Essays on Postmodernism

In the current era, more and more people pay attention to design and aesthetics. Design is a process of continuous improvement, and it is obvious that design is influenced by previous designs. “Every revolutionary movement that I‘ve known of has some type of revolutionary art.”...

America used to be known as the land of opportunity. That was before the wars and the advent of technology. For post-modern authors, modernity and prosperity has turned America into a disappointment. Barthelme’s Snow White and Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 share similar ideas...

So here you are now, ready to attack the first lines of the first page. You prepare to recognize the unmistakable tone of the author. No. You don’t recognize it at all. But now that you think about it, who ever said this author had...

Many literary pieces were written during the Victorian era, often revolving around the concepts of death and love. The Victorian era saw the unequal treatment of women and huge technological advances. It was considered an important literary period with romanticism at the forefront. However, the...

“Postmodern Blackness” is one of several essays that bell hooks has written. It is, by its nature, a philosophical essay in which the Afro-American writer mixes what is literary with what is racial. Hence, in it she attempts at evoking the exclusionary role that the...

Political human science is stressed over the sociological examination of political occasion extending from the state to normal society to the family and audits subjects for instance citizenship social advancements and the wellsprings of social power. in this area david owen has raised that the...

Don DeLillo’s post-modern novel White Noise examines the relativity of meaning in a consumer and media-controlled society. A classic dystopia comments on society’s reliance on the media, and in White Noise, it creates character identity instability and hyperreality. However, White Noise does not completely portray...

Consumer culture has been discussed by many authors and philosophers as long as the human race has been consuming. Consumerism is often referred to as a negative force in society, specifically in the United States, due to America’s image of surplus and leisure even in...

America: a land of freedom, opportunity, and prosperity; a country that highly advocates the amalgamation of conglomerating cultures. Ironically, however, in Gary Shteyngart’s novel Absurdistan, the Russians transcend Americans in their pursuit for wealth, status, and size. The protagonist, Misha Vainberg, is a 30-year-old Russian...

In Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, we see how Calvino attempts to compare the reading of a novel to a man pursuing a woman. In this text, the reader takes on the role of a male protagonist attempting to read a...

Epictetus, the Greek Stoic philosopher, said, “First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.” Defining one’s personal identity may coincide with this ancient Stoic principle, but what is not mentioned is the human transformation that must take...

Ross Murfin defines postmodernism as, “A term referring to certain radically experimental works of literature and art after World War II” (Murfin 397). According to Murfin, postmodernism, like modernism that preceded it, involves separation from dominant literary convention via the “experimentation with new literary devices,...

When the essay was first written during the 1990’s, the main point was that postmodernism was probably the most well-known trend with scholars and different academic people for its thoughts of “heterogeneity, the decentered subject…recognition of Otherness” which was just a number of different ways...

The traditional structure and approach to literature is challenged in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino. For this idiosyncratic narrative, the main character is referred to as the reader, and the novel is told in the second person. Every other chapter...

Postmodernism emerged after modernism. This term is used to refer to a period in history. But it is also used to refer to a series of ideas in history. Postmodernism is a thought movement that emerged in America and then in Europe after World War...

A recurring theme that can be found in Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49 is the conception that chaos has a tremendous effect on society. Pynchon engages in a dualistic method of literary technique to engender the realization of the effect that chaos...

Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise confronts the primal fear of death much in the way his own characters do– by nullifying or minimizing this otherwise terrifying human phenomenon. What is referred to as “white noise” in the novel is the barrage of modern life that...

In DeLillo’s White Noise the new-found abundance of technology enters into human lives to create constant distractions and background noises. The protagonist, Jack, often refers to the television as the ‘voice’ from the other room. In the supermarket, the loudspeaker drowns out conversations between shoppers....

Patched together from different marriages, various mothers and fathers, the nuclear family in Don DeLillo’s White Noise is nothing if not impacted and constructed by modernity. This explication of a typical American lifestyle does not examine the simplicity of daily life but rather the influence...

This paper is about the postmodern IR theory with the ideas of Michael Foucault and the movie The Matrix (1999). In first place postmodernism explained as a critical IR theory and its assumptions discussed. Secondly The Matrix (1999) will be summarized. After that the movie...

Literature is always considered as a faithful representation of the society. In Wordsworthian terms Literature can be sorted as a way of “man speaking to men”, with every reader it prompts out various layers of interpretation. It can be quite natural for a writer to...

Post-modernism emerged in the 20th century to displace and undermine values introduced by modernism. Postmodernism can be interpreted as “the cultural logic of late capitalism” emphasising his Marxist and post-industrial perspective. Therefore, the stiffness of modernism evolved into the indeterminacy of the post-modern aesthetic that...

Contemporary artists have appropriate past artwork to repurpose so it more relevant for the future society. Postmodernism was a broad movement that developed in the mid to late 20th century as a reaction against Modernism. It can be said that modernism has paved the way...

Human nature continues to evolve and change over time. But how do we define human nature? Human nature is how we define ourselves, such as how we feel and what we think about certain things. Kafka and Borges focus on human nature of the character....

Near the end of Thomas Pynchon’s 1965 novel The Crying of Lot 49, the protagonist Oedipa finds herself at a crossroads after trying to unravel the mystery of W.A.S.T.E., a conspiratorial underground postal system, without finding many tangible results. “It was now like walking among...

In The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon expresses a very interesting view of entropy through the actions of Oedipa Maas. In communication theory, entropy is a measure of the efficiency of a system, as a code or language, in transmitting information. Otherwise, the definition...

Author Philip K. Dick once said, “It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.” The theme of the source of madness is explored in all three stories that form Paul Auster’s novel The New York Trilogy. The three relatively short detective stories...

In his 1985 novel White Noise, Don DeLillo paints a modern society that is composed of systems too great to comprehend, putting control out of the hands of individuals. Don DeLillo crafts a postmodern society governed by cryptic systems, a world in which individuals are...

Don Dellilo’s protagonist in his novel “White Noise,” Jack Gladney, has a “nuclear family” that is, ostensibly, a prime example of the disjointed nature way of the “family” of the 80’s and 90’s — what with Jack’s multiple past marriages and the fact that his...

Walter Benjamin’s work as a philosopher and theorist speaks at length of mechanical reproduction and the impact it has on society. Benjamin’s work can therefore be applied to the society depicted in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, illuminating it as one of reproduction illustrated in...