Central themes :
Industrialization- urban jungle- alienation of the
individual .
totalitarian systems (dystopias)
Psychological control of the human mind .
Schizophrenia
Virtual reality
Fantastic elements in a real world
ID vs. social background
Surveillance
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New kind of literature:
Magical realism
Techno-gothic
Hypertext
Lunatic
Cyberpunk
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Modernism/Postmodernism
•Continued the fundamental philosophical
assumptions of modernism
•Continued its tendency toward historical
discontinuity
•Continued its preoccupation with
alienation
•Continued to focus on a social
individualism
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Modernism/postmodernism
•Modernism relied on existentialism -а philosophy
that claims that the individual must make
decisions concerning right and wrong, or the self
without access to universal truths
•Postmodernism’s tendency to use solipsism, a
philosophical perspective that holds that one саn
only truly know oneself and that all other
experiences are potentially false since they are
filtered through the senses
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Modernism/postmodernism
•The tendency of the modernists
- to construct intricate forms
- to interweave symbols elaborately
- to create works of art that, although opposed to
some established present order, create within
themselves an ordered universe
•All that has given up in postmodern literature
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Philosophy of Postmodernism
•Denial of order
•Presentation of highly fragmented
universes in the created world of art
•Presentation of critical theories that are
а form of phenomenology
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Phenomenology
A highly subjective contemporary philosophy
which argues that the meaning of an object is a
concept separate from its existence.
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Postmodernist Critics
•Jacques Lacan
•The members of the Frankfurt School
•Michel Foucault
•Ihab Hassan
•Jacques Derrida
•Academically trained in philosophy, used
substantially the works of philosophers such as
Friedrich Nietzsche, Каrl Маrх, Martin Heidegger,
оr G.W.F. Hegel
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Postmodernism as a Name
Used in architecture in the 1960s by Frederic
Jameson
In literature began to be used instead of less
satisfactory labels such as "black humor" or
"fabulism“.Ihab Hassan in his essay “From
Postmodernism to Postmodernity” emphasize
some critics who used this word in different
contexts:
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Postmodernism - etymology
•1. Charles Olson (1950 -1960)
•2.Harry Levin 1959 , to denote the high modern
culture declining.
•3. Bernard Smith , 1945 used this term with the
meaning of the socialist realism used in picture.
•Charles Jencks used the word “postmodernism” in his
works with the meaning which we have today.
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