Where to Start With Postmodern Literature 

+Fleur Bandito I sometimes think about it and realize that possibly no one else in, like, human history combined enjoyability and irony and emotion and wits so brilliantly as Vonnegut. Except for fucking Shakespeare, always spoiling my exaggerations

+Fleur Bandito Perfect way of describing my feelings towards people who've read and enjoyed Vonnegut

You're on the correct track Boyo

Never understood someone who dislikes Vonnegut.

I love Paul Thomas Anderson, but I think Charlie Kaufman's films are my favorite in the genre ("Synecdoche, New York" being the most deeply postmodern example). He also recently wrote a postmodern novel (Antkind) which may very well be my favorite book of all time. It was without a doubt the funniest book I've ever read.

When I think of the most postmodern movies made in America, Pulp Fiction, Taxi Driver, Punch-Drunk Love, and Alien all come to mind. If you like foreign films I’d recommend checking out the movies of Jean-Luc Godard like Breathless, A Woman is a Woman, Pierrot Le Fou, and Weekend or the movie of Wong-Kar Wai like Chungking Express and Fallen Angels (though his films arguably fit as well or better into post-postmodernism). It’s tricky because film as a medium’s origin is modernist, and much of common film criticism and theory is neomodernist, so postmodernism in film (if that’s even a thing) looks/feels very different than in other mediums

Just to add to the list of great post-modernist films, id say works that fit the bill perfectly are like Persona, Satantango, Post tenebras lux, Sleep has her house, Norte the end of history, Uncle Boonmee/ Cemetary of splendor (i highly recommend to anyone interested in magical realism in film), Costa (horse money, vitalina varela), Ruiz (city of pirates, mysteries of Lisbon) as well as mentioned above the french new wave, but also the czech new wave and japanese new wave, bonus for the french new extremity.

My situation exactly! I started reading in November 2020 at the ripe old age of 29, and now I can't stop reading these postmodern books! I remember watching my mother reading thillers and I would tell her "I'd love to start reading, but not thrillers" and she would reply "what else is there to read then, fantasy books?". I've always been into niche music and movie genres, I should have suspected that books worked the same way.

Don't foget Cortázar and also Jorge Luis Borges.

a lot of lterary latinamerican trends (mainly in the literar boom of the sixties and seventies) could very well be considered proto-postmodernism and I think the reason it gets over looked it's cause latinamerican politics aren't as well documented as American or European politics , this trend has kinda faded away, with all literary trends over here sadly, but you're goddamn right there are a lot of latinamerican classics and a lot of them are post-modern too

same

+sixtofive That's the best way to go about some of Pynchon's novels ;) and yeah that was pretty hardcore for a first postmodern novel :)!

+A Hermit's Progress Thanks a lot, and good luck with Calvino! I am a huge fan of his, and I'm especially fond of his Ancestors' trilogy (The Cloven Viscount, the Baron in the Trees and the Nonexisting Knight). The Baron in particular is an incredibly fascinating book.

I love valis

Good luck, sounds like you've jumped with both feet into a swamp! You probably couldn't have made it more difficult for yourself lol, but I think that is the general experience people have when reading it though!

+Damhán McLaughlin Thanks for the suggestion, I didn't know him! And I'll consider filming that video on po-pomo :)

+Asher Deep Well of course the easy recommendations are all other DeLillo and Pynchon novels :) if you like Libra's brand of thrilling postmodernism Jonathan Franzen's debut novel The 27th City is also a must. Dope novels, the best he's written!

Thanks! I love your profile picture :)

+Lauracio I recently read Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar and I found it awesome too, very imaginative and fascinating, though weird as fuck!

+BooksandQuestions I do, though not extremely much - I'm not a huge theater buff, though I do enjoy watching a play every once in a while. I do like Pirandello's Six Characters a lot (to me that's a play that's good straight from the page, even if you don't get the chance of seeing it on stage). As for Camus, I wouldn't know - I still have to read his fiction! Thanks for the feedback :)

There is a brilliant filmed performance of Godot (by the Abbey in Dublin as far as I know) available on youtube somewhere. Something about the actors' Irish accents really brings the humour to life. It's flippin hilarious!

Spot on! :-D

+Sookie Skipper I don't think Gravity's Rainbow is a good "introduction" to the genre, I think it's pretty much just for hardcore readers or scholars; I have friends who study postmodernism or American literature for a living and who really can't stand that book! I'd say Crying is less controversial :)

+Sookie Skipper I don't think Gravity's Rainbow is a good "introduction" to the genre, I think it's pretty much just for hardcore readers or scholars; I have friends who study postmodernism or American literature for a living and who really can't stand that book! I'd say Crying is less controversial :)

+ExLionTamer13 Oh yeah you're totally right, the New York Trilogy works brilliantly as gateway drug too - especially for fans of detective fiction :)

+The_Bookchemist Auster has said in a few interviews that he's bigger in Europe than the U.S., and he has attributed it to his simpler prose being easier to translate into other languages. I imagine you read Auster in Italian, so you're the perfect person for me to ask, do you find this to be true? Also how much affect do translations have in the success of books in Italy? Do some books die there due to bad translations?

+ExLionTamer13 It IS true that Auster is rather popular here in Italy, and widely studied too. I did read him in Italian (I read his works a few years ago, and back then I still did not read all of my English books in the original) but I can't tell you much about it, mostly because I'd need to read them in English too to give you an idea about that. As for translations, that's a tricky topic: if you ask people in the academia, they'll tell you all translations suck massively, each and every one. Seriously - I still have to find a Foreign Languages student or professor who says something like "yeah, the translator did a good job here." I work as a freelance translator myself and I can understand why a job so precarious as translation and a means so sacred as literature always result in shitstorms when they collide. ... So yeah, if you ask people they'll tell you that literary translations all suck, but again, I believe they are mostly exaggerating. As for the books themselves, they don't die at all because of that - most people knew too little English to understand while they're reading whether something's off with the translation or not. Which troubles me a bit, but what can you do? It is true that some American authors are way more famous than others here in Italy for whatever reason (like, Philip Roth is super-famous, Mordecai Richler is too, but I don't think anybody knew who Foster Wallace was until his death). I don't know why that's so; it must also be said that here in Italy American literature is largely unknown and goes largely un-studied, even in universities. Really, I have heard more than once people (stupid people of course, but still) ask me "why, do Americans have a literature too?"

+The_Bookchemist That is all is very interesting. Language itself is a difficult enough obstacle to translate, so getting point-of-view across too, must be close to impossible. I can see Foster Wallace's voice coming across as almost aggressively American. So embedded in American pop culture, and American academia, fucking Tennis, I could see many Italians having little interest in any of it. Whereas Roth and Richler, so driven by Jewish suffering, might seem more universal a point of view, as we all suffer, and then you throw in Jewish guilt too -- Having seen a few Fellini films -- The religious guilt runs strong in Italy too. That would be my completely uninformed speculation of their respective success in a country I've never been to (although my grandparents came from Napoli!). You re-reading City of Glass in English, might be an interesting experiment.

+Keith Witty I agree with the "don't stop just carry on" ethic, with some books it's the only sensible solution. I would perhaps not suggest The Broom of the System in a video like this one, mostly because to me that's already a work of late (post-?) postmodernism, one that engages with the authors coming before it... I wouldn't call it high postmodernis. (Moreover, being a hardcore Pynchonian, to me it's heresy to read Broom without having read Crying... which is the book Broom kinda rips off. I liked Broom, really, but I'd say that to me that's more or less a book just for Wallace completionists.) As for the New Sincerity business, I have studied it extensively in the last few years and the more I study the more I realize how much of a mess it is. I mean postmodernism already is slippery as fuck, let alone the people who react agianst it. You can draw connections here and there (the obvious ones, Wallace-Franzen-Eggers) but not many that make much sense or have any cultural value outside academic taxonomy. I'll hopefully try and offer some ideas about it all (or at least about a slice of the whole movement) if any college feels like funding my PhD research proposal. Thanks for the feedback as always, the top ten's coming in a few days - I already filmed it :)!

DFW claimed he hadn't read Crying of Lot 49 at the time he had written Broom. Always found that interesting. I think it is during an interview with Bookworm that he says it, he sounds defensive when he says it. Not sure what to think there. Good luck with your proposal, academia is hell, I got out of it while I felt I still had a chance to.

+Keith Witty I didn't know about that interview but I am 95% sure he was lying. I checked briefly and his biography denies the claim (you know, Every Ghost Story, p. 30); I also knew (the biography itself is pretty clear about it) that after Broom came out he had a small breakdown because not a single reviewer out there failed to see the debt he owed to Pynchon. But well, with these things you're never entiely sure, it's always such a mess. You probably did well with your choice, we'll see how it goes for me - the next couple of years should be quite interesting indeed.

Never read it - I know very little about contemporary British fiction! I've added it to my list though, thanks ;)

+Rishabh Chaudhary Nope, I didn't know it actually, will have to check it out! I am not excessively fond of Breakfast of Champions neither, but I put it here because with all the drawings and narrative gimmicks I think it gives reader quite a good idea of what postmodernism is about. Thanks for the feedback :)!

Thanks for the suggestion man, I confess his name doesn't ring a bell! I'll keep him in mind though!

Nope I haven't! I know it's some kind of classic but I know absolutely nothing about Lowry - I actually believed it was closer to Modernism than pomo! You made me curious :)

+Viktor Skog Totally agree, City of Glass would work brilliantly as an introduction to postmodernist fiction ;)

It's high time I read that, I know :S

That sounds awesome, I've added it to my list :)

@@TheBookchemist God damn it man I'm WAITING ON MY REVIEW! (please)

Calvino's Cosmicomics and Blow-Up by Julio Cortazar (if you want something a little "warmer") or any collection by Donald Barthelme, or John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, if you want something more cerebral!

+Oscar Lopera I love Borges :) and I should definitely re-read Fictions, it's been ages! I should have put it in this video, in fact :P! Cheers and thanks for the feedback :)

To be completely honest, my first reading of White Noise didn't leave me with much more than a general sense of strangeness for certain aspects of life I'd always taken for granted (first and foremost our reliance on technology/entertainment), and vast amusement for Jack Gladney's jealous scheming. More broadly speaking, I think reading postmodern fiction from a contemporary perspective is a difficult feat, and to fully appreciate what books like DeLillo's (or early Pynchon's, Barth's etc) are trying to do, you must read quite a lot of the stuff to tune yourself in to its atmosphere, humor, attitudes etc. It's obviously up to each reader to decide if this is something worth their time!

+Malibu Thompson White Teeth is on my bedside table and I'd like to read it sometime in 2016, but we'll see about that!

white teeth is great, you should read her review for social network, she destroys zuckerberg nicely

+Andy McKinney Metafiction is indeed a common (really, the most common) postmodernist device, used to remind the reader of the artificiality of what he's reading and, a layer beyond that, of the artificiality of modern reality itself. But there are plenty of metafictional passages in classic literature too (even in authors like Jane Austen and Walter Scott), so metafiction itself doesn't make a book PoMo (not to me at least!)

+The_Bookchemist Oh. There is a detective novel called Absolute Zero Cool by Declan Burke which I think is PoMo but I am not sure.

To be honest I'm not the biggest Jameson fan myself ;) Your take on the idea of postmodernism as a way of sneering on responsibilities and rejecting all solutions is legit, and widely shared too, but I must say that many postmodern authors (Pynchon paramount among all) overcome that type of impasse in the later phase of their career

I just got through reading Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Stranger, which is a Postmodern book. I loved it! Right off the bat, the thought of people scrambling about to find a completed copy of the book they were reading is funny. As the book continued, I began to see where, for me, it seemed Calvino was poking gentle fun at the various techniques found in the Postmodern literature. When I could grasp what he was talking about, I had a smile on my face all through the book. I studied Jameson's book with a friend a few years back, so I told him about If On A Winter's Night. He gave me a copy of Invisible Cities he found and is getting a copy of the the Winter book in order that we can read it together and discuss it. I really enjoyed the book but it is so layered I know I hardly got all of what is in it.

The must-read ones that immediately come to mind are Barth's Lost in the Funhouse and Cortazar's Blow Up! They're both unforgettable

I didn't find Vonnegut most captivating either. Try reading Erich Maria Remarque and maybe start with Arch Of Triumph or Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.And then there is always John Updike and he is everybody's friend author . You can start with Run Rabbit Run.

+br34 Oh I forgot about Guimaraes Rosa's Grande Sertão: Veredas! I don't think there's an English translation, but he's the greatest Brazilian writer of all times, along with Machado de Assis.

+br34 I have been studying different definitions of post-postmodernism lately and yeah, the whole genre is kind of a mess. I mean postmodernism itself still is largely a fuzzy concept, let alone what follows it. I would personally call IJ post-postmodern, but more out of its author's poetics (Wallace explicitly wanted to leave behind the deconstructive and caustic irony of postmodernism) than out of any specific literary feature of the book.

+The_Bookchemist That is really interesting and I understand what you mean; in some parts IJ combines this poetics with an abuse of detail where absurdity/humour/humanity are fuzzed

KANEDAAAAA I mean, I haven't read Valis yet! I'm going to lose all my literary cred right now, but I have to confess I'm not Philip Dick's biggest fan out there - I love some of his books (Ubik, Androids), but was kinda disappointed with others (Bloodmoney, High Castle). As a result I've developed a sort of block when it comes to reading more of his stuff. I'll go back to him one day soon though!

+Anand Venigalla I've never read it! Actually, although contemporary American literature is technically my area of expertise, I have read very few American classics from the 19th century, especially among the longest ones!

It's the kind of issue that keeps lit students up all night :) I tend to look at magical realism more as a genre, and at postmodernism as a movement, so that the two things aren't in contradiction (the way Gravity's Rainbow or some of Philip Dick's stuff can be sci-fi AND postmodern). BUT I have several friends who studied latin-American magical realism, and they would probably disagree, and so on and so forth ;)

Why not!

+quickthunder86 Funny you should mention!, I recently purchased a collection of his short stories because a professor of mine suggested it. So far I've only read his collection Untouched by Human Hands but it was ages ago!

ohh yes! I would love some recommendations on that!

They are both veeery blurry categories that mean different things according to whom you ask, but they don't exclude each other; if you ask me, Rushdie is definitely both things (as is, most notably, Garcia Marquez).

Ah fair enough, that makes sense. Are there any other examples, aside from Garcia Marquez, who fall into that category? And, somewhat realted and out of interest, are you familiar with Alisdair Gray?

Angela Carter certainly stands out (and I'm sure there are many other "big names" I should know!)

What did they do that the jude0 bolsheviks didnt do, heidegger and rosenberg were pretty good even if their ideology was crooked