Postmodernism

An Introduction

Preliminary Thesis on
Dictionary of the
Like the Odyssey, Dictionary Khazars
of the
Khazars, in its attempt to explore
how human beings construct
meaning for themselves, straddles
both historical eras (the modern
and postmodern) and poetic
technologies (the printed book and
the hypertext).

I tried to change the way of the reading increasing the role and
responsibility of the reader in the process of creating a novel (let us not
forget that in the world there are much more talented readers than
talented authors and literary critics). I have left to them, to the readers,
the decision about the choice of the plots and the development of the
situations in the novel: where the reading will begin, and where it will
end, even the decision about the destiny of the main characters. But in
order to change the way of reading, I had to change the way of writing.
Therefore these lines should not be understood exclusively as a talk about
the form of the novel. This is at the same time both a talk of its content. In
fact, the content of any novel has been, so to say, on Procrustes bed for
two thousand years always subjected to the merciless model of form. I
believe that an end has come to this. Each novel should select its specific
form, each story can search for, and find, its adequate body. Computer is
teaching us it is possible.
But if you do not like computers, have a look at what architecture is
teaching us. Architecture changes our way of life.
A literary work, if we consider it as a house, can change our way of life. A
novel can be a home as well. At least for a while.
--Milorad Pavic

What is Postmodernism?
An Oxymoron?

What is Postmodernism?
An Oxymoron?
An overused and meaningless
term?

What is Postmodernism?
An Oxymoron?
An overused and meaningless
term?
A bunch of nonsense?

What is Postmodernism?
An Oxymoron?
An overused and meaningless term?
A bunch of nonsense?
Postmodernism, as commonly articulated from a
divergent set of subject-positions in a discursive
environment characterized by post-industrial, postcolonial, post-feminist, post-Marxist strategies of
resistance to the phallocentric valorization of panoptic
strategies of hegemony, falls prey to a host of
(mis)representations and de/valorizations emerging from
the (de)centered plurivocalities of late-twentieth-century
global capitalism(s).

What is Postmodernism?

An Oxymoron?
An overused and meaningless term?
A bunch of nonsense?
A response (or, responses) to
modernism.

What is Modernism?
A (post-) Enlightenment
belief in progress
Francis Bacon (15611626) believed a wise,
ethical, science-minded
elite would bring a
stream of progress to
civilization

What is Modernism?
A (post-) Enlightenment
belief in progress
Francis Bacon (15611626)
G.W.F. Hegel (17701831)--Thesis, Antithesis,
Synthesis.

What is Modernism?
A (post-) Enlightenment
belief in progress
Francis Bacon (15611626)
G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831)
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
envisioned an (eventual)
utopia.

The Enlightenments
Biggest Party-Pooper:

Has Modernism Fulfilled its

Promise?

Has Modernism Fulfilled its

Promise?

Has Modernism Fulfilled its

Promise?

Has Modernism Fulfilled its

Promise?

The Plain Sense of Things

by Wallace Stevens
After the leaves have fallen, we return

Yet the absence of the imagination had

To a plain sense of things. It is as if

Itself to be imagined. The great pond,

We had come to an end of the imagination,

The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,

Inanimate in an inert savoir.

Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

It is difficult even to choose the adjective

Of a sort, a silence of a rat come out to see,

For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.

The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this

The great structure has become a minor house.

Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,

No turban walks across the lessened floors.

Required, as a necessity requires.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.

The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Hemmingways Prayer
Our nada who art in nada,
nada be thy name,
thy kingdom nada,
thy will be nada as it is in
nada. Give us this nada our
daily nada and nada us our
nada as we nada our nadas
and nada us not into nada
but deliver us from nada;
pues nada.
Hail nothing full of nothing,
nothing is with thee.
(A Clean, Well-lighted Place)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. . .
W.B. Yeats. The Second Coming

But some still seek a

center:
T.S. Eliot:
The Wasteland

James Joyce:
Ulysses

Pablo Picasso: not what you see, but

what you know is there

Jean-Francois Lyotard
Argued (contra Lacan) that the
unconscious is not a language but
figural and dream-like
The figural resists representation
In 1974 he predicted that no
knowledge will survive that cannot
be translated into computer
language--into quantities of
information.
Made critical distinction between
narrative discourse and scientific
discourse

What is narrative
discourse?

Here is the myth of Bumba,

vomiting the moon and the stars,
as Ive always heard it chanted.
Legitimized in the telling.
Mythic time/narrative time (and
space)

What is scientific
discourse?

Scientist make denotative statements:

moon is a term that denotes a material
body which rotates and orbits around the
planet.
But how is this language game legitimated?
Political narrative: French Revolution/Age of
Reason narrative of freedom
Philosophical narrative: Hegels unity of
knowledge (the gradual evolution of the human
spirit)
Lyotard called these METANARRATIVES.

But is this how science

works?

Thomas Kuhn and The Structure of

Scientific Revolutions?
Quantum Physics
Can we really say that science has
led us to greater political freedom
a spiritual evolution?
And yet . . .

Science still seems to be a legitimate (the

most?) discourse because it is performative,
and performativity (alone) legitimizes it . . .
and for Lyotard, Postmodernity is the rejection
of all METANARRATIVES . . . with life still
going on . . .

Fredric Jameson
Postmodernism is an
intensification and latest
phase of global capitalism
Reality is evaporating into
mere images
Were fixated on
commodities and products
There is no linguistic
normality, only pastiche

Like Fight Club

Jean Baudrillard
Death of modernity, the
real, and sex
Semiotic analysis of
commodities
binary oppositions that
minimize difference(s)
the simulation, simulacra,
becomes the real
The role of the hyper-real
The Merchants of
Cool/Reality TV

Modernism

Ihab
Hassan
Postmodernism

Form (conjuctive/closed)

Antiform (disjunctive/open)

Design

Chance

Hierarchy

Anarchy

Art Object/Finished

Process/Performance
Happening

Presence

Absence

Centering

Dispersal

Genre/Boundary

Text/Intertext

Root/Depth

Rhizome/Surface

The Queen of Pop

Other Big Names:

Michel Foucault

Gilles Deleuze

Jacques Derrida

Felix Guattari

Compression of Time & Space

The Post-human era of the Cyborg
Rachel: Youre not going to bed
with a woman . . . remember;

Sean Young as Rachel

though, dont think about it, just

do it. Dont pause and be
philosophical, because from a
philosophical standpoint its
dreary for us both.-- Blade
Runner

Preliminary Thesis on
Dictionary of the Khazars
Like the Odyssey, Dictionary of the
Khazars, in its attempt to explore
how human beings construct
meaning for themselves, straddles
both historical eras (the modern
and postmodern) and poetic
technologies (the printed book and
the hypertext).

Narrower Thesis: The Dictionary of the

Khazars critiques the Encyclopedia
Metanarrative and suggests to us that the
only place of refuge, the only place of
reality left for us, is in our dreams, the
place of our deepest longings and
desires, a place beyond metanarratives,
space, and time.

Narrower Thesis: The Dictionary of the

Khazars critiques the Encyclopedia
Metanarrative and suggests to us that the
only place of refuge, the only place of
reality left for us, is in our dreams, the
place of our deepest longings and
desires, a place beyond space and time.
What areas of the text do you
tend to want to skim over?
Which sections grab you?

Do you feel naked without a book?

p.79

Dictionary of the Khazars

1.

2.

3.

According to the Pavic's "fiction" of the history of the Dictionary

of the Khazars, what is the relationship between the book you
are holding in your hands and the earlier versions? Do you
have any reason to believe your edition is reliable?
What conventions of literary authority does Pavic employ in
the frontspiece, title page(s), and introduction? (In other
words, what features of the text suggest to you that you are
reading a scholarly, and therefore "reliable," text?) How do
these authoritative devices undermine themselves?
What does the epitaph mean: "Here lies the reader/who will
never open this book./He is here forever dead."?