The 'post' in literary postmodernism: A history

Abstract

The ‘post’ in literary postmodernism is far from unequivocally clear. When the term came into circulation in the 1950s, it mostly referred to a new literary mode that came after modernism and was different enough to warrant a new label. Most, but not all, early commentators deplored literary postmodernism. However, in the 1960s and early 1970s, interpreters increasingly portrayed literary postmodernism as a continuation of the literary avant-gardes of the modernist period – especially Dada and Surrealism – and connected it to a radically anti-bourgeois mode that Ihab Hassan traces back to the Marquis de Sade. This postmodernism easily predates modernism, just as the postmodernism of the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard saw a postmodern moment that confronted radical contingency and was fundamentally rule-free before the rise of modernism. For Lyotard, postmodern moments have occurred before and will occur again. By contrast, for critics such as Brian McHale, postmodernism developed and radicalized formal elements already present in modernist texts. Their postmodernism was unthinkable without an earlier modernism, which it used as a stepping stone, and so was both ‘post’ and ‘modern’. Finally, for other critics, postmodern literature not only succeeded, but also superseded modernist literature. Here, ‘post’ not only signified ‘after’ but also implied superiority, not in a formal sense, but because of postmodern literature’s recognition of the limitations of modernism’s Weltanschauung.