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An Approach to the Definition of Postmodernism : On Contents
강규봉 연세대학교 영어영문학회 1991 영어영문학연구 Vol.12-13 No.-
This writer does not deny that there have been some changes in novels in the 1960s. So we probably should distinguish postmodernism from modernism, but the changes are mostly related to the techniques, not to the contents or the themes of the novels. Tony Tanner deals with Saul Bellow and Joseph Heller in the same chapter, "A Mode of Motion" in his book, City of Words. This shows that one novelist whose novels are known as realism and another novelist whose novels are known as postmodernism are quite similar in some ways. Anyway the world of novels is filled with absurdities. Novelists talk about absurdities in their novels, but don't mean them. They would rather tell us to laugh at them. Here we can find noticeable black humor in contemporary novels. That a writer treats absurd materials cynically means that he is opposed to the absurdities, which leaves a very narrow crack for improvement and hope. It is often said that postmodern novels (many contemporary novels) are autonomous, pure games without any message, but the fact has been proved that it is not true. As the world is absurd and incomprehensible, someone may insist that a novel is also or should be incomprehensible. But there is still some relevance between reality and fiction, and thus a novel cannot be merely play or an autonomous being. Now that a novel is relevant to the reality, it cannot help containing something meaningless. But even though a novel contains meaningless materials, the theme is not meaningless. It is true that there are some novels which are more autonomous than the above three novels, such as Lost in the Funhouse, Pale Fire and Snow White. These novels might not be as easily explained in terms of my point of view. So I would rather believe that there are many kinds of contemporary novels. Some of them are very different from modernist novels and others are not very different. We know that there are realistic novels as well. Therefore I think that postmodernism has someting in common with modernism and something different at the same time. In the aspect of techniques there are more differences than similarities, while in the aspect of contents or themes there are more similarities than differences. They are all in the tradition of humanism, and have something relevant to the reality.