Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms: postmodernism
postmodernism, a disputed term that has occupied much recent debate about contemporary culture since the early 1980s. In its simplest and least satisfactory sense it refers generally to the phase of 20th‐century Western culture that succeeded the reign of high modernism, thus indicating the products of the age of mass television since the mid‐1950s. More often, though, it is applied to a cultural condition prevailing in the advanced capitalist societies since the 1960s, characterized by a superabundance of disconnected images and styles—most noticeably in television, advertising, commercial design, and pop video. In this sense, promoted by Jean Baudrillard and other commentators, postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.
As applied to literature and other arts, the term is notoriously ambiguous, implying either that modernism has been superseded or that it has continued into a new phase. Postmodernism may be seen as a continuation of modernism's alienated mood and disorienting techniques and at the same time as an abandonment of its determined quest for artistic coherence in a fragmented world: in very crude terms, where a modernist artist or writer would try to wrest a meaning from the world through myth, symbol, or formal complexity, the postmodernist greets the absurd or meaningless confusion of contemporary existence with a certain numbed or flippant indifference, favouring self‐consciously ‘depthless’ works of fabulation, pastiche, bricolage, or aleatory disconnection. The term cannot usefully serve as an inclusive description of all literature since the 1950s or 1960s, but is applied selectively to those works that display most evidently the moods and formal disconnections described above. It seems to have little relevance to modern poetry, and limited application to drama outside the ‘absurdist’ tradition, but is used widely in reference to fiction, notably to the novels (or anti‐novels) and stories of Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, William S and many of their followers.
Opinion is still divided, however, on the value of the term and of the phenomenon it purports to describe. Those who most often use it tend to welcome ‘the postmodern’ as a liberation from the hierarchy of ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures; while sceptics regard the term as a symptom of irresponsible academic euphoria about the glitter of consumerist capitalism and its moral vacuity.
后现代主义,有争议术语已经占用了当代文化最近争论自1980年代早期。最简单、最满意的意义上讲,它是指一般阶段20th终于成功世纪西方文化的现代主义统治高,从而表明产品的时代终于大众电视自上个世纪1950年代。更常见的,虽然它是适用于一种文化条件发达资本主义社会盛行于上个世纪1960年代以来,特征的图像和styles-most断开多余量,这天在电视、广告、广告设计、和流行的视频。在这个意义上,倡导鲍德里亚和其他新闻评论员琼,后现代性被认为是一个文化的零碎的知觉,折衷的怀旧之情,一次性的仿真,混淆肤浅,传统价值的品质的深度、相干性、意义、创意、真实性和撤离或溶解在随机的漩涡空的信号。
适用于文学和其他艺术,这个术语是臭名昭著的模棱两可,暗示要么那现代主义已经被取代,或者继续了进入一个新的阶段。后现代主义可以被看作是一个持续的心情和一些现代技术的异化,同时它作为一个放弃追求艺术的一致性决定一个支离破碎的世界:非常粗糙的条款,在那里一个现代派画家或作家会试图从那儿夺取一个意义世界通过神话,符号,或正式的复杂性,迎接后现代荒谬或无意义的混乱的当代存在一定或无礼的冷漠麻木,偏袒自己的depthless笔下的有意识地提供的fabulation、仿作,bricolage,或aleatory断开连接。这个词不能有效的描述作为一个兼容所有文学自1950年代或1960年代,但是应用选择性的作品显示最明显的情绪,正式断开前述。它似乎没有多少相关性现代诗歌,并限制应用戏剧外的共性的传统,但广泛应用在参考小说,尤其是小说(或反终于小说)和故事托马斯Pynchon,库尔特《20世纪美国文学导论》,威廉的他们的许多追随者。
意见还分裂,然而,在这个词的价值和对这一现象的语言来描述它。它生成那些最经常用它倾向于欢迎“后现代”作为一个解放层次的高”和“低的文化;而怀疑论者认为任一个症状的不负责任的学术兴奋灿烂的消费主义与资本主义本回答被网友采纳
