Postmodernism

Question 1

Timeline

Answer 1

Start: 1939-45 WWII
1939-45 WWII: Britain emerged bankrupt and in huge debt to the USA reforms (education, employment, pensions…), social change, population growth, obsessive consumerism, a huge multicultural influx, growing nationalism
1947-91 Cold War and post-Cold War conflicts: capitalism vs. communism/socialism
Queen Elizabeth II (1952-2022)
1960’s Space travel
1973 European Economic Community → European Union (1993) → EU referendum: Brexit → Brexit (2020)

Question 2

Politics & Society

Answer 2

• Decolonialisation/Independence of colonies → Commonwealth of Nations
  Economy (industrial age → information age): consumerism, cultural globalisation
  technological innovations, mediatisation/digitalisation

Question 3

What is Postmodernism about?

Answer 3

= late 20th century movement; characterised by broad scepticism, subjectivism, relativism, general suspicion of reason, sensitivity of the role of ideology in maintaining political and economic power
- Meaning is relative → There are multiple meanings!; There are no limitations. → Everything is possible.; The world has undergone countless disasters and is beyond redemption and understanding.

Question 4

Literary Context

Answer 4

• new cultural, aesthetic, and critical agenda
• postmodernism as an abandonment of social and intellectual responsibility
• globalisation → New English Literatures
• in many books: blending between magic, supernatural elements, fiction and reality
  avoids break with the past as avant-garde
• focus on reconceptualising notions of subjectivity and gender

Question 5

Literary Techniques

Answer 5

• everything, becomes possible
• Modernism and Post-Modernism stress the importance of text and reader, applying multiple stylistic techniques
• narrative techniques: fragmentation, multiple plots
• subjectivism = stressing the importance of a complex mind
• magic realism = creating a real world or banal setting while also adding or revealing magical and supernatural elements to the reader