Postmodern / Postmodernism

In a general sense, literature written since the Second World War, i.e. after the Modernist era. In a more specific sense the concept of postmodernism as a subject of study emerged in the 1980s, applying across many disciplines, encouraging inter-disciplinary studies, and being interpreted in many ways.

The postmodern outlook is associated with the erosion of confidence in the idea of progress, as a result of such phenomena as the holocaust, the threat of nuclear war, and environmental pollution.

In literature one of its manifestations is the attempts by some writers to examine and break down boundaries involved in such issues as race, gender, and class, and to break down divisions between different genres of literature. Other aspects of the postmodernist outlook are: a spirit of playfulness with the fragmented world, the awareness of fiction as an artifice, and the creation of works as a pastiche of forms from the past. Postmodern writers include Thomas Pynchon, John Fowles, Angela Carter, and Salman Rushdie.

In literary criticism such approaches as structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, and postcolonial criticism are postmodern methods.

Pun is usually humorous use of a word in such a way as to suggest two or more of its meanings or the meaning of another word similar in sound.

A pun is a figure of speech which consists of a deliberate confusion of similar words or phrases for rhetorical effect, whether humorous or serious. A pun can rely on the assumed equivalency of multiple similar words (homonymy), of different shades of meaning of one word (polysemy), or of a literal meaning with a metaphor. Bad puns are often considered to be cheesy.

Simile figure of speech involving a comparison between two unlike entities. In the simile, unlike the metaphor, the resemblance is explicitly indicated by the words "like" or "as." The common heritage of similes in everyday speech usually reflects simple comparisons based on the natural world or familiar domestic objects, as in "He eats like a bird," "He is as smart as a whip," or "He is as slow as molasses." In some cases the original aptness of the comparison is lost, as in the expression "dead as a doornail."

Stream-of-consciousness narration is a variant of the limited third-person point of vew; the narrator relates only what is experienced by a character's mind from moment to moment, presenting life as thought process, or interior monologue. More precisely, "stream of consciousness" refers to any lengthy passages of introspection in literature; whereas "interior monologue" denotes a narrative entirely in a wandering, introspective style.

James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) experiments in types of stream-of-consciousness narrative, while Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is an example of a series of interior monologues.

Stream-of-consciousness technique The most intense use of a central consciousness in narration. The stream-of-consciousness technique takes a reader inside a character’s mind to reveal perceptions, thoughts, and feelings on a conscious or unconscious level. This technique suggests the flow of thought as well as its content; hence, complete sentences may give way to fragments as the character’s mind makes rapid associations free of conventional logic or transitions. James Joyce’s novel Ulysses makes extensive use of this narrative technique.

Stream of consciousness writing aims to provide a textual equivalent to the stream of a fictional character’s consciousness. It creates the impression that the reader is eavesdropping on the flow of conscious experience in the character’s mind, gaining intimate access to their private “thoughts”. It involves presenting in the form of written text something that is neither entirely verbal nor textual. S. of c. writing was developed in the early decades of the twentieth century when writers became interested in finding ways of laying open for readers’ inspection, in the way impossible in real life, the imaged inner lives of their fictional characters. The challenge was to find ways of writing that would create plausible textual presentations of the imaged thought-streams.

S. of c. writing comes in a variety of stylistic forms, most importantly narrated stream of consciousness and quoted stream of consciousness (“interior monologue”). Narrated stream of consciousness is often composed of a variety of sentence types including psycho-narration and free indirect style.

Stream of consciousness:

• phrase used by William James in 1890 to describe the unbroken flow of thought and awareness of the waking mind

• a special mode of narration that undertakes to capture the full spectrum and the continuous flow of a character's mental process

• sense perceptions mingle with conscious and half-conscious thoughts and memories, experiences, feelings and random associations

• in a literary context used to describe the narrative method where novelists describe the unspoken thoughts and feelings of their characters without resorting to objective description or conventional dialogue

• Eduard Dujardin's Les lauriers sont coupйs credited by Joyce as the first example of this technique

Stream of consiousness. Writing in which a character's perceptions, thoughts, and memories are presented in an apparently random form, without regard for logical sequence, chronology, or syntax. Often such writing makes no distinction between various levels of reality--such as dreams, memories, imaginative thoughts or real sensory perception. William James coined the phrase "stream of consciousness" in his Principles of Psychology (1890). The technique has been used by several authors and poets: Katherine Anne Porter, Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, T. S. Eliot, and William Faulkner.

Style. The manner of expression of a particular writer, produced by choice of words, grammatical structures, use of literary devices, and all the possible parts of language use. Some general styles might include scientific, ornate, plain, emotive. Most writers have their own particular styles.

Symbol is using an object or action that means something more than its literal meaning.

• *The practice of representing things by means of symbols or of attributing symbolic meanings or significance to objects, events, or relationships.

• *A system of symbols or representations.

• *A symbolic meaning or representation.

Symbol. Something that on the surface is its literal self but which also has another meaning or even several meanings. For example, a sword may be a sword and also symbolize justice. A symbol may be said to embody an idea. There are two general types of symbols: universal symbols that embody universally recognizable meanings wherever used, such as light to symbolize knowledge, a skull to symbolize death, etc., and constructed symbols that are given symbolic meaning by the way an author uses them in a literary work, as the white whale becomes a symbol of evil in Moby Dick.