What are the main viewpoints of postmodern literary theory?

Basic characteristics of post-modern literature

There are different opinions about the basic characteristics of post-modern literature, both repetitive and different. Here, we take "From Modernism to Postmodernism" edited by Liu Xiangyu as an example, supplemented by other authoritative views and the characteristics of representative American postmodern novels, and draw a more systematic and mature view. According to Liu Xiangyu, "the basic characteristics of postmodern literature can be summarized into three aspects: the uncertainty of creative principles, the diversity of creative methods, the experimental language and the playfulness of words." [ 18]

1, the creation principle of uncertainty

Donald barthelme, an American writer known as "the father of a new generation of postmodern writers", once declared: "The song in my song is the principle of uncertainty." The indeterminacy of postmodern literature is reflected in the following four aspects: the indeterminacy of theme, image, plot and language.

(1) The theme is uncertain.

Zeng Yanbing thinks: "What is important in realism, how to write in modernism, and what is important in postmodernism is writing itself" [19] "What to write" is also a question of how to write a theme, but in postmodernism, it mainly no longer exists. Because meaning does not exist, the center does not exist, and the essence does not exist. "Everything is scattered." For example, on the Road by Kerouac, a representative writer of the "Beat Generation", frankly stated his most intimate and profound feelings without shame and scruples, and expressed himself casually and impromptu. The author stuffed a long roll of white paper into a typewriter, and wrote about his wandering life and conversation record, his partner, without considering the composition and theme. In three days, he wrote this novel with more than 200,000 words. In association, the name of Xu Xing's Variations without Theme speaks for itself.

(2) the uncertainty of image

If in realism, people are people, in modernism, people are personality, then in postmodernism, people are characters and people are images. When postmodernism announces the death of the subject and the author, the characters in literature also die. The characters in the works have become a plane without personality, background, past and future, a code name, a symbol, and even letters such as A, B and C can be used instead. Some people generalize this post-modernist character image as "irrationality without foundation, ego, root, painting and metaphor", in which "painting without painting" refers to the painting symbol without image, without giving a portrait to the character; "No metaphor" means no metaphor and metonymy code, because in postmodern literature, there is no "meaning" hidden behind the phenomenon to explore. It is this "six nothingness" that makes the certainty of post-modern literary image completely dismembered. In donald barthelme's Simberta, an American teacher named Simberta, who lived in the 1980s, told the story of the sailor Simberta. But in the end, it's hard to say whether the speaker is the sailor Simberta or the university teacher. Or are they the same? How many heroes are there in the novel, two or one? All this is uncertain.

(3) the uncertainty of the plot

Postmodern writers oppose the logic, coherence and closure of stories. Stories in traditional works have a complete sequence and context, but the author's wishful thinking and self-deception. They randomly reverse the real time, duration and future time, randomly replace the present, past and future, and constantly divide and partition the real space, making the plot of literary works present various or infinite possibilities. Bouthors's diary novel Timetable, one of the representative writers of new novels, is divided into five parts, with five months in the diary (May-September). The diary written by the protagonist in this labyrinthine city is not in normal chronological order, but interweaves the present, past, future, reality, history and fantasy. Readers will be confused if they read Balzac-style novels with their hearts, but if they read them in the form of new novels and analyze the structure carefully designed by the author layer by layer, they will have a sense of pleasure and pleasure of getting out of the maze step by step, and at the same time they have to admire the author's ingenuity.

(4) the uncertainty of language

Language is the most important factor of post-modernism, and it even rises to the height of ontology. In Zero Degree Writing, roland barthes believes that all literature from Flaubert to today has language problems. Postmodernism almost pushed this literary language to the extreme. Although postmodernism has always advocated "no center", it was after they abandoned all depth models that language games led them to inadvertently create another center-language center. This point will be discussed in detail in the later "Language Experiment-Discourse Game".

2. Diversity of creative methods.

In From Modernism to Postmodernism, when discussing this chapter, the editor compared postmodernism with realism, modernism and romanticism, and thought that the interaction between the former and the latter led to the emergence of many excellent postmodern works. For example, magic realism, a magical product of the combination of postmodernism and realism (the masterpiece is Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude), Joyce's later works (finnigan's Wake) absorbed modernism and successfully completed the transition from modernism to postmodernism, and the black humor school influenced by existentialism philosophy and literature (the masterpiece is Heller's Twenty-two Military Tracks) pushed romanticism to the extreme. This way of comparing postmodernism with other literary thoughts highlights the characteristics of postmodern literature, but just like A has B on the left, C on the right and D in front, it is the same to ask A what characteristics it has. If B answers A on the right, C on the left and D on the back, there is still no answer. In view of this, the author will introduce many creative methods of American postmodern novels in this link, and discuss them in detail with specific examples. Because the United States is the birthplace and important town of post-modernism literature, and novels are the most representative genre of post-modernism literature, we can see the big picture from the small.

These new creative methods are as follows [19]:

(1) the combination of fact and fiction

Postmodern novels are no longer the product of the writer's personal imagination and fiction, but a clever combination of fact and fiction. Historical figures and events have re-entered postmodern novels, which has become a major feature. But this kind of "revisiting history" is no longer an objective representation or subjective expression of historical figures like traditional novels, but parody, ridicule and satire. Postmodern writers have no so-called objective history or grand narrative, and famous historical figures will also appear obscene and ridiculous in their works. For example, Robert Coover's Anger (1977), in which former President Nixon was the main narrator, inserted Nixon's real experience from his youth to the White House in the fictional plot, implicitly criticized and mocked McCarthyism's persecution of scientist Rosenberg in the 1950s.

(2) the combination of science fiction and fiction

In the post-industrial era, the description of the relationship between man and machine, man and animal has once again attracted the attention of postmodern writers. With the development of TV and Internet, science fiction, which was originally neglected, has regained its brilliance and youth. The development of science and technology makes people rethink the mystery of time. Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse Five is a typical example. After the protagonist of the novel is kidnapped by a UFO to Volkswagen Star 54 1, he can travel through time and space at will. He went in through the door of 1955, came out through another door of 194 1, went in through this door again, and found himself in 1963. This seemingly absurd science fiction novel reawakens people's thinking about life and death, time and space, which is thought-provoking and intriguing.

(3) The combination of novel and poetry, drama and letters.

Different from traditional novels, postmodern novels have become a cross-genre artistic creation. It is different from previous epistolary novels, or novels with several poems inserted, but has undergone fundamental changes in quality and quantity. Nabokov's "Dim Fire" interprets the story in the story through Sid's poems and Jin Baote's comments, and shows Nabokov's experience of reality. Known as "the first important formal innovation in the field of novels since finnigan's Wake". In the creation of this novel, he criticized the unity of poetry and novel in the past. He turned his novel world upside down from the inside out, poured out all the fragmented contents of the novel and put them on the table, leaving the unity of poetry and narrative to the readers. Poetry and annotations in the novel are synchronous, and the texts as poems and annotations seem to be irrelevant, but in fact they are interdependent, thus forming the third text created by readers.

(4) the combination of fiction and non-fiction

Postmodern novels not only clarify the boundaries between novels and other genres such as poetry and drama, but also greatly transcend the traditional boundaries between novels and non-novels. In De Lillo's novel White Noise, supermarket advertisements, TV advertisements, travel advertisements and drug advertisements abound, which stimulate people's nerves. Professor Jack, the protagonist, often finds the voice of his daughter steffe repeating advertisements on TV in her dreams. This has hinted to people that noise is not necessarily the vibration of air, but it may have become people's subconscious and hidden in people's brains. So that in the silent night, people either can't sleep or talk nonsense. Compared with the former, this kind of noise may be more terrible.

(5) the combination of elegant art and popular art.

Different from the elite position of modernist writers who pursue elegance, postmodern writers have been committed to absorbing the artistic techniques of popular literature to express serious social themes. As Jameson said: "In the post-modernism stage, culture has been completely popularized, and the distance between elegant culture and popular culture, pure literature and popular literature is disappearing." [20] Using the technique of popular novels, serious novels can gain a broad living space, further adapt to the needs of the public, and constantly enrich and update. Popular novels, including gothic novels, detective novels, adventure novels, romance novels, romance novels, etc. , has a long history and is deeply loved by the public. Postmodern writers choose their excellent artistic skills, melt and innovate them, and achieve good social effects. For example, in Billy Bassett, doctorow used the techniques of popular novels to the fullest. At the beginning of the novel, the flashback technique of film montage is used to describe that Sulzer, a gangster, ordered thugs to throw his subordinates into the sea in order to occupy his wife. The plot is tense, the scene is thrilling, and sometimes the feast is bloody and thrilling. After the novel was adapted into a film, it was well received by the audience. Doctorow has published eight novels, five of which have been adapted into movies, and the other three are under negotiation. He became one of the most striking American postmodern novelists.

(6) the combination of fairy tales or myths and fiction

Postmodern writers, like modernist writers, sometimes fall in love with fairy tales or mythological genres to re-create novels. However, compared with modernist writers who deliberately create a metaphor, postmodern writers try to avoid his observation and go to any degree of mythology. Donald barthelme's novel (1967) reproduces the fairy tale Snow White in a loose collage way (19 18). The novel retains the basic plot of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in fairy tales, but the characters have begun to deform and the plot has become very strange. Modern Snow White is tired of being a housewife and wants a prince to help her. But the clumsy and timid prince was deeply worried and hid in the monastery to escape his mission as a prince. The author's non-linear narration, playful form and the combination of extreme fantasy and daily details convey the anti-fairy tale essence of post-modern life: its emptiness, its sameness, its vulgarity and boredom, and the inevitable disappointment and failure of people in it.

(7) The combination of novel and painting, music and especially multimedia.

The seventies and eighties of last century were the era of great development of the Internet. Some versatile and bold writers combine novels with paintings, music, especially the most fashionable multimedia, and create more postmodern novels. The most prominent is the famous female writer Laurie Anderson. She is a novelist, actress, painter, photographer and composer. Her famous short story "War is the highest form of modern art" is one of the famous articles in Neurobiology. Illustrated, short and pithy (less than 500 words), it seems unintelligible. The work vividly and concisely records the story of the author's performance in the Middle East countries with his own electronic equipment during the 199 1 Gulf War. Next to the text are four pictures she drew: a bomber in flight, a soldier with a rocket on his shoulder, a smoke screen caused by the explosion of the bomb and the light emitted by the bomb when it exploded at night. Four paintings and written descriptions constitute intertextuality, which brings strong emotional impact to readers. Not only that, Anderson also put this little story on the stage. The stage is equipped with related background pictures and background music. She recited herself on the stage, creating a unique atmosphere through the level of her voice. Her performance is always fully affirmed by the audience. People call her an interdisciplinary artistic generalist and an innovative postmodern writer.

Of course, the above is limited to the main features of American postmodern novels. In fact, postmodernism varies from country to country. French new novels, Latin American magic realism, Russian "another literature" and China avant-garde novels all have their own national characteristics. However, the above-mentioned new creative methods can also be regarded as a universal feature of post-modernism literature in various countries: the boundaries of literature and art are blurred, evolved and increasingly diversified. It transcends the boundaries between art and reality, literary genre and various arts, and presents a colorful and diverse situation.

3. Language experiment and discourse game

As we said before, postmodernism inadvertently led to "language-centered theory" when it advocated all "no center". Gadamer pointed out, "There is no doubt that language has been at the center of philosophy in this century." Of course, this center is not the center in the traditional sense. First of all, this center is not intentional; Secondly, this center has the characteristics of dispelling the other and self-dispelling. It is with this as the center that postmodernism unconsciously stands on the opposite side of tradition. The emergence of language center has a profound philosophical background, and we can see what theorists say. Heidegger said: "Language is the home of existence"; Gadamer said: "Whoever has the language will have the world"; Lacan said: "Truth comes from words, not from reality"; Derrida said: "Because of the lack of center or origin, everything becomes words"; Habermas said: "power is such a thing, in a specific sense, it belongs only to words and not to sentences"; Tugenhart said: "The world is divided according to the way we divide it, and the main way we divide things is to use language. Our reality is our language category. " The world suddenly became a world of words. All knowledge of human beings and human society is produced by words, truth is constructed by words, and all truth is only the truth of words. "I am just a part of the language system. It is the language that tells me everything, not the language I speak." [2 1] Saussure's one-to-one correspondence between the signifier and the signified is only artificial in postmodernism, and the meaning of language symbols is only the process of replacing the signifier to be explained with a new signifier, or the endless retrogression from one signifier to another. Meaning is always in endless delay, the physical object referred to by the symbol never exists, the reference is always limited to a language symbol, and the entity referred to can never be touched. Lacan's formula is: signifier/signified (S/s), signifier and signified are always separated by horizontal lines, and cannot be combined into one. The ideographic chain completely collapsed. In this way, "we enter schizophrenia, in the form of a bunch of clear but unrelated signifier fragments."

Therefore, critics and writers engaged in deconstruction criticism have to indulge in the signifier of the text and play freely with peace of mind. Therefore, roland barthes said: "Writing, or' reading as writing', is the last unexplored field, where intellectuals can play freely, enjoy the luxury of signifier and ignore whatever may happen in the Elysee Palace or Renault factory. In writing, free language games can temporarily destroy and disturb the tyranny of structural meaning; Moreover, the writing-reading subject can get rid of the shackles of a single identity and become an ecstatic self. " [22] This is one of the most important features of postmodern literature.

In view of the above reasons, postmodern writing presents a completely different style from modernism. If modernism is centered on "self", then postmodernism is centered on "language". This is the biggest difference between the two. We can continue to look at what postmodern writers who are engaged in first-line writing say. Gass said: "There is no description in literature, only words and sentences", "I never doubt language, I know it is confusing, but I just believe in language"; Beckett said in the novel "Nobody": "Everything comes down to a word problem", "Everything is a word, nothing more"; The poet Gondelin once wrote: "Words are shadows/shadows become words/words are games/games become words"; Linguistic poetry school bluntly pointed out that the main raw material of poetry is language, which is the experience of language production. As a philosopher, literary critic and writer, roland barthes believes that postmodern writers are not people who use language as a tool to express their thoughts, feelings or imagination, but "a language thinker and linguist (in other words, neither a thinker nor a linguist)". [23] Contemporary writing has been freed from the dimension of expressing meaning, but only refers to itself. Writing is like a game, which expresses itself by constantly going beyond its own rules and violating its own boundaries.

The playfulness of this narrative mode of postmodern literature endows the writing itself with unprecedented freedom, and at the same time makes readers get great pleasure from reading the text. Postmodern text is a kind of "language structure" and a kind of network structure. Readers can start reading from anywhere or stop reading from anywhere. The reader does not need to explore or scrutinize the contents hidden behind the text, he only needs to pay attention to his own experiences and feelings at all times. Let's take American postmodern novels as an example to show the fantastic world created by postmodernism in language experiments and discourse games.

(1) Cross-genre Irony Discourse

In Robert Coover's novel Anger, there are poems, songs, newspaper clippings, advertisements, operetta, Eisenhower's dialogue with prisoners and so on. What is particularly striking is the narration of Nixon's political speech at the Rosenberg execution ground in new york Times Square. He shouted and called on people to "take off their pants for America", and there were a series of one-way comparisons, such as "take off their pants for God and the country!" "Take off your pants for Jesus Christ!" "Take off your pants for all mankind!" "Take Dick's pants off!" Wait a minute. Taking off pants in public was originally a vulgar and indecent action, but when the author linked it with Nixon's grandiose remarks, the two immediately formed a strong contrast. Noble political words and obscene actions make a mockery of the persecution of innocent scientists in the United States. Its irony is profound.

(2) directly quoting the narrative discourse formed by the dialogue between characters.

The narrative discourse of novels generally consists of direct and indirect quotations of dialogue between characters and the author's narration and description, but William Gaddis's novel Little Tycoon is composed of direct quotations of dialogue between characters. Just as there are no punctuation marks between the sentences of the consciousness school in modernist novels, this novel, which directly quotes the dialogue of characters, simply omits the narrative and description of the dialogue, showing the artistic characteristics of the fire. This is reminiscent of Hemingway's short story Mountains Like White Elephants and Rob Gray's Eraser. Hemingway, known as "iceberg narration", and Geyer, who wrote "materialized novels", have a common principle: don't describe and comment arbitrarily, but present things truly. William Gaddis obviously inherited this tradition. In his view, the so-called consciousness is unpredictable, and only the words presented are true. Among postmodern writers who advocate language experiments and discourse games, William Gaddis is perhaps the most radical one. He abandoned all narrative and description, making people look directly at the living words. Maybe he just wants to show that it's nothing, and that's all our lives are.

(3) Supermarket advertisements, travel advertisements and drug advertisements constitute narrative discourse with rich market information.

Commodity advertisement is the trumpeter and lucky dog of the market economy, and it has become the darling of the post-industrial era. When you turn on the TV at home or walk into the door of the supermarket, you will see colorful advertisements. All kinds of true and false advertisements guide or mislead people's consumption. Too many commercial advertisements break the peace of life and disturb people's mentality. This is the trouble brought by consumerism in the post-industrial era. Various advertisements themselves constitute an invisible ideological discourse, which silently guides people's consciousness and makes individuals and subjects disappear in the noisy advertising world. Postmodern writers integrate this kind of advertising discourse full of the characteristics of the times into the narrative of the novel, collage, juxtapose and mix it, so that people can understand the intertextuality between various voices themselves, thus giving birth to their own different perceptions. The narrative discourse of De Lilio's novel White Noise embodies the above characteristics, and the novel is full of various advertising brands. Such as the three major credit cards: MasterCard, Visa and American Express; ; Toyota's three major brands: Toyota Corolla, Toyota Celica and Toyota Cressida；; Others include polyester, Orion, Lycra spandex, Kleenex Softique, Lyda and so on.

(4) "specious" words are intertwined with lyric and narrative, praise and complaint.

Different from modernist writers, postmodern writers deliberately keep a cold-eyed writing posture, carry out the so-called "zero-degree narrative", and instead put in a lot of feelings, sometimes happy, sometimes sad, sometimes praised, sometimes complained, sometimes ridiculed, sometimes satirized, like a playful child, playing unscrupulously in the language. They both praise and criticize some people and things, forming a kind of "paradox" discourse. Nabokov is such a far-reaching language master. He is Thomas Pynchon's teacher and an admirer of Bath, Hawkes and donald barthelme. Lolita, his masterpiece, was banned in the early days and was later recognized as a classic of western postmodern literature. For example, at the beginning, the author wrote in a sentimental style: "Lolita, the light that illuminates my life has ignited the fire of my lust." My sin, my soul. Rorita: From the tip of the tongue to the hard palate, the trilogy of Luo, Li and Ta. In fact, he is full of ambivalence towards Lolita: "Naive, scheming, charming and vulgar, dark blue and rosy and carefree, which is the portrayal of Lolita ..." This specious discourse makes the novel full of tension and intriguing.

(5) The author's voice randomly intervenes in the narration, which constitutes an "invasive" discourse.

In the past, authors were forbidden to make irresponsible remarks in novel creation, but in postmodern novels, such "intrusive" words are common. Vonnegut said frankly in Earthquake (1997): "trout (the hero of the novel) doesn't really exist. In my other novels, he is my other self. " This kind of "invasive" discourse in which the author casually intervenes in the narrative is reflected in the "meta-novel". Meta-fiction can be defined in the most popular language as: commenting on the novel creation itself while creating a novel, which is simply a kind of "novel about a novel". Metafiction intentionally exposes the traces of the artistic operation of the novel to readers, reveals the fiction and imitation of the narrative world, and aims to announce to people that everything is forged, and even the world is narrated. Metafiction was first put forward by William Gass, an American postmodern writer. He is also a practitioner of metafiction and is known as the "Muse of Metafiction". Sentences about novel creation, such as Deep in the Center, I can't edit any more, and I just want this page to be this long, often appear. By using this creative technique, Gass gives himself (the author) and readers more freedom to explore the novel and tear off the disguise that it reflects the real world.

(6) Hypertext computer language discourse.

The popularity of computers has brought about the emergence of online literature, and hypertext computer language has aroused the interest of postmodern novels. They tried to use it to construct new cultural relics in the novel. E.L. doctorow used three groups of *** 12 nouns in his novella The Leather Man to describe the American social background in 1960s:

Screaming penis in the night staircase window

Patrol mud flares mortars

Presidential crowd bullets

Chinese is:

At night, the ladder window screams penis.

Patrol slurry flame mortar

Presidential crowd bullets

In fact, if you think about it carefully, it is not difficult to interpret the meaning of these three groups of words:

First, in the 1960s, some men used ladders to climb into windows at night to meet or rape women, and women screamed. It refers to the social vices such as adultery and rape brought by "sexual liberation" in the 1960s. Second, the soldiers patrolled the dirt road and saw the flames when the mortars fired. It refers to the Vietnam War. Third, the president was shot in the crowd. Refers to the assassination of former US President Kennedy 1963. These words are meaningless in isolation, but if they are put together, they can immediately create a scene. Of course, this scene is only a reality, and there are other interpretations. This also fully embodies the way that postmodern literature tries to present the world through language experiments and discourse games.

The above six language experiments and discourse games are the writing styles of post-modern literature at the discourse level. There are various specific methods. Some critics believe that in postmodern works, the most commonly used artistic techniques of modernism, such as inner monologue, metaphor, symbol, association and dislocation of time and space, have not been abandoned. However, it has retreated to the second line, and some new means of expression have been widely used, of which four are the most prominent: a, montage; B, irony; C, splicing; D. collage. Dewey Fokma pointed out five prominent semantic fields of postmodern literature compared with modernist literature: assimilation, overlapping and arrangement, feeling, movement, mechanization and other factors. Some techniques commonly used in postmodern literature are put forward, such as interruption, praise, multiplication (including plot multiplication and old words multiplication, two stories crossing each other in a text, "meaningless cycle", "poetry discovery" and writing activity multiplication) and multiplication (including symbol system multiplication; The mixture of language and other coincidences, the proliferation of endings, and the proliferation of plots without endings), enumeration, parallelism (including the interchangeability of various parts of the text, the parallelism between the text and social context, the parallelism of semantic units, etc.). ). And it is pointed out that the parallel method may be more destructive to some programs in early modernism, even enough to overthrow the hierarchical order that may still appear in post-modernism system. These specific techniques show different characteristics in the narrative discourse of various postmodern novels. Metafiction, for example, can be divided into specific categories. David Lodge mentioned six skills when evaluating the language processing of meta-novelists: "contradiction, arrangement, interruption, arbitrariness, excess and short circuit." [24] It can be said that there has never been a literary genre with so many dazzling skills as postmodern literature. Therefore, in just half a century, they created a large number of varied and bizarre works for the world.