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Literary Postmodernism
The perspective of this work is formed through an understanding of literary postmodernism as a radicalisation of the primary conceits of modernism, as a mode which crosses many disciplinary boundaries and defies any attempt to be constrained or limited to one systematic set of ideas. To further appreciate the term, it is necessary to analyse and critique the views of postmodernist literary critics such as Charles Newman, Brian McHaIe, and Patricia Waugh. Taking the more negative approach to postmodernism, Newman sharply describes it as inevitably calling to mind 'a band of vainglorious contemporary artists following the circus elephants of Modernism with snow shovels' (Newman, qtd in McHaIe 1987, 3). The more comprehensive assessment of McHaIe however, asserts that [a lot like the Gothic] 'postmodernism, the thing, does not exist' outside of being a "discursive artefact constructed by readers, and in retrospect by historians'. McHaIe sees that the term, taken literally, 'signifies a poetics which is the successor of, or possibly a reaction against the poetics of early twentieth century modernism, and not some hypothetical writing of the future' (McHaIe 1987, 5). Ultimately, what both critics are emphasising here is the 'historical consequentiality' of postmodernism, and it is therefore possible to interpret it as a point where modernism has reached its estuary and is overwhelmed by the vast openness and philosophical opportunities of the condition of postmoderni ty.
Achieving a clearer focus on the relationship between modernism and postmodernism, Waugh claims that '[p]ostmodernism can be seen to exhibit the same sense of crisis and loss of belief in the external authoritative system of order as that which prompted modernism' (Waugh 1984, 20). To distinguish the two movements clearly, the Russian formalist concept of 'the dominant' has proved useful for many critics. Maintaining that there is a hierarchy of literary functions evident in every text, correspondent to literary movements, the shift in the dominant function is often seen as the key to literary evolution. Significantly, McHaIe, among others, considers the shift of the dominant in literary developments separating modernism and postmodernism to be a shift from epistemology to ontology, leading to a focus on the 'self, and thus, to a strong trend of self-consciousness in fiction (McHaIe 1987, 9).
In a broad sense, there is...