What does 'postmodern' mean?

[KEV67]

I must have heard the term first about forty years ago. Tom Paulin was always using the term on Late Review on BBC2 in the 90s. I even looked the term up on Wikipedia and I was none the wiser.

[Hux]

It means capitalism won and we all got fat and bored.

[KEV67]

In The Critic magazine I have just been reading an article about the Modernists: James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, a few others, perhaps Proust. It is 100 years since Ulysses was published. I have read two Woolf novels, which bored and underwhelmed me. I read Ulysses, some bits of which I did enjoy, but most of which I either did not understand or which bored or irritated me. I have not read the other two. I suspect the Modernists are mostly read by students, and that the movement failed. In literature, the Modernists were succeeded by the Postmodernists. I think the term is too wide, so it is easier to understand what it means in individual fields, and by example. If I understand rightly, Slaughter House Five is postmodern, and so are some of Umberto Eco's novels, such as The Island of the Day Before. Both those books dick around with the expected narrative structure. In Slaughter House Five, the protagonist time travels from present to past, and is held captive by extra-terrestrials, so parts are realistic and other bits are totally impossible. He might be mad, but it doesn't say. In The Island of The Day Before, the protagonist in the story is writing a story himself. Quite a lot of the book is about the story, but at least as much is about the story the protagonist is writing. I found the book infuriating because it left the stories unresolved. This makes me wonder if Quentin Tarantino is a Postmodern film maker. He likes to do stories within stories, unexplained timeshifts,  change historical realities. He breaks rules in other ways, for example introducing bunches of new characters half way through the story. He can be annoying too, because he will not edit down.

[KEV67]

Looked postmodern up on the internet. One webpage said the difference was that in pre-modern times the source of truth was religion; in modern times, science, and in post-modern times there is no objective truth. I think this is the social science perspective. Postmodernists are sceptical of people claiming objective fact. They think fact and truth is what an individual perceives it to be.

 

There is also modernism and post-modernism in architecture. Modernist buildings are all form-follows-function with no fancy bits (so I understand). Post-modern architects might throw in a Doric Arch or two. So what does that make a building like The Gherkin, which was definitely designed to look good as well as being reasonably functional?

 

I read The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. It was about this architect who designed very well proportioned, but very functional buildings. He refused to draught columns or crenelations or any other decorative features on his buildings. So he would be a Modernist architect. So does that make Ayn Rand a Modernist author?