Movements
Postmodernism
Postmodernism is the leading movement and worldview-stylistic situation in the culture and literature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, which succeeded Modernism and is characterized by skepticism toward 'grand narratives', pluralism, irony, play, the mixing of the 'high' and the 'popular', intertextuality, pastiche, and de-canonization. Postmodern literature quotes, parodies, and rewrites the preceding tradition and destroys the boundary between author and reader. World models are the prose of Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose), Milan Kundera, and John Barth. In Ukrainian literature Postmodernism announced itself vividly at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s: the work of the poetic group Bu-Ba-Bu (Yurii Andrukhovych, Viktor Neborak, Oleksandr Irvanets), the novels of Yurii Andrukhovych (Recreations, The Moscoviad, Perverzion), and the prose of Oksana Zabuzhko and Yurko Izdryk, who combined irony, carnival, intellectualism, and national problems.
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Compare “Postmodernism” with another term
Meaning, origins and distinction — side by side.
Distinction
Two epochs of modern art, separated by their attitude to meaning and wholeness. Modernism, disillusioned with realism, still BELIEVES in the possibility of a new, deeper meaning, seeking it in myth, symbol, stream of consciousness and elite form, tragically experiencing the world's disintegration. Postmodernism rejects the very belief in a single truth: irony, play, quotation, pastiche, the mixing of high and mass culture, the erasure of the line between original and copy. Modernism mourns the loss of wholeness; postmodernism plays with its fragments.
