By the end of 20th century Postmodernism is a term widely used in literature and arts by the writers / artists and critics. In fact the D term is rather vague. For John Barth "Postmodernism" is a literature of i<:plenishment. For Charles Newmen, it is a literature of an inflammatory economy, for Jean Francis Lyolard, it is general condition of knowledge in the contemporary information regime; for Ihab Hassan, it is a stage in the road of spiritual unification of human kind. Terry Eagleton; Douwe Fokkema.
And also, it makes the discipline of popular culture consist of a theory of criticism. It can be said that the field of popular culture abolishes the great gaps between the high and low culture. It started with the Bowling Green State University Department of Popular Culture and then the studies of the Frankfurt School on popular culture followed it. Besides them, many theories about popular culture have propounded until today and still new ideas appear. Because it is a very pivotal area to analyze the societies, studies on popular culture should be gone on especially to recognize the capitalist and patriarchal elements used in the products of popular culture.
This explains the turn towards “the mythicizing objectification of the world by the media through which we get much of our ‘news.’ The ‘reality’ the mass media cover —objects of their attention—has become indistinguishable from the way they cover it” (Frus 164). Phyllis Frus points out that mass media has utterly transformed the way that American society saw itself. The new paradigm threatens both traditional journalists and men of letters as it blurs the boundaries between what is factual and what is fictional. In this regard, Edward Epstein assumes that journalistic narrative can allure its audience only through adopting fictional imagery in which characters are cast “in the form of the fictive story, with narrative closure” (263). Therefore, visual media emerges as a “menace” to print journalism in such a context of shifting paradigms.
And, on the contrary, if some media focus on the popular culture trends, such media will be referred to as mainstream media. In other words, different case studies show that alternative media usually report on counterculture, and mainstream media center around popular culture (Bailey, Cammaerts and Carpentier; Kenix). Rolling Stone remained an alternative media outlet until it rejected to cover the countercultural trends in the early 1980s. Being alternative media, Rolling Stone shared most of the theoretical characteristics attributed to this media category. The magazine was a counter-hegemonic critique of the mainstream.
In the minds of artists, myths have known as multiple transformations their literary traditions were changing along with cultural, philosophical, political and social changes. But it was no other span than postmodernism that interchanged myth into a bunch of contradictory definitions. Thus in this regard, myth gained the degree of literal meaning of the fundamental concept of post-modern philosophy. Miserably, it is impossible to find the whole idea of myth related postmodern texts, let alone to show all the dimension of myth portray by postmodern writers in such a creative writing. As a result , it will be confined to defendable the most important of them, John Barth's fiction Chimera(1972) explained by other dignified postmodernists such as Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme or Kurt Vonnegut remarks to mythology can be beheld as a peripheral affection, restructure and revising of
The postmodernism approach analyzes both culture, and history, through critiques such as Marxism and psychoanalysis. The concept focuses on cultural representations exhibited through media, and the complications of our experiences of reality. Postmodernism also challenges traditional iterations of subjectivity as well as identity. It mainly functions to divide the bar between high art and popular culture. It may be drawn out and difficult to understand, but audiences accept the legitimacy of popular culture along with the pleasure it provides.
To fully grasp on the concept of “pop culture”, one must first understand the second half of this term, “culture”. Culture does not have an evident definition to it, for its meaning is rather subjective, though certain primary elements of this term are widely accepted. Raymond Williams has categorized this term into three main groups: “a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development”. The first section can be applied to the well-known development in Europe from 2000 year ago, in Rome, of poetry and philosophers and how their intellectual and aesthetic development managed to influence such a large group of people, which later had an enormous impact on western culture. This connects to the second section, of molding a way of living.
Globalization has led not only philosophers, geographers, and sociologists but also writers to problematize our understanding of places in order to understand modern society. Place and our relationship with it has been a recurring theme in literature. Over the XIX, the last and the current century literature has been dealing with detached characters, in the form of vagabonds, and auto-exile individuals who seem to have trouble to find their place in society. The changes did not limit to the content of the texts. In the arts, modernity brought as a consequence modernism; an artistic and philosophical movement that questioned the enlightenment thinking.
Formalism and formalist critics believe that all that is needed to interpret a piece of literature art is in the work itself, through literary forms and techniques. New criticism however, is the revision of these texts once more, but doing so in isolation, separate from political and social preconceptions but still observing the literary form. • New formalism was a movement throughout the 1980s and 1990s in America. It was the resurgence of metred and rhymed poetry, and was very popular amongst the young generation of the time. The literature was more direct in the depiction of emotion and colloquial in diction.
Globalization: Emerging Trends in English Language and Literature Sub Theme no: 4. Voices of the Marginalized Title : …..? Margins of post-Globalized India / Marginalization and post-millennium Indian novels A modern outlook on Globalization in India Globalization: A polarization of the rich and the poor Abstract The cultural diversity of India is because of the existence of many cultures and religions in the country. It is observed however that the voices of the marginalized are pushed to the edges due to certain political or social issues. The inclusion and mingling of the cultures of various parts of the world in recent times also has paved way to the exclusion