POSTMODERN AUTHORS

 Adams, Douglas (born 1952; Cambridge, England)  Aldis, Brian W. (born 1952; East Dereham, England)  Amis, Martin (born 1949; Oxford, England)  Banks, Ian (born1954; Fife, Scotland  Barnes, Julian (born 1946; Leicester, England)  Clarke, Susanna (born 1959; Nottingham, England) LIST OF CONTEMPORARY BRITISH AUTHORS AND NOVELISTS AT THE VERGINIA PUBLIC LIBRARY  Drabble, Margaret ( born 1939; Sheffield, England)  Fitzgerald, Penelope ( born 1916; Linclon, England)  Le Carré, John (born 1931; Poole, England)  McEwan, Ian (born 1948; Aldershot, England)  Orwell, George (born 1903; Motihari; Bengal)  Rushdie, Salman (born 1947; Bombay, India)

 10. The Cannibal by John Hawkes, 1949  9. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, 1961  8. Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth, 1968  7. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, 1969  6. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, 1973  5. White Noise by Don DeLillo, 1985  4. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie  3.The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, 1980  2.The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson, 1969  1. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 2007

POSTMODERN FICTION  Postmodern fiction presents its readers with a challenge : instead of enjoying it passively, they have to work to understand it, to question their own responses, and to examine their views about what fiction is. Yet accepting this challenge is what makes postmodern writing so pleasurable to read and rewarding to study.

 First of all, let’s examine a few of the most common narrative and stylistic devices found in postmodern texts: 1.Postmodern literature uses confusing chronology, jumping from one historical period to another and from one charachter’s thoughts to another charachter’s thoughts without indication at all. 2.Postmodern writers often leave their stories open-ended, with no satisfying conclusion, or the book concludes by making a refrence back to the beginning, thereby offering circularity. 3.Postmodern stories and novels often rely on parody or satire.

Barry Lewis’ essay on « Postmodernism and fiction », he claims that postmodernism underwent an « epistemic break» during the 1990s, creating a distinction between what he calls first-wave postmodernism and second-wave postmodernism. The both waves challenged and shattered some literary conventions such as: plot, setting, character, and theme through features: Temporal Disorder :this refers not only to the disruption of the past, but also the disruption of the present, for a example, take Seth Graham-Smith’s 2010 novel Abraham Linclon, Vampire Hunter, which depicts and alters the biografical facts of the 16th president of the U.S.

Pastiche: came to prominence when artists realized that the contemporary moment presents little room for originality because everything has been said and done before. A good example of pastiche would be Art Spieglman’s Maus, a graphic memoir that depicts a son who tries to create a work based on his father’s experiences as a Polish Jew in the Holocaust. Fragmentation: take for instance Sandra Cisnero’s The House on Mango Street (1984), which is told through a series of memories rather than the traditional narrative structure. Paranoia: a notable example is Tony Kushner’s 1993 play Angels in America.

The features mentioned above were employed in first-wave postmodernism as a way of challenging the authority and dominance of literary conventions such as : plot, setting, character, and theme, they are employed in second-wave postmodernism simply because they have become integrated with the dominant literary culture; notable example of second-wave are novels such as Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Prt-Time Indian and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night –Time.

CONCLUSION : To conclude, « postmodern attitude is as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he can not say to her "I love you madly", because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows), but taking into consideration that it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence. »Barbara Cartland An other way to deal with postmodernism is that, we should not treat it as a reaction to modernism or as a continuation or even an attitude of life,but rather as an aesitic,artistic trend for tasting the beauty of language.

CITATION: Barthes, Roland (1968). Writing Degree Zero, New York: Hill and Wang. Barthes, Roland (1975). The Pleasure of the Text, New York: Hill and Wang. Foucault, Michel (1983). This is Not a Pipe. Berkeley: University of California Press. Borrowed heavily from Jane Flax, via Lester Faigley's Fragments Of Rationality.