by Blake Tepour

Created on: March 14, 2007   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

I would first like to establish a basic understanding of Post-Modernism:

Defining Post-Modernism is a very difficult proposition, because Post-Modernism dictates that no definition is accurate or precise. Post-Modernism is generally synonymous to ideas of deconstruction amongst literature. Deconstruction in its truest essence is criticism, but a different kind of criticism. Throughout the Western Canon, criticisms have always been around. For instance, Aristophanes ridiculed Plato consistently throughout his works. He regarded Plato's questioning as repetitive senseless inquiry, and dismissed it as such. As Aristophanes criticizes the pillars of Western Philosophy, Post-Modernism criticizes the pillars of Western Literature. The difference is the method of attack. Aristophanes flat out attacked Plato's work, head first, but Post-Modernism attacks the frame of reference, the definitions, the language of a work, not always necessarily the work itself.

A famous Post-Modernist Jacques Derrida stated that as a result of deconstruction, no Western Philosopher has been able to escape the reach of deconstruction to achieve true literature, which relative to deconstruction lies just beyond the text in itself, but relative to Post-Modernism, doesn't exist at all. In all literary essence, Post-Modernism can be viewed as a style and as a challenge. As a style, Post-Modernism incorporates many characteristics of Modern Literature, but changes them in certain ways. Modernism relied heavily on organization and stability, but that organization and stability relied heavily on Francois Lyotard's theory of "grand narratives" or "master narratives." Lyotard defined these narratives as a blanket by all means. A blanket in the form of a story that is recycled in society to keep a society's understanding of practice and belief in a constant stream of conscience. It is a story to give purpose to a culture, to keep it thriving, hoping, and living. Lyotard uses Marxism as an example of a grand narrative. The grand narrative for Marxism is the idea that capitalism, being out of the nature of greed, will ultimately end itself and from the ashes of capitalism a utopian socialist society will emerge.

Post-Modernism attacks the idea of grand narratives as a mask for inaccuracies or contradiction within the idea that it shields. Post-Modernism in turn favors mini-narratives or small stories to explain localized and largely subjective events. These mini-narratives are always temporary, situational,

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