Featuers of post-modernist novel..any help? THANK YOU..?

The previous answer (which is copied from Wikipedia and derived from copyrighted material by Professor John Lye), certainly lists many features of post-modern literature. The problem with most definitions of the "post-modern" is that they attempt to define what is ultimately indefinable.

For the post-modern novel is really an "anti-novel," or perhaps "hyper-novel" would be a better term. You can describe it best by telling what it is not. Think of all the features of a good, old fashioned novel, like those of, say, Charles Dickens or George Eliot, or even Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald: plot, character, setting, theme, point of view. Though they may not always be told in chronological order, you can figure out the chronology of the story, what happens first and what happens next, and so forth (even with flashbacks, retellings, foreshadowing, and the like). Characters may be complex, even confusing, but you can use your reason and common sense to figure them out. There's one consistent point of view (omniscient, limited, first person), or maybe more than one, but with clear transitions from one to the other. The settings, even in fantasy and conventional science fiction, are places that can be mapped and charted, and understood like places we all know.

The post-modern or "anti" novel, challenges those assumptions. It will be unconventional in one way or another. The Wikipedia article, quoted above, has a long list of post-modern novelists, including Lemony Snicket!

One of the ones listed is the science-fiction award winner, Philip K. Dick. Here's what one critic, Charles Platt, says about his work: "All of his work starts with the basic assumption that there cannot be one, single, objective reality. Everything is a matter of perception. The ground is liable to shift under your feet. A protagonist may find himself living out another person's dream, or he may enter a drug-induced state that actually makes better sense than the real world, or he may cross into a different universe completely."

Now that's a good description of many a post-modern novel. It may start out like a conventional novel or end up like one, but somewhere, somehow there will be major departures.

So if I were to choose the most prominent characteristics of post-modern fiction, here are the ones I probably would focus on:

1. Discontinuity/fragmentation in events, characters, point of view.

2. Rejection or questioning of the "real" world, of a rational, comprehensible world order; and of the reliability of perceptions

3. Language creative, self-conscious, playful, ambiguous, even "made-up" or invented

4. Novel imitates not a "real world," but real thinking, for the mind deals with "hyper-reality," jumping inexplicably from one thing to another, like surfing the net or channel surfing tv

Most post-modern fiction will have an element of "magical realism," that is fantastical, imaginative, "unrealistic" elements are accepted as real or logical. One doesn't question the questionable.

For a prime example, read the first few chapters of My Name Is Red, perhaps the best-known novel of the recent Nobel Prize winner, Orham Pamuk.

Chapter 1, "I Am a Corpse," is spoken by the victim of a murder. "My present complaint," he says, "isn't that my teeth have fallen like nuts into my bloody mouth . . . it's that everyone assumes I'm still alive."

Chapter 2, "I Am Called Black," is the account of someone who, after a twelve-year absence, has returned to Istanbul, seeking a childhood love. Is this the same person speaking, or someone else? In his fairly straight-forward narrative, a pickle seller tells him about a cleric, but then he is drawn away by the sounds of celebration to a coffee house. The storyteller there, as he talks, is pointing to a picture of a dog. "He was giving voice to the dog, and pointing from time to time, at the drawing."

Chapter 3, "I Am a Dog," is spoken by the dog. "I bit him so hard on the leg that my canines sank right through his fatty flesh to the hardness of his thigh bone." He speaks of a cleric whom he calls Husret Hoja, but the dog then explicates a chapter from the Koran.

Now do you see what I mean? So far, the narrative is discontinuous and fragmented. The "real" world has corpses and dogs that talk. Each speaker uses language curiously and self consciously and lets his thoughts wander in a natural way from one thought to another, never exactly explaining who he is or what he means--except the dog.

"I'm a dog, and beause you humans are less rational beasts than I, you're telling yourselves, 'Dogs don't talk.' Nevertheless, you seem to believe a story in which corpses speak and characters use words they couldn't possible know. Dogs do speak, but only to those who know how to listen."

So that's post-modern fiction. It speaks "only to those who know how to listen." The readers' pleasure or satisfaction comes not so much from a story, but from the telling of the story, not from what happens but from how the tellers talk about what happens.

I hope this makes sense--except that post-modern fiction doesn't really make sense, it "makes up" sense. As Charles Platt said, “. . . there cannot be one, single, objective reality. Everything is a matter of perception.”

Go Orwellian. The book describes a Huxlian world of media-mediated apathy, but Snow is the quintessential Orwellian character. Play with that dichotomy.

Post modernism is characterized by a reaction to, refusal and diffusion of, the elements of modernist thought which are totalizing: which suggest a master narrative or master code, i.e. an explanatory cohesion of experience; the result may be

1. a sense of discontinuity, of the world as a field of contesting explanations none of which can claim any authority,

2. parodies of all sorts of meta-narrative and master-code elements, including genre and literary form,

3. the challenging of borders and limits, including those of decency,

4. the exploration of the marginalized aspects of life and marginalized elements of society.

(The 'problem' with grand narratives is that they bring all of experience under one explanatory and one implicitly or explicitly regulative order, and hence are potentially (some would say, inevitably) totalitarian and repressive; the problem of trying to live without them is that without their explanatory frame there is no way in which acts can be validated (once one tries, one uncovers a hidden grand narrative) other than through the validation of pleasure or pain, some would say beauty or ugliness. It comes down to what one believes: is living without grand narratives an act of courage and freedom in the face of inevitable doubt and instability, or merely an opening of oneself to the worst forces of the libido and an abandonment of necessary principles?)

Another features:

- the writing of reflexive or meta-fiction: fiction which is in the first instance aware of itself as fiction and which may dramatize the false or constructed nature of fiction, on the one hand, or the inevitable fictionality of all experience, on the other.

- a reaction to, refusal of, the totalizing of modernist form -- of the dominance in modernism of form and of the idea of the aesthetic, which concept created a 'special world' for art, cut off from the variety and everydayness of life (a negative judgment on this 'refusal' is that postmodernism simply aestheticizes everything, see the next point)

- an attempt to integrate art and life -- the inclusion of popular forms, popular culture, everyday reality; Bakhtin's notion of 'carnival', of joyous, anti-authoritarian, riotous, carnal and liberatory celebration, makes sense in this context and adds a sense of energy and freedom to some post modern work

- the notion of carnival, above, is taken to the limit in the idea of transgression, the idea that to live and think beyond the structures of capitalist ideology and of totalizing concepts one must deliberately violate what appear to be standards of sense and decency but are (if the truth were known) methods of social and imaginative control. A more benign conception than transgression is the concept of the paralogical: a revelation of the non-rational immediacy of life (considered thus to be implicitly revolutionary, liberating); as with ideas such as carnival and transgression, the paralogical gives access to the energy of the world, and allows us to experience outside of the strictures of the grand narratives which form our usual sense of our reality.

- the use of paradox, of undercutting, of radical shifts, in order to undercut any legitimization of reality, subject, ontological ground

- a refusal of seriousness or an undercutting of or problematizing of seriousness -- achieved through such things as the above-mentioned notion of carnival, of the turning upside-down of everything, and through the use of parody, play, black humour and wit; this refusal and these methods of undercutting seriousness are associated as well with fragmentation, as traditional notions of narrative coherence are challenged, undone. The 'problem' with seriousness is that is has no room for the disruptions necessary to expose the oppressions and repressions of master narratives, in fact seriousness tends almost inevitably to reinforce them and hence the ideologies they support; to attack seriousness does not mean, in this context, to abandon conviction or good intentions.

- a crossing or dissolving of borders -- between fiction and non-fiction, between literary genres, between high and low culture

- a sense that the world is a world made up of rhetoric -- of language and cultural constructs and images and symbols, none of which have any necessary validity

- a move away from perspectivism, from the located, unified 'subject' and the associated grounding of the authority of experience in the sovereign subject and its processes of perception and reflection (see next point)

- a fragmentation of the self (the unified, located subject), or a disappearance or flatness -- the self, or subject, is no longer a 'psychological' reality but henceforth a cultural construction, located rhetorically (in terms of the kinds of language used, the subject matter, the situation), differently configured in different situations

- the dramatization to a world in which there are no depths, in which there is nothing 'under' appearances