Postmodernist Literature and Authors

http://www.textetc.com/modernist/postmodernism.html

Text Etc is a website which deals with many structures of literature, with a focus on poetry. The site includes a brief history of postmodernism within literature and poetry, describing this form as one where the author focuses on ‘free-wheeling creations constructed of a language that largely points to itself’. The site outlines what it believes to be the main four elements of postmodernist literature, iconoclasm, groundless, formlessness, and populism. The four terms are explained in detail, outlining the history and features of each:

Iconoclasm: decanonizes cultural standards, denies authority to the author, contradicts the expected, and denounces ethnic, gender and cultural repression

Groundless: employs flat, media-like images that have no reference beyond themselves, regards both art and life as fictions, and argues that meaning is indeterminate, denying a final or preferred interpretation

Formlessness: fragments texts, turning them into collages or montages, avoids the shaping power of metaphor and other literary tropes, mixes genres with pastiche, travesty and cliché

Populism: employs material from a wide social spectrum, eschews elitist, literary language, and avoids the serious and responsible, promoting the arbitrary and playful

There is a list of postmodernist poets, such as John Ashbury, Susan Howe, and Kenneth Goldsmith, and also an extensive list of references and resources for further research. This website is quite basic, but is a good place to start when trying to understand the terminology of postmodernist literature. It is also interactive; there are links to pages which teach you to create your own postmodernist poem, making this difficult topic more accessible and entertaining.


Kathy Acker (1947-1997) was an American experimental novelist, postmodernist, and sexpositive feminist writer. She was known in the literary field for creating a new style of feminist prose, exposing a misogynistic capitalist society which employs sexual domination as a key form of oppression. In the face of criticism for her chosen, and frequently taboo, topics, Acker argued that in order to challenge the accepted male driven power structures of language, literature must explore silenced subjects that had been previously marginalised.

‘Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified’

Through the use of performative prose to initiate political and aesthetic discourses, Acker’s narrative methods work perfectly within postmodern feminism. Her fiction imitates consumer dynamics within its own narrative cycles. Within her chosen social context she discusses the fragments of an information age, forcing associations between materials from many different backgrounds. Her texts are hybrid, part narrative, part essay, performing a critical simulation of literary moments by placing them alongside what has been traditionally passed over by the literary. Ambiguous boundaries are prevalent within feminist theory, and her investigation of difference works within both poststructural theory and postmodern feminism.

Some of her novels include The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula: Some Lives of Murderesses (1973), I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining (1974), Blood and Guts in High School (1984), and Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream (1986).