What do you think of Post Modernism ?

You first OP.

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shitpost modernism

It's over

I didn't

>>9083471
infinite jest is literally shit-tier
i don't want to read the fucking ramblings of a maniacal drug addict
reading his work is suffering

I like it, we are living in the most unreal times, you can cry or you can join the fun. Joining the fun doesnt mean you need to stop crying tho.
Read Pynchon
Drop acid and out of college
Create something
Die
Or not

1/2

I think it is a style of writing that uses “difficulty” and “complexity” as excuses to produce bad writing, to produce literature that hardly appeals to anyone outside the academia, literature that was more pleasurable to be written (pleasure to the writer, who was considering himself a great genius) than to be read. The authors are unable to compose organized and clear works, or simply too lazy to revise and cut, and the end final product tends to be a huge mess of several thousand words. It is a kind of literature produced by university-writers for other university-writers to read.

On those books there is neither the simplicity but faithfulness to life and reality of a Tolstoy and a Chekhov (and, if we are judging contemporary writers, Alice Munro) nor the extremely beautiful artificiality of Shakespeare, Melville and Nabokov. The works categorized as post-modern tend to be neither clean and simple nor poetic and exuberant.

The major aim of the writers grouped under this seal is to write something like Ulysses but better than Ulysses (they do not seem to realize that Ulysses itself is not the pinnacle of literature that they and their colleagues so honestly believe it to be).

To me those kinds of books are produced by people who are obviously highly intelligent, but without talent (and worse, without the humility to accept their deficiencies and try to correct them). They are the works of highly intelligent individuals who don’t have creativity and will-power enough to study mathematics and work with science; yet those individuals (since they possess immense pride and are quite learned in humanities subjects) flatter themselves with plans of offering to the world some glittering fruits of their intellect. Some of the people who got themselves stuck in this situation in the past tended to become philosophers, but today many of those bitter souls become novelists instead.

With the decision of becoming writers in mind, those individuals proceed to absorb many literary works, but always with a main goal before them: to do something completely different, to do something nobody has ever done before, to work with plots and characters that are completely different from everything already created. The collective knowledge of several generations of artists about style and technique is not important, because all of that has been done already. What these fellows want is to create a completely different branch of literature. The stranger, the more experimental, the more “complex”, the better. They also want to clog their books with all their encyclopedic knowledge, without considering whether this will make the work balanced and readable. Every novel must contain the whole world inside of it.

>>9083615

2/2


The final result are generally huge leviathans of strange and ugly prose (that to the authors and to other University “writers” is actually “poetic”) describing the life of bizarre and uninteresting characters in either static or confuse and surreal plots. To balance the philosophical and experimental parts of the work with more light entertainment those authors generally also present many moments of comic relief, forgetting that they were never funny or actually endowed with humor. So what is the comedy on their books? Generally many pages about shit and piss jokes and all sorts of bizarre sexual behavior. It is South Park in its worst moments, South Park without the good parts.

Those writers do not have the talent or the patience to learn how to write poetry. They also do not have much empathy and capacity to understand other human beings. They are great human encyclopedias that think that, because they are extremely cultured they will certainly produce great literature. And if you end up thinking their work is bad then they will simply look at you as if you were unintelligent and uncultured. They never admit that the fault is in themselves.

>>9083510
>i don't want to read the fucking ramblings of a maniacal drug addict
must not read much literature at all then

>>9083615
>Shakespeare, Melville and Nabokov
The works categorized as post-modern tend to be neither clean and simple nor poetic and exuberant.

Nabokov is quintessentially postmodern you total fucking pseud

>>9083471
What's the deal with airline food?

>>9083471
Post Modernism?

More like Post Modermemeism lmfaotbh

>>9083615
>>9083623
I think you made some good points.

I feel like one of those intelligent but talentless people you described. I am afraid of the possibility that my assumend intelligence is just a narcisstic illusion.
At least I am studying philosophy instead of becoming a novelist. But who knows, maybe I will write a book after my graduation. And kill myself afterwards.

>>9083615
>>9083623
Who gives a shit? Novels have always been garbage.

>>9083623
Wow dude, way to write two posts about post-modern literature without mentioning a single post modern work or author (except for Nabokov who you didn't know was post modern). You realize how completely useless it is to talk at this level of generality? Are you talking about Barth and Barthelme? or are you talking about Pynchon? Calvino? If you truly are talking about all postmodern authors (an indefinably large and varied group) then you've made an impossible argument for your self, if you are talking about a specific group of them without ever mentioning the group in your post, you are either an idiot or a pathologically bad writer.

Either way I take your vagueness as an indication that you haven't actually read whatever it is you are talking about.

>>9083615
>>9083615
>To me those kinds of books are produced by people who are obviously highly intelligent, but without talent (and worse, without the humility to accept their deficiencies and try to correct them). They are the works of highly intelligent individuals who don’t have creativity and will-power enough to study mathematics and work with science; yet those individuals (since they possess immense pride and are quite learned in humanities subjects) flatter themselves with plans of offering to the world some glittering fruits of their intellect. Some of the people who got themselves stuck in this situation in the past tended to become philosophers, but today many of those bitter souls become novelists instead.
>With the decision of becoming writers in mind, those individuals proceed to absorb many literary works, but always with a main goal before them: to do something completely different, to do something nobody has ever done before, to work with plots and characters that are completely different from everything already created. The collective knowledge of several generations of artists about style and technique is not important, because all of that has been done already. What these fellows want is to create a completely different branch of literature. The stranger, the more experimental, the more “complex”, the better. They also want to clog their books with all their encyclopedic knowledge, without considering whether this will make the work balanced and readable. Every novel must contain the whole world inside of it.

Give some examples of writers like this

>>9084023
Pynchon

>>9083615
Wake me up when this post finally addresses postmodernism

>>9084023
David Foster Wallace

The only postmodern writer I dislike is Pynchon

>>9084093
Look up writers Pynchon endorses:
http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/blurbs.html

>>9084093
>>9084122
Nevermind I read that as "like".

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>>9083615
>>9083623

There's a little strawmanning here, especially regarding your comment about the scatological humour of pomo books, which is neither a particularly necessary part of postmodern literature or exclusive to that movement

But broadly I think you hit the bail on the head when you say that the canonical postmodernists jump through the most incredible hoops in order to forego the most important elements of fiction, namely character and deft handling of theme, for messily organized bricks (which I've read and enjoyed greatly by the way, but it has to be acknowledged however fun these works are that they are lacking).

Particularly the degradation of good characterization as a worthwhile metric to consider in judging fiction is the worst offense of the postmodernists. Indeed the degradation of the human figure is a theme of 20th century art, and one that tells of an aesthetic decline in the world of ideas.

>>9083471

I like it conceptually but it's used as an excuse for a lot of genuine shit.