There are any number of lengthy books defining modernism including Frederick Jameson’s Postmodernism and Linda Hutchison’s A Poetics of Postmodernism. Having read those so long ago that reconstructing them is impossible, I went back online. An online academic study resource offered the following list:
- Intertextuality
- Metafiction
- Pastiche
- Maximalism
- Irony
- Hyperreality
- Paranoia
- Fragmentation
So what I see in these two definitions is a morphing from modernism to postmodernism that can be characterized by an increased self-consciousness of the writer, and a need to wrangle, or play with the reader’s thought. And that’s my perception, probably sourced in long-ago now-forgotten reading ….
J
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QS: Let’s return to poetics.
JR: When did we leave?
—From the conversation between Quinta Slef and Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager