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Stylistic Techniques That Are Often Used in Postmodern Literature

Postmodern literature is characterized by unconventional techniques such as unreliable narrators, fragmented plots, and mixing of genres. It often blurs distinctions between high and low art forms. Some common postmodern literary devices include pastiche, intertextuality, metafiction, nonlinear timelines, and magical realism. Umberto Eco was an influential Italian philosopher and novelist known for his postmodern works like The Name of the Rose and Travels in Hyperreality, which examined themes of semiotics, medieval studies, and fabricated realities in contemporary culture.

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64 views2 pages

Stylistic Techniques That Are Often Used in Postmodern Literature

Postmodern literature is characterized by unconventional techniques such as unreliable narrators, fragmented plots, and mixing of genres. It often blurs distinctions between high and low art forms. Some common postmodern literary devices include pastiche, intertextuality, metafiction, nonlinear timelines, and magical realism. Umberto Eco was an influential Italian philosopher and novelist known for his postmodern works like The Name of the Rose and Travels in Hyperreality, which examined themes of semiotics, medieval studies, and fabricated realities in contemporary culture.

Uploaded by

Necky Sairah
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Postmodern literature is a form of literature which is marked, both stylistically and ideologically, by a

reliance on such literary conventions.

as fragmentation, paradox, unreliable narrators, often unrealistic and downright impossible plots,
games, parody, paranoia, dark humor and authorial self-reference

Postmodern literature also often rejects the boundaries between 'high' and 'low' forms of art and
literature, as well as the distinctions between different genres and forms of writing and storytelling.

Stylistic techniques that are often used in postmodern literature:

o Pastiche: The taking of various ideas from previous writings and literary styles and pasting them
together to make new styles.
o Intertextuality: The acknowledgment of previous literary works within another literary work.
o Metafiction: The act of writing about writing or making readers aware of the fictional nature of
the very fiction they're reading.
o Temporal Distortion: The use of non-linear timelines and narrative techniques in a story.
o Minimalism: The use of characters and events which are decidedly common and non-
exceptional characters.
o Maximalism: Disorganized, lengthy, highly detailed writing.
o Magical Realism: The introduction of impossible or unrealistic events into a narrative that is
otherwise realistic.
o Faction: The mixing of actual historical events with fictional events without clearly defining what
is factual and what is fictional.
o Reader Involvement: Often through direct address to the reader and the open acknowledgment
of the fictional nature of the events being described.

Famous Post-Modernism Writers

Paul Auster, Italo Calvino , and John Hawkes

UMBERT ECO, TRAVELS IN HYPERREALITY

Who is Umbert Eco?

- an Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, cultural critic, political and social commentator,
and novelist. In English, he is best known for his popular 1980 novel The Name of the Rose, a
historical mystery combining semiotics in fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies, and
literary theory, and Foucault's Pendulum, his 1988 novel which touches on similar themes.

Travels in Hyperreality

An early description of the way contemporary culture is now full of re-creations and themed
environments was provided by Umberto Eco. In a brilliant essay, Eco saw that we create these realistic
fabrications in an effort to come up with something that is better than real -- a description that is true of
virtually all fiction and culture, which gives us things that are more exciting, more beautiful, more
inspiring, more terrifying, and generally more interesting than what we encounter in everyday life.
The title essay, “Travels in Hyper Reality,” is particularly enlightening. It delves into America’s small
places that are untouched by big-city sophistication and remote from the floods of information that
assail people in urban areas. Eco contends that Americans insist on creating icons that are perfect

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