The term Postmodernism had emerged as a result of Modernism. In another words, Postmodernism can be considered as a reaction or response to Modernism in the late twentieth century. Postmodernism rejects some views of what Modernism came up with, but not all of them. Postmodernism supported some views of Modernism, it does not differ from Modernism, they seem very much like each other in many ways ; they differ from each other in the concept of attitude towards certain trends . Modernism, for example tends to presents the idea of fragmentation as something tragic, something to be commiserated.
Whereas, Postmodernism does not see the idea of fragmentation as something tragic, or something to be lamented, but rather celebrates that. Postmodernism used to describe certain characteristics of post-world war II literature and to reject the idea of Enlightenment implied in Modernist literature. In this chapter, we will see the definition of postmodernism,characteristics and features,and the most famous figures of postmodernism. 1.2. The postmodern American Poetry 1.2.1. Definition We found many definitions of postmodernism,each one of them describes postmodernism and gives the full image about what postmodernism is in many aspects and sides.
Postmodernism era creates a wide range of developments in various scopes, we chose to define postmodernism in a way that it covers all what postmodernism is about. Postmodernism is a term that encompasses a wide-range of developments in philosophy, film, architecture, art, literature, and culture. Originally a reaction to modernism, referring to the lack of artistic, intellectual, or cultural thought or organized principle. Started around 1940s, exact date is unknown. Peaked around the 1960s and 1970s with the release of Catch 22 and SlaughterhouseFive (“Postmodern presentation “).
Postmodern literature is considered as a literature or a movement came up with a wide range of innovative techniques and methods like metaphor, simile, fragmentation…., in addition to other subdivisions. Postmodern literature is a style, various figures of that period adapted to be the style of their writing and to define postmodern literature in their writing and works. Postmodern literature is literature characterized by reliance on narrative techniques such as fragmentation, paradox, and the unreliable narrator; and often is (though not exclusively) defined as a style or a trend that emerged in the post–World War II era. Postmodern works are seen as a response against dogmatic following of Enlightenment thinking and Modernist approaches to literature.Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, tends to resist definition or classification as a “movement”. Indeed, the convergence of postmodern literature with various modes of critical theory, particularly reader-response and deconstructionist approaches, and the subversions of the implicit contract between author, text and reader by which its works are often characterised, have led to pre-modern fictions such as Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605, 1615) and Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth-century satire TristramShandy being retrospectively considered by some as early examples of postmodern literature.While there is little consensus on the precise characteristics, scope, and importance of postmodern literature, as is often the case with artistic movements, postmodern literature is commonly defined in relation to a precursor. In particular, postmodern writers are seen as reacting against the precepts of modernism, and they often operate as literary “bricoleurs”, parodying forms and styles associated with modernist (and other) writers and artists.
Postmodern works also tend to celebrate chance over craft, and further employ metafiction to undermine the text’s authority or authenticity. Another characteristic of postmodern literature is the questioning of distinctions between high and low culture through the use of pastiche, the combination of subjects and genres not previously deemed fit for literature(“Postmodern literature”). The history of the American poetry is very wide and large and not easy to know the exact day and the period in which it is emerged. The history of the American poetry contains various events and different periods of time came up together, each one has its own events and innovations and subdivisions. Many poets influenced by this period , two of most influential ones are T.S Eliot and Ezra pound during world war I , and many poems read widely in that period .
American poetry has a great intellectual impact on many people of that period.We chose to speak in briefly about this historical period or what called American poetry because of the large elements concerning the historical events, in addition to the unlimited number of information that you can find about American poetry. American poetry, the poetry of the United States, arose first as efforts by colonists to add their voices to English poetry in the 17th century, well before the constitutional unification of the thirteen colonies (although before this unification, a strong oral tradition often likened to poetry existed among Native American societies).Unsurprisingly, most of the early colonists’ work relied on contemporary British models of poetic form, diction, and theme. However, in the 19th century, a distinctive American idiom began to emerge. By the later part of that century, when Walt Whitman was winning an enthusiastic audience abroad, poets from the United States had begun to take their place at the forefront of the English-language avant-garde(“American poetry”). The history of American poetry is not easy to know.
Much of the American poetry published between 1910 and 1945 remains lost in the pages of small circulation political periodicals, particularly the ones on the far left, destroyed by librarians during the 1950s McCarthy era. The received narrative of Modernism proposes that Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot were perhaps the most influential modernist English-language poets in the period during World War I.But this narrative leaves out African American and women poets who were published and read widely in the first half of the twentieth century. By the 1960s, the young poets of the British Poetry Revival looked to their American contemporaries and predecessors as models for the kind of poetry they wanted to write. Toward the end of the millennium, consideration of American poetry had diversified, as scholars placed an increased emphasis on poetry by women, African Americans, Hispanics, Chicanos and other cultural groupings(“American poetry”).
