Postmodernism And Literature

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Krzysztof Dryś Doktor Ewa Rychter metodologia badań literaturoznawczych 27 November 2011 Stephen Connor " Postmodernism and literature" in The Cambridge Companion to postmodernism Steven Connor in his chapter " Postmodernism and Literature" is describing differences between modernism and postmodernism. They are described both in terms of relations between genres and in terms of understanding the world Generally modernism is described by Connor as "a curious mixture of abstraction and excess" (68). Abstraction here means the denial of traditional points of view, escape from known types of characters and plot in literature, points of reference in paintings. Excess for modernists means to put many subjects, such as "madness, sexuality, boredom, fantasy, randomness" ( Connor 68) into their works and demand "many more ways of rendering those subjects." ( Connor 68). According to Connor crucial aspect of modernism is "its concentration and condensation." (68), which means that the huge amount of events, plots and genres is squeezed, for example, into description of only one day. Modernism tried to describe the world by using language. For modernists language existed only to describe the world, to make it more comprehend. Even this chaos in modernist works is carefully planned to help readers understand the world. It can be seen in their way of writing short stories. "They tend to focus on the moments of revelation, realization, or transformation, at which suddenly everything is made clear, and time is therefore drawn to an epiphanic point." ( Connor 74), which means that the main point of these stories are moments of explanation. After such moment, the story and is closed. Postmodernism actually deals with similar aspects but does it in a different manner. For Postmodernists chaos is not something that needs to be explained. It is the main
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