Postmodern Literature Analysis

The Use of Popular Culture in Postmodern Literature: The Dismantling Of Identity in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Tom Cho’s Look Who’s Morphing
Popular culture plays a significant role in postmodern fiction; starting with earlier postmodern works of the 1960’s and persisting until the present day, extending into, or at least bordering, the literature of post-postmodernism. Today, popular culture is a big part of everyday life; therefore, the presence of multiple pop culture references in late postmodern literature is not surprising. However, literary writers of early postmodern works were just as concerned with popular culture, seeing as the emergence of postmodernism caused the eradication of a former difference between the so-called

These new technologies, as well as the democratization and expansion of capitalism has contributed to globalization and consumerism, which has effectively helped spreading and promoting popular culture, such as TV shows, commercials, sports broadcasting and popular music. Cultural and media services have also started to become a main sector of economy in a lot of advanced societies, due to their decline of engineering and manufacturing. Instead of manufactured products, cultural artefacts such as images and signs have become the more significant commodities in the market. The world has slowly become highly saturated by media, and people were increasingly overwhelmed by media and advertising reports through television networks, radio stations, newspapers and billboards. These changes have contributed to the change of people’s view of the world and the way literature is written, marking the start of postmodern literature. In culture, the spread and commercialization of popular culture has lead to the aesthetic and artistic norms for interpreting art and literature, as well as their value, being reduced, causing the eradication of a former distinction between the “high” and “low” forms of art. In his article “Mapping the Postmodern” (1984), Andreas Huyssen argues that the relation between modernism and postmodernism is a shift of the way of thinking, which challenges “modernism's relentless hostility to mass culture” by postmodernism's integrations of pop and high art (16). He completes this thought by stating that this “new creative relationship between high art and certain forms of mass culture” is what marked the shift from “high modernism and the art and literature which followed it in the 1970s and 1980s both in Europe and the United States” (Huyssen 23). Similarly, in her A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988), Linda Hutcheon