The Astronautilia ( Czech : Hvězdoplavba ; full title in Greek : Ποιητοῦ ἀδήλου ΑΣΤΡΟΝΑΥΤΙΛΙΑ ἢ ἡ Μικρο οδυσσεία ἡ κοσμική ; i.e. "An unknown poet's Starvoyage, or the Cosmic Micro-Odyssey") is the magnum opus , written in 1994 under the hellenised pseudonym Ἰωάννης Πυρεῖα, of Czech poet and writer Jan Křesadlo , one of the most unusual works of twentieth-century literature. It was published shortly after his death as a commemorative first edition.
190-553: While no published full English translation exists as yet, there is a sample chapter translation online, and a German translation of the fully transcribed and annotated Greek text is in preparation. Aside from the science fiction and epic poem aspects, the postmodern playfulness of the plot itself is underlined by the Czech language Prologue (see part translation) in Karel Čapek 's mystification style. Jan Křesadlo purports to have come into
380-646: A hydraulic computer, where the priest declares they must kill Oudeis and his men because they are ungodly; they begin an attack, and Oudeis and crew try to defend themselves but becomes overwhelmed. A flock of winged creatures resembling the Beaked Ones flies down and saves the men, carrying them to their own city. Their king explains that the hydraulic device was designed to govern their lives, but, blocked with seaweed, it broke, demanding them do evil and split their society in two. Asked to make repairs, Oudeis sends his technician Burda, who does so. Oudeis and crew board
570-496: A waterwheel to power the bellows of a blast furnace producing cast iron . Zhang Heng was the first to employ hydraulics to provide motive power in rotating an armillary sphere for astronomical observation . In ancient Sri Lanka, hydraulics were widely used in the ancient kingdoms of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa . The discovery of the principle of the valve tower, or valve pit, (Bisokotuwa in Sinhalese) for regulating
760-461: A "white noise" of television, product brand names, and clichés. The cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson , Neal Stephenson , and many others use science fiction techniques to address this postmodern, hyperreal information bombardment. Perhaps demonstrated most famously and effectively in Heller's Catch-22 , the sense of paranoia , the belief that there's an ordering system behind the chaos of
950-462: A Möbius Strip through its length, there would not be two circles but one circle longer than the other; if a ring was cut it would create two smaller rings, and using this one could save the cosmos: Mandys, isolated in one cosmos, would only destroy only that one, with the other safe. Onuphrios says he has a time-cutter in his stomach and asks to be buried in the cosmos, at which point the putrefaction reaches him and he becomes brain-dead. Elephas removes
1140-523: A break from the 19th century realism . In character development, both modern and postmodern literature explore subjectivism , turning from external reality to examine inner states of consciousness, in many cases drawing on modernist examples in the " stream of consciousness " styles of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf , or explorative poems like The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot . In addition, both modern and postmodern literature explore fragmentariness in narrative- and character-construction. The Waste Land
1330-743: A center piece of the Latin American "boom" , a movement coterminous with postmodernism. Some of the major figures of the "Boom" and practitioners of Magic Realism (Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar etc.) are sometimes listed as postmodernists. This labeling, however, is not without its problems. In Spanish-speaking Latin America, modernismo and posmodernismo refer to early 20th-century literary movements that have no direct relationship to modernism and postmodernism in English. Finding it anachronistic, Octavio Paz has argued that postmodernism
1520-470: A ceremony. Oudeis asks the king for the help he promised, and is refused because he has a wife and Oudeis slept with her. Oudeis insults the king and says he will seek glory. He and his men board the ship and fly into the cosmos. Oudeis and his men land on a planet of the Tripodes who rule four-footed grazers; their blood the Tripodes drink for everlasting life , offering some, but upon being refused attack
1710-412: A certain dream-like quality. Some of the characteristic features of this kind of fiction are the mingling and juxtaposition of the realistic and the fantastic or bizarre, skillful time shifts, convoluted and even labyrinthine narratives and plots, miscellaneous use of dreams, myths and fairy stories, expressionistic and even surrealistic description, arcane erudition, the element of surprise or abrupt shock,
1900-512: A certain sheep. To kill the sheep would mean the end of everything. The cosmos-observing sheep is kidnapped by a villain called Mandys, and pursued by a rapid reaction commando force, whose captain is called Oudeis (Οὐδείς, "Nobody"), following the example of Captain Nemo (Νήμω καπιτᾶνος), as well as the Odyssey 's original hero, Odysses , who went by the name Outis (Οὖτις, "Noman, Nobody"), to fool
2090-479: A city whose king asks who they are. Oudeis explains their mission and the sheep, saying they were about to capture Mandys. The king orders them freed and offers his help, summoning a feast. Once they are all drunk, the King bids the servants to bring in some objects resembling animal skins : they are inflated into blow-up dolls that resemble women, with which locals and humans alike have sex and fall asleep. Oudeis stirs
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#17327823402622280-550: A city, but fall into a valley . Aliens resembling women with tails and long ears arrive and say they should bring them to the Queen. Taking Oudeis, they strip and collar him, making him walk on all fours. A woman remarks they should not offer an inexperienced dog, so they have sex with Oudeis until twilight. Leading them to the city, they throw them into kennels with creatures resembling men, with smaller heads, long ears, and tails. Refusing dog food , Oudeis sleeps. Once they are washed
2470-645: A collection of symbols and myth. The episcopate of this pop-reference movement were the post-Nabokovian Black Humorists , the Metafictionists and assorted franc-and latinophiles only later comprised by "postmodern". The erudite, sardonic fictions of the Black Humorists introduced a generation of new fiction writers who saw themselves as sort of avant-avant-garde, not only cosmopolitan and polyglot but also technologically literate, products of more than just one region, heritage, and theory, and citizens of
2660-484: A combination of multiple genres to create a unique narrative or to comment on situations in postmodernity : for example, William S. Burroughs uses science fiction, detective fiction, westerns; Margaret Atwood uses science fiction and fairy tales; Umberto Eco uses detective fiction, fairy tales, and science fiction, and so on. Though pastiche commonly involves the mixing of genres, many other elements are also included (metafiction and temporal distortion are common in
2850-615: A culture that said its most important stuff about itself via mass media. In this regard one thinks particularly of the Gaddis of The Recognitions and JR , the Barth of The End of the Road and The Sot-Weed Factor , and the Pynchon of The Crying of Lot 49 ... Here's Robert Coover 's 1966 A Public Burning , in which Eisenhower buggers Nixon on-air, and his 1968 A Political Fable , in which
3040-485: A house of many nude women. He wakes on the ship with his companions. Franta had called the ship and Ivo killed the creatures, but Oudeis keeps one in a Faraday cage to use its hypnosis . The ship sails on to the Time Guardians. Oudeis and the companions arrive in a star system, in which one of the moons bristles with military armaments. He orders four men with Franta board the skiff with the hypnotic creature in
3230-402: A large scale to prospect for and then extract metal ores . They used lead widely in plumbing systems for domestic and public supply, such as feeding thermae . Hydraulic mining was used in the gold-fields of northern Spain, which was conquered by Augustus in 25 BC. The alluvial gold-mine of Las Medulas was one of the largest of their mines. At least seven long aqueducts worked it, and
3420-402: A man he finds why he weeps; he explains the king's daughter will be sacrificed to the monster Gr-gr-gros and leads them to the palace. They find the king lamenting his daughter, and Oudeis tells him he can kill the monster. The king does not believe him, and outlines a race of pygmy men and the phlegms they made that can turn into any shape and choke men, and how they made Gr-rg-ros (whose spelling
3610-417: A megaphone demands the queen, four others, and the men board. Franta explains it had the ship computer Caesar send Tonda to repair Ivo. They interrogate the Queen, who explains she left their former city for the mountains and bred their Fake-Dogs to be aggressive for sport, which they decided to set on the men for entertainment. The Queen and four others are exchanged for the captured women and men. They marry in
3800-1708: A moment – they realised the cosmos-observer was real, and Oudeis' men radiophoned Franta to report this and say they will collect him in the Tatra Mountains . Oudeis explains that Mandys remained on Earth in the twentieth century to become a literary critic with the wrong sheep. Franta says it composed this account in the Argive tongue and reported it truthfully. It and Oudeis want to board onto their spaceship and leave, to return to their own Earth, and their own time. The Preamble/Prooimion and Oudeis' biography. Ἀρχόμενος πρῶτον Μουσῶν χορῷ εἰξ Ἑλικῶνος εὔχομαι ἐκπάγλως καὶ Ἀπόλλωνι ἄνακτι Μουσάων ἄρχοντι καλῷ ἰδὲ δαίμον' ἀοιδῶν ὄφρ' εἴποιεν ἐμὴν κόσμου γλαφυροῖο πόρευσιν [5] θαύματα πλανητῶν καὶ ἀνδρῶν ὄμβριμα ἔργα, οἷά τε δειξάμενοι πλέομεν δνοφερὸν διὰ χάσμα πλοίαρχος μὲν ἐγὼ καὶ ἐμοὶ ἐρίηρες ἑταῖροι Μανδὺν ζητοῦντες καὶ μῆλον κοσμοθεωροῦν. ἔσπετε νῦν ἡμῖν τάδε, ὦ θεὸς ἠὲ θέαιναι. [10] Ποῦ ἀρχήν γε λάβοιμι τίδε πρότερον καταλέξω; Εἰρωτᾷς ὅτις εἰμί τέ μοι κλυτὸν οὔνομα ζητεῖς. Τοίγαρ ἐγὼ φήσω· ἐπεὶ ἐσσόμενός γε ἱκάνω οὐχί κεν ἐκφωνεῖν δύνασαις, χαλεπὸν δὲ τόδ' ἐστι. Ἀλλά γε εἵνεκα σεῖο θέλω ἑτέρως καλέσασθαι. Οὐδένα πλοίαρχόν περ ἐπίκλησιν κεκαλήσθω ὥς εἰν βίβλοισιν μυστηρικὸν ἄνδρα καλοῦσι τολμηρόν· Νήμω καπιτᾶνον Ῥωμαϊστί τε. Οὕτως μὲν κέλεσον μετατιθεὶς ἤματα πάντα. Ἀστυνόμος μὲν ἐγὼ ἐν ἐσσυμένῳ πτολιέθρῳ κοίραμος ἀστυνόμων ἰδὲ καὶ ταγός· μοι δε πίθονατι πάντες ἀστυνόμοι ἐν Μητροπόλει καλιπύργῳ. Αὐτάρ μοι λύπη γέγονεν χαλεπὴ δέτε πρῆξις. Ποῦ δ' ἀρχήν γε λάβοιμι τίδε πρότερον καταλέξω; To begin, first
3990-422: A phaser. The priest cries that the city is doomed; Oudeis calls him a liar; he says the pygmies will make a new monster so the priests can rule the city. Oudeis annihilates him, and in the tussle the crew are overwhelmed and flee. The men laugh at Oudeis for trying to save the girl; they board the spaceship and flee into the cosmos. Oudeis is woken by Franta who tells him the robots have revolted and are steering to
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#17327823402624180-463: A planet of the Macropodes who shepherd flocks of sheep. They offer the men fermented sheep's milk , explaining they believe in the cosmos-observer, and recently had a human, matching Mandys' description, come and leave a sheep. Oudeis and crew stay on the planet and wait for Mandys, announced by the noise of his spaceship. Mandys disembarks, pulls down his trousers, and penetrates a sheep – he stole
4370-409: A playful and humorous way: for example, the way Heller and Vonnegut address the events of World War II . The central concept of Heller's Catch-22 is the irony of the now-idiomatic " catch-22 ", and the narrative is structured around a long series of similar ironies. Thomas Pynchon 's The Crying of Lot 49 in particular provides prime examples of playfulness, often including silly wordplay, within
4560-517: A reciprocating device with hinged valves. The earliest programmable machines were water-powered devices developed in the Muslim world. A music sequencer , a programmable musical instrument , was the earliest type of programmable machine. The first music sequencer was an automated water-powered flute player invented by the Banu Musa brothers, described in their Book of Ingenious Devices , in
4750-408: A serious context. For example, it contains characters named Mike Fallopian and Stanley Koteks and a radio station called KCUF, while the novel as a whole has a serious subject and a complex structure. Since postmodernism represents a decentred concept of the universe in which individual works are not isolated creations, much of the focus in the study of postmodern literature is on intertextuality :
4940-510: A sheep is missing. Oudeis says they must chase Mandys again, and the Time Guardians arrives. Oudeis tells the men he will board the skiff with Franta, Tonda, and the time-plotter to chase after Mandys to draw the Time Guardians away; they must return home and enjoy life; Burda is appointed admiral. Franta makes the Commander hesitate and it, Oudeis, Tonda, and the time-plotter flee into the cosmos. Oudeis and his companions sail towards Earth and
5130-426: A single path to cover the whole Strip without crossing an edge, unlike a ring, where two ants on either side could not meet. Time resembles a ring and must be made into a Möbius Strip to travel though it: to do so one requires a time-plotter, which Mandys has. There are creatures called Time Guardians which prevent the misuse of time travel: only they have time-plotters, one of which Mandys must have stolen and keeps on
5320-522: A standalone tale on some planet akin to the television series Star Trek , which are summarised below. This is followed by: The work is an epic poem , comprising 6,576 verses of hexameter in Homeric Greek , with parallel translation into Czech hexameter. The postmodern science fiction story is inspired by the philosophical postulate of quantum physics , that for something to exist it must be observed. The cosmos-observing creature turns out to be
5510-456: A star system with a tidally locked planet: along its narrow belt between the two hemispheres he lands. Life flourishes there, including a race of butterflies . They ask Oudeis why he has come, and he explains his mission. The butterflies tell him, should he help them first, they will help him track Mandys: they ask Oudeis to keep back the Grogals who attack the butterflies from the dark side of
5700-420: A tool. The Guardians tell them to leave, so Oudeis aims the dream device at them, which works and backfires. Oudeis wakes in a prison with Franta and his men under the watch of the Time Guardians. Franta tells Oudeis what happened and that all of Tolma was captured. The Commander of the Time Guardians approaches, asking who they are, suspecting they have come for a time-plotter; Oudeis replies truthfully, explaining
5890-483: A trap and calls Caesar to summon Ivo. On his return, Franta orders Caesar to wake Burda, who fixes Franta's leg and, upon Franta's request, removes the genitals. Franta convinces Caesar to give up its memory drive, the companions are woken from suspended animation, and the ship sails into the cosmos. Oudeis and the companions sail in the cosmos when they come upon a ship that speaks to them in English and says one of their sailors are sick, begging them send one. Oudeis sends
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6080-616: A warden in a future city, ruler of wardens and their leader: I'm obeyed by all the wardens in Metropolis of beautiful towers. But grief came to me, and a difficult task. Where should I start, and what should I speak of first? Postmodern literature Postmodern literature is a form of literature that is characterized by the use of metafiction , unreliable narration , self-reflexivity , intertextuality , and which often thematizes both historical and political issues. This style of experimental literature emerged strongly in
6270-592: A watering channel for Samos , the Tunnel of Eupalinos . An early example of the usage of hydraulic wheel, probably the earliest in Europe, is the Perachora wheel (3rd century BC). In Greco-Roman Egypt , the construction of the first hydraulic machine automata by Ctesibius (flourished c. 270 BC) and Hero of Alexandria (c. 10 – 80 AD) is notable. Hero describes several working machines using hydraulic power, such as
6460-619: Is " Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote " by Jorge Luis Borges , a story with significant references to Don Quixote which is also a good example of intertextuality with its references to Medieval romances. Don Quixote is a common reference with postmodernists, for example Kathy Acker 's novel Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream . References to Don Quixote can also be found in Paul Auster 's post-modern detective story, City of Glass . Another example of intertextuality in postmodernism
6650-473: Is "often considered as the postmodern novel, redefining both postmodernism and the novel in general." The 1980s, however, also saw several key works of postmodern literature. Don DeLillo 's White Noise , Paul Auster 's New York Trilogy and this is also the era when literary critics wrote some of the classic works of literary history, charting American postmodern literature: works by Brian McHale , Linda Hutcheon , and Paul Maltby who argues that it
6840-420: Is John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor which deals with Ebenezer Cooke 's poem of the same name . Related to postmodern intertextuality, pastiche means to combine, or "paste" together, multiple elements. In Postmodernist literature this can be a homage to or a parody of past styles. It can be seen as a representation of the chaotic, pluralistic, or information-drenched aspects of postmodern society. It can be
7030-404: Is a solution. He can say "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly". At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly 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. Novelist David Foster Wallace in his 1990 essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" makes
7220-529: Is a style popular among Latin American writers (and can also be considered its own genre) in which supernatural elements are treated as mundane (a famous example being the practical-minded and ultimately dismissive treatment of an apparently angelic figure in Gabriel García Márquez 's " A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings "). Though the technique has its roots in traditional storytelling, it was
7410-434: Is a technology and applied science using engineering , chemistry , and other sciences involving the mechanical properties and use of liquids . At a very basic level, hydraulics is the liquid counterpart of pneumatics , which concerns gases . Fluid mechanics provides the theoretical foundation for hydraulics, which focuses on applied engineering using the properties of fluids. In its fluid power applications, hydraulics
7600-528: Is a term coined by Alastair Fowler to refer to a specific type of metafiction in which the story is about the process of creation. According to Fowler, "the poioumenon is calculated to offer opportunities to explore the boundaries of fiction and reality—the limits of narrative truth." In many cases, the book will be about the process of creating the book or includes a central metaphor for this process. Common examples of this are Thomas Carlyle 's Sartor Resartus , and Laurence Sterne 's Tristram Shandy , which
7790-532: Is about the narrator's frustrated attempt to tell his own story. A significant postmodern example is Vladimir Nabokov 's Pale Fire (1962), in which the narrator, Kinbote, claims he is writing an analysis of John Shade's long poem "Pale Fire", but the narrative of the relationship between Shade and Kinbote is presented in what is ostensibly the footnotes to the poem. Similarly, the self-conscious narrator in Salman Rushdie 's Midnight's Children parallels
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7980-401: Is adopted, devoid, in most part, of articles and conjunctions. The text is interspersed with lacunae and everyday language combines with poetry and biblical references leading up to syntax disruption and distortion of grammar. A sense of alienation of character and world is created by a language medium invented to form a kind of intermittent syntax structure which complements the illustration of
8170-671: Is an imported grand récit that is incompatible with the cultural production of Latin America. Along with Beckett and Borges, a commonly cited transitional figure is Vladimir Nabokov ; like Beckett and Borges, Nabokov started publishing before the beginning of postmodernity (1926 in Russian, 1941 in English). Though his most famous novel, Lolita (1955), could be considered a modernist or a postmodernist novel, his later work (specifically Pale Fire in 1962 and Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle in 1969) are more clearly postmodern. Some of
8360-621: Is another described as a "magic realist". Postmodernists such as Italo Calvino ( The Baron in the Trees , 1957), and Salman Rushdie ( The Ground Beneath Her Feet , 1999), commonly use magic realism in their work. A fusion of fabulism with magic realism is apparent in such early 21st-century American short stories as Kevin Brockmeier 's " The Ceiling ", Dan Chaon 's "Big Me", Jacob M. Appel 's "Exposure", and Elizabeth Graver 's "The Mourning Door". Fredric Jameson called postmodernism
8550-446: Is essentially a series of clichés taken from a language textbook. One of the most important figures to be categorized as both Absurdist and Postmodern is Samuel Beckett. The work of Beckett is often seen as marking the shift from modernism to postmodernism in literature. He had close ties with modernism because of his friendship with James Joyce; however, his work helped shape the development of literature away from modernism. Joyce, one of
8740-424: Is highly self-reflexive about the political issues it speaks to. Precursors to postmodern literature include Miguel de Cervantes ' Don Quixote (1605–1615), Laurence Sterne 's Tristram Shandy (1760–1767), James Hogg 's Private Memoires and Convessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), Thomas Carlyle 's Sartor Resartus (1833–1834), and Jack Kerouac 's On the Road (1957), but postmodern literature
8930-425: Is inconstant). Oudeis obliterates a bird with his phaser: the king rejoices, calling his daughter, and Oudeis repeats himself. The men return to the ship. The following morning Oudeis and crew, including Ivo and Franta, go to a forum where the girl is bound. The priests lament but call it necessary for the seasons to pass, to Oudeis' utmost disgust. The temple doors open and Grg-rg-gros is released – Oudeis kills it with
9120-577: Is marked by moments in critical theory: Jacques Derrida 's " Structure, Sign, and Play " lecture in 1966 or as late as Ihab Hassan 's usage in The Dismemberment of Orpheus in 1971. Brian McHale details his main thesis on this shift, although many postmodern works have developed out of modernism, modernism is characterised by an epistemological dominant while postmodern works are primarily concerned with questions of ontology. Though postmodernist literature does not include everything written in
9310-544: Is more complicated than a single reference to another text. Robert Coover 's Pinocchio in Venice , for example, links Pinocchio to Thomas Mann 's Death in Venice . Also, Umberto Eco 's The Name of the Rose takes on the form of a detective novel and makes references to authors such as Aristotle , Sir Arthur Conan Doyle , and Borges . An early 20th century example of intertextuality which influenced later postmodernists
9500-682: Is occasionally listed as a postmodernist, although he started writing in the 1920s. The influence of his experiments with metafiction and magic realism was not fully realized in the Anglo-American world until the postmodern period. Ultimately, this is seen as the highest stratification of criticism among scholars. Other early 20th-century novels such as Raymond Roussel 's Impressions d'Afrique [ fr ] (1910) and Locus Solus (1914), and Giorgio de Chirico 's Hebdomeros (1929) have also been identified as important "postmodern precursor[s]". Postmodern literature represents
9690-468: Is often cited as a means of distinguishing modern and postmodern literature. The poem is fragmentary and employs pastiche like much postmodern literature, but the speaker in The Waste Land says, "these fragments I have shored against my ruins". Modernist literature sees fragmentation and extreme subjectivity as an existential crisis, or Freudian internal conflict, a problem that must be solved, and
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#17327823402629880-415: Is related to mastery." Although Ercolino's "maximalist" examples overlapped with LeClair's earlier systems novel examples, Ercolino did not see "mastery" as a defining feature. According to Ercolino, "it would make more sense to speak of an ambiguous relationship between maximalist narrative forms and power." Many modernist critics, notably B.R. Myers in his polemic A Reader's Manifesto , attack
10070-400: Is sometimes used as a rough boundary for postmodernism's start. Irish novelist Flann O'Brien completed The Third Policeman in 1939. It was rejected for publication and remained supposedly lost until published posthumously in 1967. A revised version called The Dalkey Archive was published before the original in 1964, two years before O'Brien died. Notwithstanding its dilatory appearance,
10260-407: Is tasked with travelling the cosmos with a crew to recover the sheep. He is given phasers , a universal translator called Franta (who resembles a skunk made of brain matter ), a robot called Tonda skilled in electronics , a human doctor called Elephas, and a spaceship called Tolma. Oudeis and his companions land on a planet and he sends out two men, who find a city of Lesbians . They torture
10450-458: Is the branch of hydraulics dealing with free surface flow, such as occurring in rivers , canals , lakes , estuaries , and seas . Its sub-field open-channel flow studies the flow in open channels . Early uses of water power date back to Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt , where irrigation has been used since the 6th millennium BC and water clocks had been used since the early 2nd millennium BC. Other early examples of water power include
10640-490: Is the claim made to Křesadlo by the 'archivist Divíšek' (a reference to Čapek's character of the same name) who brings the Greek text to Křesadlo for translation. (Albeit Křesadlo supposes that Divíšek wrote it himself.) The text begins with a Latin summary for the erudite non-Czech reader. Greek neologisms are explained in a Greek-English glossary. The plot is divided according to the Greek alphabet into 24 books, each typically
10830-456: Is the present, the other the past: one cannot pass one from side to the other without crossing an edge or piercing. Take a ring of paper and cut it, yielding a strip, and joining one end to another so the inside attaches to the outside and vice versa one, achieves a twisted ring mathematicians call a Möbius strip . Only one colour tints its surface; if an ant moved along the Strip it could walk on
11020-548: Is this an exclusive list of features. Linda Hutcheon claimed postmodern fiction as a whole could be characterized by the ironic quote marks, that much of it can be taken as tongue-in-cheek. This irony , along with black humor and the general concept of "play" (related to Derrida's concept or the ideas advocated by Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text ) are among the most recognizable aspects of postmodernism. Though
11210-399: Is transmitted undiminished throughout the fluids. A French physician, Poiseuille (1797–1869) researched the flow of blood through the body and discovered an important law governing the rate of flow with the diameter of the tube in which flow occurred. Several cities developed citywide hydraulic power networks in the 19th century, to operate machinery such as lifts, cranes, capstans and
11400-540: Is understood as a historical period from the mid-1960s to the present, which is different from the (2) theoretical postmodernism, which encompasses the theories developed by thinkers such as Roland Barthes , Jacques Derrida , Michel Foucault and others. The third category is the "cultural postmodernism", which includes film, literature, visual arts, etc. that feature postmodern elements. Postmodern literature is, in this sense, part of cultural postmodernism. Late 19th and early 20th century playwrights whose work influenced
11590-436: Is used for the generation, control, and transmission of power by the use of pressurized liquids. Hydraulic topics range through some parts of science and most of engineering modules, and they cover concepts such as pipe flow , dam design, fluidics , and fluid control circuitry. The principles of hydraulics are in use naturally in the human body within the vascular system and erectile tissue . Free surface hydraulics
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#173278234026211780-579: The Odyssey of Homer , which Nancy Felson hails as the exemplar of the polytropic audience and its engagement with a work. In The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow to Roberto Bolano's 2666 , (2014) Stefano Ercolino characterised maximalism as "an aesthetically hybrid genre of the contemporary novel that develops in the second half of the twentieth century in the United States, then 'emigrates' to Europe and Latin America at
11970-788: The Bataan Death March , the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , the Holocaust , the bombing of Dresden , the Katyn massacre , the fire-bombing of Tokyo , and Japanese American internment ). It could also imply a reaction to significant post-war events: the beginning of the Cold War , the Civil Rights Movement , postcolonialism ( Postcolonial literature ), and the rise of the personal computer ( Cyberpunk and Hypertext fiction ). Some further argue that
12160-534: The Cat in the Hat runs for president. Hans-Peter Wagner offers this approach to defining postmodern literature: Postmodernism ... can be used at least in two ways – firstly, to give a label to the period after 1968 (which would then encompass all forms of fiction, both innovative and traditional), and secondly, to describe the highly experimental literature produced by writers beginning with Lawrence Durrell and John Fowles in
12350-613: The Lebanese Civil War and various real life political figures. Thomas Pynchon 's Mason and Dixon also employs this concept; for example, a scene featuring George Washington smoking marijuana is included. John Fowles deals similarly with the Victorian period in The French Lieutenant's Woman . Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five has been said to feature a metafictional, " Janus-headed " outlook in
12540-739: The New York School , the San Francisco Renaissance , and so on. These writers have occasionally also been referred to as the "Postmoderns" (see especially references by Charles Olson and the Grove anthologies edited by Donald Allen ). Though this is now a less common usage of "postmodern", references to these writers as "postmodernists" still appear and many writers associated with this group ( John Ashbery , Richard Brautigan , Gilbert Sorrentino , and so on) appear often on lists of postmodern writers. One writer associated with
12730-933: The Qanat system in ancient Persia and the Turpan water system in ancient Central Asia. In the Persian Empire or previous entities in Persia, the Persians constructed an intricate system of water mills, canals and dams known as the Shushtar Historical Hydraulic System . The project, commenced by Achaemenid king Darius the Great and finished by a group of Roman engineers captured by Sassanian king Shapur I , has been referred to by UNESCO as "a masterpiece of creative genius". They were also
12920-509: The United States in the 1960s through the writings of authors such as Kurt Vonnegut , Thomas Pynchon , William Gaddis , Philip K. Dick , Kathy Acker , and John Barth . Postmodernists often challenge authorities , which has been seen as a symptom of the fact that this style of literature first emerged in the context of political tendencies in the 1960s. This inspiration is, among other things, seen through how postmodern literature
13110-504: The Vietnam War , features a character named Tim O'Brien; though O'Brien was a Vietnam veteran, the book is a work of fiction and O'Brien calls into question the fictionality of the characters and incidents throughout the book. One story in the book, "How to Tell a True War Story", questions the nature of telling stories. Factual retellings of war stories, the narrator says, would be unbelievable, and heroic, moral war stories don't capture
13300-484: The ancient Near East in the 4th century BC, specifically in the Persian Empire before 350 BCE, in the regions of Iraq , Iran , and Egypt . In ancient China there was Sunshu Ao (6th century BC), Ximen Bao (5th century BC), Du Shi (circa 31 AD), Zhang Heng (78 – 139 AD), and Ma Jun (200 – 265 AD), while medieval China had Su Song (1020 – 1101 AD) and Shen Kuo (1031–1095). Du Shi employed
13490-460: The force pump , which is known from many Roman sites as having been used for raising water and in fire engines. In the Roman Empire , different hydraulic applications were developed, including public water supplies, innumerable aqueducts , power using watermills and hydraulic mining . They were among the first to make use of the siphon to carry water across valleys, and used hushing on
13680-420: The "cultural logic of late capitalism". " Late capitalism " implies that society has moved past the industrial age and into the information age. Likewise, Jean Baudrillard claimed postmodernity was defined by a shift into hyperreality in which simulations have replaced the real. In postmodernity people are inundated with information, technology has become a central focus in many lives, and one's understanding of
13870-585: The 1960s and reaching to the breathless works of Martin Amis and the "Chemical (Scottish) Generation" of the fin-de-siècle. In what follows, the term 'postmodernist' is used for experimental authors (especially Durrell , Fowles , Carter , Brooke-Rose , Barnes , Ackroyd , and Martin Amis ) while "post- modern" is applied to authors who have been less innovative. Hydraulics Hydraulics (from Ancient Greek ὕδωρ ( húdōr ) ' water ' and αὐλός ( aulós ) ' pipe ')
14060-401: The 9th century. In 1206, Al-Jazari invented water-powered programmable automata/ robots . He described four automaton musicians, including drummers operated by a programmable drum machine , where they could be made to play different rhythms and different drum patterns. In 1619 Benedetto Castelli , a student of Galileo Galilei , published the book Della Misura dell'Acque Correnti or "On
14250-643: The Beat Generation who appears most often on lists of postmodern writers is William S. Burroughs . Burroughs published Naked Lunch in Paris in 1959 and in America in 1961; this is considered by some the first truly postmodern novel because it is fragmentary, with no central narrative arc; it employs pastiche to fold in elements from popular genres such as detective fiction and science fiction ; it's full of parody, paradox, and playfulness; and, according to some accounts, friends Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg edited
14440-501: The Cyclops Polyphemus . After the proem , Oudeis introduces himself and explains how the cosmos exists only because it is observed by the cosmos-observing sheep; he recounts how this sheep was discovered. If the sheep were to be killed, the cosmos would cease to exist. A guard was established for the sheep under Oudeis' charge. One of the guardians, Mandys, steals away the sheep in a spaceship and Oudeis, blamed for this,
14630-591: The Islamic world, including fulling mills, gristmills , paper mills , hullers , sawmills , ship mills , stamp mills , steel mills , sugar mills , and tide mills . By the 11th century, every province throughout the Islamic world had these industrial mills in operation, from Al-Andalus and North Africa to the Middle East and Central Asia . Muslim engineers also used water turbines , employed gears in watermills and water-raising machines, and pioneered
14820-494: The Lesbians left the planet; a Y chromosome mutation made the men degenerate into dogs, but the women keep them as bedfellows. She begs Oudeis stay to bear intelligent children. They have sex again, and Oudeis wakes to find his companions around him (summoned by Franta) and the three scouts discovered in stables. Oudeis and his men leave their sperm; they board the ship and fly into the cosmos. Oudeis and his companions arrive on
15010-677: The Measurement of Running Waters," one of the foundations of modern hydrodynamics. He served as a chief consultant to the Pope on hydraulic projects, i.e., management of rivers in the Papal States, beginning in 1626. The science and engineering of water in Italy from 1500-1800 in books and manuscripts is presented in an illustrated catalog published in 2022. Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) studied fluid hydrodynamics and hydrostatics, centered on
15200-470: The Muses' choir dwelling on Helikonos I invoke with all might, as do also the ruler Apollo, the fine ruler of Muses and also the god of all poets, let them witness my voyage through the void of the cosmos, [5] the planet'ry wonders, and also the great deeds of men, done as we voyaged out there through the black chasm, myself, the ship's captain, and also my worthy companions, for Mandys searching and
15390-511: The Queen asks who they are: Oudeis explains their mission and thanks the women for saving them – the Queen tells Oudeis to return the following evening for a banquet where their story will be explained. Sleeping in their ship, Oudeis and his companions return, and the Queen, Tethis, explains that they were tasked to destroy the Lesbians. They lived in secret amongst them and raised a generation of men to use in rebellion – they rejoice now to have succeeded and won their freedom. Oudeis and his men finish
15580-490: The actual achievement of order and meaning becomes unlikely. Gertrude Stein 's playful experiment with metafiction and genre in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) has been interpreted as postmodern. As with all stylistic eras, no definite dates exist for the rise and fall of postmodernism's popularity. 1941, the year in which Irish novelist James Joyce and English novelist Virginia Woolf both died,
15770-473: The aesthetics of postmodernism include August Strindberg , Luigi Pirandello , and Bertolt Brecht . Another precursor to postmodernism was Dadaism , which challenged the authority of the artist and highlighted elements of chance, whim, parody, and irony. Tristan Tzara claimed in "How to Make a Dadaist Poem" that to create a Dadaist poem one had only to put random words in a hat and pull them out one by one. Another way Dadaism influenced postmodern literature
15960-436: The artist is often cited as the one to solve it. Postmodernists, however, often demonstrate that this chaos is insurmountable; the artist is impotent, and the only recourse against "ruin" is to play within the chaos. Playfulness is present in many modernist works (Joyce's Finnegans Wake or Woolf's Orlando , for example) and they may seem very similar to postmodern works, but with postmodernism playfulness becomes central and
16150-481: The asteroid where he mines gold to flee into the past with it and the sheep. If he took the sheep into the past, it cannot observe the cosmos in the future, so it is there destroyed, but Mandys and the sheep are safe in the past with no one from the future extant to stop him. Since Oudeis is compelled to chase after Mandys, he needs this technology, and Onuphrios shows him the route to the Guardians. Were someone to cut
16340-480: The author presents multiple possible events occurring simultaneously—in one section the babysitter is murdered while in another section nothing happens and so on—yet no version of the story is favored as the correct version. Magic realism may be literary work marked by the use of still, sharply defined, smoothly painted images of figures and objects depicted in a surrealistic manner. The themes and subjects are often imaginary, somewhat outlandish and fantastic and with
16530-437: The author provides a general context and then allows the reader's imagination to shape the story. Among those categorized as postmodernist, literary minimalism is most commonly associated with Jon Fosse and especially Samuel Beckett . Fragmentation is another important aspect of postmodern literature. Various elements, concerning plot, characters, themes, imagery and factual references are fragmented and dispersed throughout
16720-416: The barriers between drama, fiction, and poetry, with texts of the collection being almost entirely composed of echoes and reiterations of his previous work ... He was definitely one of the fathers of the postmodern movement in fiction which has continued undermining the ideas of logical coherence in narration, formal plot, regular time sequence, and psychologically explained characters. The " Beat Generation "
16910-416: The basic principles of hydraulics, some teachers use a hydraulic analogy to help students learn other things. For example: The conservation of mass requirement combined with fluid compressibility yields a fundamental relationship between pressure, fluid flow, and volumetric expansion, as shown below: Assuming an incompressible fluid or a "very large" ratio of compressibility to contained fluid volume,
17100-411: The beginning of postmodern literature could be marked by significant publications or literary events. For example, some mark the beginning of postmodernism with the first publication of John Hawkes ' The Cannibal in 1949, the first performance of En attendant Godot in 1953 ( Waiting for Godot , 1955), the first publication of Howl in 1956 or of Naked Lunch in 1959. For others the beginning
17290-398: The book guided by chance. He is also noted, along with Brion Gysin , for the creation of the " cut-up " technique, a technique (similar to Tzara's "Dadaist Poem") in which words and phrases are cut from a newspaper or other publication and rearranged to form a new message. This is the technique he used to create novels such as Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded . Magic realism
17480-454: The broader pastiche of the postmodern novel). In Robert Coover 's 1977 novel The Public Burning , Coover mixes historically inaccurate accounts of Richard Nixon interacting with historical figures and fictional characters such as Uncle Sam and Betty Crocker . Pastiche can instead involve a compositional technique, for example the cut-up technique employed by Burroughs. Another example is B. S. Johnson 's 1969 novel The Unfortunates ; it
17670-421: The central eye of the aliens is blind, so has the robot Tonda study the image with three eyes, and discerns an eagle flying over a village, fish in claw. Oudeis orders Tonda build the same image visible to two eyes, and the creatures rejoice. The crew arrives on another planet covered in fat, long strong poles pushing through, and lice the size of foals pepper the surface, one of which a crewmate blasts and out
17860-416: The collapse of the American empire. Fabulation is a term sometimes used interchangeably with metafiction and relates to pastiche and Magic Realism. It is a rejection of realism which embraces the notion that literature is a created work and not bound by notions of mimesis and verisimilitude . Thus, fabulation challenges some traditional notions of literature—the traditional structure of a novel or role of
18050-487: The companions choose death. Mandys says he will reveal the goldmine if they release him; the companions agree. He shows them the mine and the cosmos-observing sheep (whose back Oudeis marks), and flies away. The men work to replace Kypta's loss and use Semtex , an explosion of which causes the cosmos-observer to break its neck, but the cosmos is not destroyed. Oudeis takes the corpse to the men. The real cosmos-observer never sleeps, so they can identify it at night; they discover
18240-488: The computer into a disk and takes it away; later he returns with canine genitals. Franta sees Melis approaching, but is horrified to see male genitals. Melis calls Franta a fool and says he was always male; Franta tells him he does not love men, and Melis, heartbroken, destroys himself with a phaser. Oudeis asks Franta to return to the disk but Franta wants to try sex with the local creatures on Rebellion. Oudeis finds some robot-hunters and has them catch Franta, who falls into
18430-493: The connection between the rise of postmodernism and the rise of television with its tendency toward self-reference and the ironic juxtaposition of what's seen and what's said. This, he claims, explains the preponderance of pop culture references in postmodern literature: It was in post-atomic America that pop influences on literature became something more than technical. About the time television first gasped and sucked air, mass popular U.S. culture seemed to become High-Art-viable as
18620-452: The cosmos but Oudeis decides he no longer wants to keep the hypnotic animal, which the guards will kill tomorrow, so, testing the time-plotter, he makes it move forward one day and vanish. The sensors find an asteroid covered in dung and a flock. A shepherd lives there with a dog's head, who tells Oudeis he is Veles and was built by the engineers who construct all the gods of the cosmos. Oudeis asks him about Mandys, and Veles tells them he came
18810-445: The cosmos-observer away not to destroy it, Oudeis realises, but he loves it. The men seize and chain him in a cave, celebrating with the fermented milk, and fall asleep. They are woken by Mandys' ship leaving: the Macropodes released him. The crew boards Tolma and chase Mandys in the cosmos for nine days, and on the tenth, passing by a planet, are intercepted by the locals and forced to land. Oudeis and his companions are led in chains to
19000-418: The cosmos-observing sheep. The Commander calls it mythical and keeps them trapped, but takes Franta to examine it. Oudeis and his men wail, but suddenly appear on Tolma, where Franta spits out a box. It says the Commander in fact loved it and while he was enraptured Franta stole a time-plotter and used its tongue to go back one day to save them. The ship sails on to find Mandys. Oudeis and the companions sail in
19190-421: The cosmos. Oudeis and his companions arrive in a star system in which two planets are joined by a bar, resembling a dumbbell . They land on one of the planets and are attacked by bipedal dogs, who, about to destroy the ship, are attacked by a race of cats. As the men watch, the ground yields and the ship tips inside the planet, which is hollow. A friendly group of men wearing bagpipes on their backs move towards
19380-538: The cosmos. Oudeis sends out Kypta, but he is also cast into the cosmos. The crew then make Oudeis go out, who takes a jetpack , and struck out three times he dissolves the kosmobiont with his phaser on the fourth. He tells the crew to wait while he goes to recover Ivo and Kypta. Meanwhile, they vote to abandon him and steer away. Oudeis finds Ivo and Kypta and moves back to the ship, but, and finds it attacked by another kosmobiont that he kills. The men praise Oudeis, and reinstate him as admiral. Oudeis and his companions find
19570-443: The creation of his book to the creation of chutney and the creation of independent India. Anagrams (1970), by David R. Slavitt , describes a week in the life of a poet and his creation of a poem which, by the last couple of pages, proves remarkably prophetic. In The Comforters , Muriel Spark 's protagonist hears the sound of a typewriter and voices that later may transform into the novel itself. Jan Křesadlo purports to be merely
19760-412: The crew. They flee into the cosmos and come to a cold planet where creatures live, the more eyes the nobler; it is too cold for a sheep, so they leave. The ship lands on a barren planet populated by ghosts, blessed because they lack need, and inviting the tempted men to join them, but the robots force them back onto the ship. They land on a planet where goat-like creatures live: the males are intelligent but
19950-498: The description of dreams should play a greater role in the creation of literature. He used automatism to create his novel Nadja and used photographs to replace description as a parody of the overly-descriptive novelists he often criticized. Surrealist René Magritte 's experiments with signification are used as examples by Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault . Foucault also uses examples from Jorge Luis Borges , an important direct influence on many postmodernist fiction writers. He
20140-412: The device. They throw his corpse into the cosmos and Oudeis orders the vessel steered towards the Time Guardians. Oudeis calls a council and the men agree to the plan. Robbers boom through the speakers, bidding them surrender or resist and die. Oudeis orders the cloak cast but they announce they can penetrate it; he orders the ship's nuclear power increased and it cascades into the cosmos. The crew fires
20330-406: The difference in pressure is proportional to the difference in height, and this difference remains the same whether or not the overall pressure of the fluid is changed by applying an external force. This implies that by increasing the pressure at any point in a confined fluid, there is an equal increase at every other end in the container, i.e., any change in pressure applied at any point of the liquid
20520-439: The doctor Elephas in a space suit with Franta; the ship, having received them, speeds off, and Franta sends an SOS. Oudeis chases on them and fires despite the rogue vessel threatening to kill Elephas and Franta if he continues. The robbers cover their ship in an electromagnetic cloak, making them invisible, so Oudeis flies by, and they retreat to an asteroid to repair the damage. Large birds living on its surface attack it and pierce
20710-536: The earliest examples of postmodern literature are from the 1950s: William Gaddis ' The Recognitions (1955), Vladimir Nabokov 's Lolita (1955), and William Burroughs ' Naked Lunch (1959). It then rose to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s with the publication of Joseph Heller 's Catch-22 in 1961, John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse in 1968, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969, and many others. Thomas Pynchon 's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow
20900-463: The entire work. In general, there is an interrupted sequence of events, character development and action which can at first glance look modern. Fragmentation purports, however, to depict a metaphysically unfounded, chaotic universe. It can occur in language, sentence structure or grammar. In Z213: Exit , a fictional diary by Greek writer Dimitris Lyacos , one of the major exponents of fragmentation in postmodern literature, an almost telegraphic style
21090-483: The escape of water is credited to ingenuity more than 2,000 years ago. By the first century AD, several large-scale irrigation works had been completed. Macro- and micro-hydraulics to provide for domestic horticultural and agricultural needs, surface drainage and erosion control, ornamental and recreational water courses and retaining structures and also cooling systems were in place in Sigiriya , Sri Lanka. The coral on
21280-534: The exemplars of modernism, celebrated the possibility of language; Beckett had a revelation in 1945 that, in order to escape the shadow of Joyce, he must focus on the poverty of language and man as a failure. His later work, likewise, featured characters stuck in inescapable situations attempting impotently to communicate whose only recourse is to play, to make the best of what they have. As Hans-Peter Wagner says: Mostly concerned with what he saw as impossibilities in fiction (identity of characters; reliable consciousness;
21470-420: The feast and fly into the cosmos. Oudeis and his companions land on a planet and are met by creatures with human bodies but crow heads, and who invite them to their city. It is poorly built, and they provide disgusting food and drink. One of the priests addresses their fellows, announcing that they must consult their Great Light (their sun), a speech Franta secretly translates. The Bearers of Beaks bring them to
21660-430: The females tame and milked by the males; finding no sheep, the crew leaves the planet. They land on another whose air is toxic and see a lone man walking it in a space-suit , who Oudeis approaches, and Franta, finding the right language, asks to board their ship and what happened to his world. The stranger explains his planet once had a system in which everything was communal but the commanders possessed private property and
21850-438: The fiction pages of The New Yorker , herald either a new chapter of postmodernism or possibly post-postmodernism. Many of these authors emphasize a strong urge for sincerity in literature. Several themes and techniques are indicative of writing in the postmodern era. These themes and techniques are often used together. For example, metafiction and pastiche are often used for irony. These are not used by all postmodernists, nor
22040-540: The first chapter of his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five is about the process of writing the novel and calls attention to his own presence throughout the novel. Though much of the novel has to do with Vonnegut's own experiences during the firebombing of Dresden, Vonnegut continually points out the artificiality of the central narrative arc which contains obviously fictional elements such as aliens and time travel. Similarly, Tim O'Brien 's 1990 short story cycle The Things They Carried , about one platoon's experiences during
22230-535: The first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back. Without lapsing into moral or artistic simplism, shoddy craftsmanship, Madison Avenue venality, or either false or real naiveté, he nevertheless aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal than such late-Modernist marvels as Beckett 's Texts for Nothing ... The ideal Postmodernist novel will somehow rise above the quarrel between realism and irrealism, formalism and "contentism", pure and committed literature, coterie fiction and junk fiction... Many of
22420-464: The form of the novel became almost disintegrated. Catch-22 was a collage; if not in structure, then in the ideology of the novel itself ... Without being aware of it, I was part of a near-movement in fiction. While I was writing Catch-22 , J. P. Donleavy was writing The Ginger Man , Jack Kerouac was writing On the Road , Ken Kesey was writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , Thomas Pynchon
22610-403: The future of fiction?", Sam Leith compared Tom McCarthy's The Making of Incarnation with Dave Eggers' The Every . Leith wrote, "The question ultimately posed, or pointed to, by systems novels is: can novels do without people? And the answer I would give is: not completely. The problem is, perhaps, that the part of our minds that responds to old-fashioned novels hasn't changed as fast as
22800-460: The hole spurts blood. They realise the planet is one great creature and flee in fear. The men land on a planet covered in terrifying monsters. One addresses Oudeis in his own language, saying he was the monster that lived in Oudeis' bedroom when he was a child. Oudeis asks how he can exist, saying he must be a vision. The monster, enraged, tells him sleeping and waking are the same thing and stalks off;
22990-470: The horrific and the inexplicable. It has been applied, for instance, to the work of Jorge Luis Borges , author of Historia universal de la infamia (1935) is considered a bridge between modernism and postmodernism in world literature. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez is also regarded as a notable exponent of this kind of fiction—especially his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude . The Cuban Alejo Carpentier ( The Kingdom of This World , 1949)
23180-443: The idea of employing these in literature did not start with the postmodernists (the modernists were often playful and ironic), they became central features in many postmodern works. In fact, several novelists later to be labeled postmodern were first collectively labeled black humorists: John Barth , Joseph Heller , William Gaddis , Kurt Vonnegut , Bruce Jay Friedman , etc. It is common for postmodernists to treat serious subjects in
23370-432: The idea of parody itself. Metafiction is often employed to undermine the authority of the author, for unexpected narrative shifts, to advance a story in a unique way, for emotional distance, or to comment on the act of storytelling. For example, Italo Calvino 's 1979 novel If on a winter's night a traveler is about a reader attempting to read a novel of the same name. Kurt Vonnegut also commonly used this technique:
23560-605: The inventors of the Qanat , an underground aqueduct, around the 9th century BC. Several of Iran's large, ancient gardens were irrigated thanks to Qanats. The Qanat spread to neighboring areas, including the Armenian highlands . There, starting in the early 8th century BC, the Kingdom of Urartu undertook significant hydraulic works, such as the Menua canal . The earliest evidence of water wheels and watermills date back to
23750-566: The king about the Tailed Women, that he believes he knew where the Lesbians came from, and that the remaining Tailed Women would be happy to unite with their men. The king rejoices, ordering preparations be made. Oudeis and men aboard Tolma lead a fleet to the planet of the Tailed Women, and, landing, approach their city. The army approaches the city and the women fire: the robots, including Ivo, march forward and begin to disintegrate them, but are badly damaged. The city walls are destroyed, and
23940-415: The king asks Oudeis to kill him. Oudeis sends Ivo. Their lifestyle is hedonistic and compared to twentieth-century hippies . Meanwhile, the dogs and cats have assembled, but before Ivo can shoot Au-Bau-Gau, the dogs call him a traitor and kill him – they fight cats. Oudeis recalls Ivo and receives treasure. He tries to get his men to leave the planet, but they refuse; once asleep, Oudeis slips them back onto
24130-532: The label "postmodern", wrote an influential essay in 1967 called " The Literature of Exhaustion " and in 1980 published "The Literature of Replenishment" in order to clarify the earlier essay. "The Literature of Exhaustion" was about the need for a new era in literature after modernism had exhausted itself. In "The Literature of Replenishment" Barth says: My ideal Postmodernist author neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates either his 20th-century Modernist parents or his 19th-century premodernist grandparents. He has
24320-635: The like. Joseph Bramah (1748–1814) was an early innovator and William Armstrong (1810–1900) perfected the apparatus for power delivery on an industrial scale. In London, the London Hydraulic Power Company was a major supplier its pipes serving large parts of the West End of London , City and the Docks , but there were schemes restricted to single enterprises such as docks and railway goods yards . After students understand
24510-546: The literary theorist Keith Hopper regards The Third Policeman as one of the first of that genre they call the postmodern novel. The prefix "post", however, does not necessarily imply a new era. Rather, it could also indicate a reaction against modernism in the wake of the Second World War (with its disrespect for human rights, just confirmed in the Geneva Convention , through the rape of Nanjing ,
24700-421: The locals who enslaved his race, he agrees. There is an asteroid of pure gold, dense enough to support its own atmosphere and populated by sheep whose dung coats the surface – Mandys lives there as a shepherd. He will flee into the past with the cosmos-observing sheep and Oudeis will need to chase him with a time-cutter. Time, Onuphrios explains with an analogy, is like a huge 3D ring with two surfaces, where one
24890-414: The main character's subconscious fears and paranoia in the course of his exploration of a seemingly chaotic world. Patricia Lockwood 's 2021 Booker-shortlisted novel, No One Is Talking About This is a recent example of fragmentation, employing the technique to consider the effects of internet usage on quality of life and the creative process. John Barth , a postmodernist novelist who talks often about
25080-456: The massive rock at the site includes cisterns for collecting water. Large ancient reservoirs of Sri Lanka are Kalawewa (King Dhatusena), Parakrama Samudra (King Parakrama Bahu), Tisa Wewa (King Dutugamunu), Minneriya (King Mahasen) In Ancient Greece , the Greeks constructed sophisticated water and hydraulic power systems. An example is a construction by Eupalinos , under a public contract, of
25270-402: The maximalist novel as being disorganized, sterile and filled with language play for its own sake, empty of emotional commitment—and therefore empty of value as a novel. Yet there are counter-examples, such as Pynchon's Mason & Dixon and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest where postmodern narrative coexists with emotional commitment. In a 2022 GQ article, "Is the 'systems novel'
25460-403: The men cast in a pit, where they are kept for a month until a ladder is let down. Ten are taken, including Oudeis, and lead to an amphitheatre . Underground, the men are cleaned, armed, and brought into the stadium. Women sit in the stalls and watch as ten Fake-Dogs enter, larger and tusked. Oudeis battles with one and is about to be killed when Tolma flies down and disintegrates it. Franta through
25650-443: The men enter. The women throw down their arms and strip off their clothes – the men move forward to have sex with them. Oudeis finds the Queen who is already with the King and he accosts him; the King unintelligibly retorts and they square off until the Queen signals she desires them both. Everyone sleeps together. Women riding on dragons fly in and carry everyone off, naked and unarmed, to the mountain city. The women are led off while
25840-468: The moon, the men dig him out of the ice and, attaching electrodes to his head, shock him awake. After some complaint, and Oudeis' request, the prophet tells Oudeis he will find Mandys and the sheep on dung and gold, but not until he has a time-cutter. He refuses to say any more, so Oudeis and crew board their ship and fly into the cosmos. Oudeis and his companions land on a planet and send out three scouts who do not return. Oudeis and Franta head out and see
26030-542: The narrator, for example—and integrates other traditional notions of storytelling, including fantastical elements, such as magic and myth, or elements from popular genres such as science fiction . By some accounts, the term was coined by Robert Scholes in his book The Fabulators . Strong examples of fabulation in contemporary literature are found in Salman Rushdie 's Haroun and the Sea of Stories . Poioumenon (plural: poioumena; from Ancient Greek : ποιούμενον , "product")
26220-420: The next day and finds the King already awake. Through Franta he asks the king why there are no women on the planet. The king explains that a ship landed on their world carrying Lesbian women who the men, when they realised their intentions, killed; a fear of their own women developed, who degenerated to the point of speechlessness and were wiped out in a plague, so the men built the dolls as substitute. Oudeis tells
26410-403: The next day, a woman takes them to the Queen, who picks Oudeis while her companion takes Franta. The Queen, treating Oudeis like a dog, calls for and whips him; Oudeis takes the whip and spanks the Queen, which she enjoys, and they have sex. Afterwards, Oudeis indicates for Franta, who the Queen summons. She explains that long ago the women were split between the Lesbians and men-lovers, and by lot
26600-581: The novelist and theorist Umberto Eco explains his idea of postmodernism as a kind of double-coding, and as a transhistorical phenomenon: [P]ostmodernism ... [is] not a trend to be chronologically defined, but, rather, an ideal category – or better still a Kunstwollen , a way of operating. ... I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her "I love you madly", because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland . Still there
26790-467: The others join him. The men board the ship and fly into the cosmos. Now that the crew have been travelling for five years, Oudeis calls a council to say they can either return to Earth and be imprisoned, leaving the cosmos in threat, or aimlessly continue as they are. He suggests instead they return to the Grogal prophet and ask him to explain his prophecy. Kypta calls Oudeis a fool and argues for sailing to
26980-548: The people suffered; a revolution brought democracy, and everything was privatised to the point air, polluted by industry, was commodified and all his race was destroyed but him. He returns to his planet, awing the crew. Oudeis and his men land on a planet populated by three-eyed Tetrapods. They reveal their holy idol, given by the gods; whoever understands it shall be blessed, but whoever cannot must be killed, so none of their race examine it – Oudeis and his men are heaven-sent gods and can study it. They see nothing, but Burda discovers
27170-412: The planet Utopia . Oudeis explains how the etymology of Utopia proves the planet does not exist and the crewmates laugh at Kypta. Oudeis nevertheless agrees the crew need a break and suggests journeying to a nearby planet to relax before chasing after the prophet, which the crew agrees to. They arrive on a natural, idyllic planet, where the nymphs rise out of the sea with whom they have sex. They relax on
27360-420: The planet Rebellion. Franta prevented the other robots killing Oudeis: the other men are in suspended animation , and Oudeis must act like a robot on Rebellion. They arrive, and Franta tells Oudeis it and the ship computer Caesar love each other but Franta has no genitals and Caesar no body. Franta will sell its linguistic talent to pay for Melis (its name for Caesar) to be embodied. One day Franta has Tonda upload
27550-446: The planet but are chased by spaceships. Oudeis throws out the unconscious Grogal, making the ships to think it Onuphrios; Burda turns on the cloak and they escape with the real Onuphrios. Oudeis, Burda, Elephas, and Franta take Onuphrios out of their suspended animation, attach the electrodes, and shock him awake again. Oudeis beseeches him to explain his earlier prophecy about the dung, gold, and time-cutter. Because Oudeis saved him from
27740-486: The planet for a while, until one day thunder sounds and Oudeis sees a small skiff of Tolma flying away. He calls his companions and they board, discovering Kypta has stolen the treasure given in Book 6. They chase Kypta for nine days, finding him on the tenth. He drives past pulsars , whose radiowaves interfere with Tolma's sensors. A ship robot calculates a path around the magnetic field but Oudeis sails through and, to stop
27930-492: The planet makes the creatures hostile. Oudeis digs a hole with his phaser to release large supplies of water, then boards his spaceship and flies into the cosmos. Oudeis and his companions land on a planet with aliens resembling humans . They meet the king, Rx-Phrx-Prx, who gladly receives and sends them to bathe. Once Oudeis and his men have entered the pools, two doctors arrive and speak with Oudeis through Franta, saying Rx-Phrx-Prx sent them to check on their health. The men exit
28120-839: The pool to be examined; Franta secretly translates the doctors, who excitedly admire their physique. They tell the men to dress, who unnervingly discover their phasers are gone. The crew feasts with the Rx-Phrx-Prx: he tells them their civilisation was long ago mutated with nuclear radiation , and they need the crew to marry their daughters for their DNA . They are forcibly married , Oudeis wedding Grgla, Rx-Phrx-Prx's daughter. Oudeis takes her to their bedchambers, but Grgla's shucks her skin and reveals her monstrosity. In fear Oudeis strikes her – she calls for her father who imprisons Oudeis. The next morning two judges arrive and through Franta tell Oudeis he will be tried for his life in two hours. They leave, but using Franta's bioradiophone Oudeis orders
28310-826: The postmodern aesthetic. The work of Alfred Jarry , the Surrealists, Antonin Artaud , Luigi Pirandello and so on also influenced the work of playwrights from the Theatre of the Absurd . The term "Theatre of the Absurd" was coined by Martin Esslin to describe a tendency in theatre in the 1950s; he related it to Albert Camus 's concept of the absurd . The plays of the Theatre of the Absurd parallel postmodern fiction in many ways. For example, The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco
28500-498: The postmodern period, several post-war developments in literature (such as the Theatre of the Absurd , the Beat Generation , and magic realism ) have significant similarities. These developments are occasionally collectively labeled "postmodern"; more commonly, some key figures ( Samuel Beckett , William S. Burroughs , Jorge Luis Borges , Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez ) are cited as significant contributors to
28690-417: The principles of hydraulic fluids. His discovery on the theory behind hydraulics led to his invention of the hydraulic press , which multiplied a smaller force acting on a smaller area into the application of a larger force totaled over a larger area, transmitted through the same pressure (or exact change of pressure) at both locations. Pascal's law or principle states that for an incompressible fluid at rest,
28880-488: The real is mediated by simulations of the real. Many works of fiction have dealt with this aspect of postmodernity with characteristic irony and pastiche. For example, the virtual reality of "empathy boxes" in Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in which a new technology-based religion called Mercerism arises. Another example is Don DeLillo 's White Noise presents characters who are bombarded with
29070-458: The related term systems novel , the sprawling canvas and fragmented narrative of such writers as Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace has generated controversy on the "purpose" of a novel as narrative and the standards by which it should be judged. The postmodern position is that the style of a novel must be appropriate to what it depicts and represents, and points back to such examples in previous ages as Gargantua by François Rabelais and
29260-534: The relationship between one text (a novel for example) and another or one text within the interwoven fabric of literary history. Intertextuality in postmodern literature can be a reference or parallel to another literary work , an extended discussion of a work, or the adoption of a style. In postmodern literature this commonly manifests as references to fairy tales—as in works by Margaret Atwood , Donald Barthelme , and many others—or in references to popular genres such as sci-fi and detective fiction. Often intertextuality
29450-590: The reliability of language itself; and the rubrication of literature in genres) Beckett's experiments with narrative form and with the disintegration of narration and character in fiction and drama won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. His works published after 1969 are mostly meta-literary attempts that must be read in light of his own theories and previous works and the attempt to deconstruct literary forms and genres. ... Beckett's last text published during his lifetime, Stirrings Still (1988), breaks down
29640-474: The rockets in reverse and place their position with star maps. They find a binary star system and land on the Tlalochoi planet to draw water, but the Tlalochoi attack and drive them off. On the next planet Oudeis dispatches men who do not return; the sensors find them smiling in a plain, surrounded by cephalopod creatures. In a skiff Oudeis, Franta, and Ivo approach; once they step out, Oudeis sees himself in
29830-693: The sake of irony. Historiographic metafiction (see above ) is an example of this. Distortions in time are central features in many of Kurt Vonnegut 's nonlinear novels, the most famous of which is perhaps Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five becoming "unstuck in time". In Flight to Canada , Ishmael Reed deals playfully with anachronisms, Abraham Lincoln using a telephone for example. Time may also overlap, repeat, or bifurcate into multiple possibilities. For example, in Robert Coover 's "The Babysitter" from Pricksongs & Descants ,
30020-440: The scouts to death and, discovering the spaceship, melodiously sing to the Oudeis' crew to lure them outside. They lead them to their city as prisoners to cage them. Two more men are tortured and night falls. The next day a crowd takes out another two, but a violent revolution breaks out among the women; one approaches the Queen and, pulling out a penis, rapes her. The other rebel women follow suit. They release Oudeis and his men, and
30210-399: The self's mastery of itself, economic and political hegemony, force in history and culture, the transforming power of science and technology, the control of information and art. These novels are also about the size and scale of contemporary experience: how multiplicity and magnitude create new relations and new proportions among persons and entities, how quantity affects quality, how massiveness
30400-511: The sensors detect Mandys. Oudeis radiophones, telling him halt or he will fire; Mandys calls him a fool who could destroy everything. Oudeis fires, the vessel vibrates and vanishes. Oudeis remembers Onuphrios saying that Mandys will flee into the past because of the wealth that gold provides, so he reasons Mandys will go to the twentieth century where he will be rich from his gold and technology sufficiently advanced for comfort. He does so and finds Mandys hurtling towards Earth. Mandys and sheep vacates
30590-625: The sheep which watches the cosmos, tell us of this now, oh god, ye goddesses also! [10] Where should I start, and what should I speak of first? You ask who I am, and you search for my famous name? Well then, I'll tell you: since I come from the future, you cannot pronounce it, because it's difficult. But for your sake I want to be called something other. [15] Oudeis the ship's captain – let that be my name, like how they call that brave, mysterious man in books: in Latin, he's Captain Nemo. In translation so they call me for all days. [20] I am
30780-405: The ship and leaves. The men wake up in the middle of the cosmos and mutiny under the direction of the crewmate Kypta, steering the ship back to the planet. The ship is immobilised by a kosmobiont – a creature, Oudeis explains, that lives in the cosmos and feeds on each other . It bores its proboscis into the ship. The crew begs Oudeis for help; he sends out Ivo, but the creature strikes it into
30970-461: The ship computer Caesar to dispatch the RoboCop Ivo in two hours. Once he has been taken to the courtroom, where Rx-Phrx-Prx, Grgla, and the companions are seated, Ivo bursts in and disintegrates the judge. Oudeis demands his phasers back, and announces he and his men will leave the planet, but will donate their sperm for future generations. Having done so, they board the spaceship and fly into
31160-475: The ship exploding, opens an auxiliary jet, casting them deep into the cosmos. Kypta is caught by the gravity of the pulsar and crushed. The crew bewails the loss of their loot. Oudeis and his companions reverse the ship's engines to gradually slow the ship, landing on the first planet they see, whose gravity is weaker than Earth 's. Oudeis and four men explore and find a city of men smaller than humans; they return, and Oudeis, Franta, and Ivo head out. Oudeis asks
31350-448: The ship, as do Oudeis, Franta, and Tonda; they land on Earth unharmed. Oudeis summarises the hunt for Mandys and how they corner him. Mandys puts a knife to the sheep's throat and tells them to back off; Franta radiophones to Oudeis and he darts forward, striking the sheep to the ground and knocking it out, to Mandys' shock. Mandys took the wrong sheep: when the Time Guardians fired on the asteroid, it shook and darkness fell on their eyes for
31540-408: The ship, asking them to join them for a feast, meeting the King and eating in zero-gravity . The King explains that two races of men, having made peace, built the bar to unite the two worlds and set the dogs and cats against each other for entertainment, but they rebelled and drove them inside the planet. If they find peace, the men will be exterminated – a dog prophet, Au-Bau-Gau, is mediating one, and
31730-399: The spaceship and fly into the cosmos. Oudeis and his companions land on a planet inhabited by animals that resemble plants, and explains the chemical structure of their chlorophyll . Their planet seems peaceful, but one of the locals attacks and injures a crewmate. The men flee to their ship and begsto leave, but Oudeis with two others goes back out and discovers that short supply of water on
31920-486: The temple whose guards are made of energy – they absorb the raybeams, so Burda inverts his phaser and drinks them in. The men find the prophet, discovering from a plaque his name is Onuphrios (Oudeis explains who the Onuphrios of our own world is), and trip an alarm. They steal the corpse and flee on the surface of the planet under attack – one of the Grogals, rushing Oudeis, he knocks out and takes along. They leave from
32110-638: The term " historiographic metafiction " to refer to works that fictionalize actual historical events or figures; notable examples include The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez (about Simón Bolívar ), Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes (about Gustave Flaubert ), Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow (which features such historical figures as Harry Houdini , Henry Ford , Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria , Booker T. Washington , Sigmund Freud , and Carl Jung ), and Rabih Alameddine 's Koolaids: The Art of War which makes references to
32300-781: The term in relation to Don DeLillo , Tom LeClair chose seven novels as the focus of The Art of Excess . They were: Gravity's Rainbow (by Thomas Pynchon ), Something Happened (by Joseph Heller ), J R (by William Gaddis ), The Public Burning (by Robert Coover ), Women and Men (by Joseph McElroy ), LETTERS (by John Barth ) and Always Coming Home (by Ursula Le Guin ). LeClair's systems novels were all "long, large and dense" and all in some way striving for "mastery", showing similarity to Moby-Dick and Absalom, Absalom! in "range of reference, artistic sophistication, and desire for profound effect." LeClair wrote, "These seven novels are about mastery, about excesses of power, force, and authority in arenas small and large:
32490-473: The theme of technoculture and hyperreality. For example, in Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut , the character Dwayne Hoover becomes violent when he's convinced that everyone else in the world is a robot and he is the only human. This theme is likewise present in the satirical dystopian science-fiction tabletop role-playing game Paranoia . Dubbed maximalism by some critics, and overlapping with
32680-719: The threshold the twenty-first." . Ercolino singled out seven novels for particular attention: Gravity's Rainbow , Infinite Jest , Underworld , White Teeth , The Corrections , 2666 , and 2005 dopo Cristo by Babette Factory. Tom LeClair had previously coined the term systems novel in his 1987 book In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel , exploring the concept further in his 1989 book, The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction . Having introduced
32870-518: The translator of a "chrononaut's" handed down Homeric Greek science fiction epic, the Astronautilia . Other postmodern examples of poioumena include Samuel Beckett 's trilogy ( Molloy , Malone Dies and The Unnamable ); Doris Lessing 's The Golden Notebook ; John Fowles 's Mantissa ; William Golding 's The Paper Men ; Gilbert Sorrentino 's Mulligan Stew ; and S. D. Chrostowska 's Permission . Linda Hutcheon coined
33060-461: The truth. David Foster Wallace in The Pale King writes that the copyright page claims it is fiction only for legal purposes, and that everything within the novel is non-fiction. He employs a character in the novel named David Foster Wallace. Giannina Braschi also has a namesake character and uses metafiction and pastiche in her novels Yo-Yo Boing! and United States of Banana about
33250-435: The use of dams as a source of water power, used to provide additional power to watermills and water-raising machines. Al-Jazari (1136–1206) described designs for 50 devices, many of them water-powered, in his book, The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices , including water clocks, a device to serve wine, and five devices to lift water from rivers or pools. These include an endless belt with jugs attached and
33440-413: The vessel, exposing the robbers to the vacuum, killing them, and destroying the cloak. Franta signals Oudeis, who arrives to save them. Oudeis takes the electromagnetic cloak and sails into the cosmos. Oudeis and his companions arrive on the moon they visited in Book 8 and find a temple on the site of the Grogal prophet besides to a city of aliens that enslave the Grogals but worship the prophet. They enter
33630-528: The water streams were used to erode the soft deposits, and then wash the tailings for the valuable gold content. In the Muslim world during the Islamic Golden Age and Arab Agricultural Revolution (8th–13th centuries), engineers made wide use of hydropower as well as early uses of tidal power , and large hydraulic factory complexes. A variety of water-powered industrial mills were used in
33820-421: The way the novel seeks to represent both actual historical events from World War II while, at the same time, problematizes the very notion of doing exactly that. Temporal distortion is a common technique in modernist fiction: fragmentation and nonlinear narratives are central features in both modern and postmodern literature. Temporal distortion in postmodern fiction is used in a variety of ways, often for
34010-553: The well-known postmodern novels deal with World War II , one of the most famous of which being Joseph Heller 's Catch-22 . Heller claimed his novel and many of the other American novels of the time had more to do with the state of the country after the war: The antiwar and anti government feelings in the book belong to the period following World War II: the Korean War , the cold war of the 1950s. A general disintegration of belief took place then, and it affected Catch-22 in that
34200-621: The whole process not as the author, but as a translator of the Greek original "by an unknown author." We are to believe this is a real travelogue, whose alleged author is a space-time travelling Captain Oudeis / Nemo, (as confirmed by "copyright Nemo" for the Greek text edition.) Oudeis' travelogue was dictated to his universal translator Franta (which is a creature resembling a skunk, but made entirely of brain tissue.) Franta, who lacked common sense, thought it wise to write it all down in Homeric Greek, so as to make it more famous. At least, that
34390-574: The world around it." Literary minimalism can be characterized as a focus on a surface description where readers are expected to take an active role in the creation of a story. The characters in minimalist stories and novels tend to be unexceptional. Generally, the short stories are "slice of life" stories. Minimalism, the opposite of maximalism , is a representation of only the most basic and necessary pieces, specific by economy with words. Minimalist authors hesitate to use adjectives, adverbs, or meaningless details. Instead of providing every minute detail,
34580-399: The world is another recurring postmodern theme. For the postmodernist, no ordering is extremely dependent upon the subject, so paranoia often straddles the line between delusion and brilliant insight. Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 , long-considered a prototype of postmodern literature, presents a situation which may be "coincidence or conspiracy – or a cruel joke". This often coincides with
34770-415: The world. Oudeis and crew meet the Grogals, who resemble the dog of Dulux commercials , but are bipedal and carry spears and bows . Oudeis repulses them with phasers. He has Burda and Tonda to build an organic wall demarcating the cold hemisphere of the planet. The butterflies rejoice and tell Oudeis that one of the planet's four moons contains a Grogal prophet buried in the ice who help Oudeis. Flying to
34960-476: Was but driven back by the rams who jealously wanted to mate with the cosmos-observer. Oudeis stays on the asteroid for a short while, and while the other men sleep he goes to the shepherd's cave and sees Veles wears a mask; removing it, he finds Mandys. Oudeis cries for his companions and seizes the man. Oudeis calls a meeting. Oudeis addresses his companions: they will have Mandys identify the sheep, but he asks, afterwards, if they should kill or return him to Earth;
35150-417: Was in the development of collage, specifically collages using elements from advertisement or illustrations from popular novels (the collages of Max Ernst , for example). Artists associated with Surrealism , which developed from Dadaism, continued experimentations with chance and parody while celebrating the flow of the subconscious mind. André Breton , the founder of Surrealism, suggested that automatism and
35340-400: Was not until the 1980s that the term "postmodern" caught on as the label for this style of writing. A new generation of writers—such as David Foster Wallace , William T. Vollmann , Dave Eggers , Michael Chabon , Zadie Smith , Chuck Palahniuk , Jennifer Egan , Neil Gaiman , Carole Maso , Richard Powers , Jonathan Lethem —and publications such as McSweeney's , The Believer , and
35530-740: Was particularly prominent in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 21st century, American literature still features a strong current of postmodern writing, like the postironic Dave Eggers ' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), and Jennifer Egan 's A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011). These works also further develop the postmodern form. Sometimes the term "postmodernism" is used to discuss many different things ranging from architecture to historical theory to philosophy and film . Because of this fact, several people distinguish between several forms of postmodernism and thus suggest that there are three forms of postmodernism: (1) Postmodernity
35720-492: Was released in a box with no binding so that readers could assemble it however they chose. Metafiction is essentially writing about writing or "foregrounding the apparatus", as is typical of deconstructionist approaches, making the artificiality of art or the fictionality of fiction apparent to the reader and generally disregards the necessity for "willing suspension of disbelief". For example, postmodern sensibility and metafiction dictate that works of parody should parody
35910-545: Was the youth of America during the materialistic 1950s; Jack Kerouac , who coined the term, developed ideas of automatism into what he called "spontaneous prose" to create a maximalistic, multi-novel epic called the Duluoz Legend in the mold of Marcel Proust 's In Search of Lost Time . More broadly, "Beat Generation" often includes several groups of post-war American writers from the Black Mountain poets ,
36100-456: Was writing V. , and Kurt Vonnegut was writing Cat's Cradle . I don't think any one of us even knew any of the others. Certainly I didn't know them. Whatever forces were at work shaping a trend in art were affecting not just me, but all of us. The feelings of helplessness and persecution in Catch-22 are very strong in Cat's Cradle . In his Reflections on 'The Name of the Rose ' ,
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