After more than four decades of the rise of postmodernity and postmodernism, we are essentially concerned with the issue of signification from historical and textual perspectives. What makes the situation of a preface writer more and more paradoxical is that “writing about” postmodernity and postmodernism is a two-fold activity. On the one hand, we are entrapped within the historical boundaries, but on the other hand, we produce a text through which we decipher the mere allegory of reading, in de Man’s terms, and come to realise the fact that how we have constructed the signified as such to refer to as “history.” Postmodernity is vain in the face of postmodernism, and postmodernism drops dead concerning postmodernity. The new yet effective epistemological and critical notion of performativity and experientiality arises at this point. The problem, however, is that once we attempt to verbalise the solid or concrete experience and performance, it falls ill against our deeply rooted convictions as to what we call truth and reality. As Steven Connor suggested, there is no end, a somewhat weird “nothing-arrives-nowhere” state. If we remember Beckett, a literary figure standing at the threshold of modernism and postmodernism, the characters are depicted as struggling to “begin.” Whenever I am asked about the gist discrepancy between modernism and postmodernism, I give a straightforward answer. In the case of modernism, as T.S. Eliot alluded keenly, we say “there is no way out,” borrowed from Dante’s Divine Comedia. In the case of postmodernism, it seems we say that “there is no way IN.” Hence, the modernist zeitgeist imprisons us within our very subjectivity.
In contrast, the postmodernist zeitgeist is infected with the melancholy that we will never be able to grasp reality nor our subjectivity, as we have no entrance into what we conceive as reality. Truth, therefore, is ultimately gone and lost, and the only thing we have is the mere textuality and narratives, which cover -and make- reality within and without in a world where there is no hope for the truth. Truth, then, appears to be a strict ‘idea’ in Plato’s sense, and it sounds like one of the most resonating and prevailing utopic and platonic -and non-natural- concepts. There is no truth in the world of phenomena, and literature launches from this subversive point of the impossibility of mimesis. That gives a clue to understanding the outgoing idea of defamiliarisation; most readers think it is a modern product. However, the very concept of defamiliarisation started earlier since such discrepancy and discordance reside in the very nature of the arts. The arts produce an aesthetic effect (aesthetic pleasure) through the essential and spontaneous inconsistency between reality/experience and its verbal or nonverbal representation. Unmimetic mimesis, defamiliarising mimesis, and mimetic defamiliarisation are the main features of the arts; in the phase of modernism. Defamiliarisation overcomes mimesis, for subjectivities and fragments disappoint the expectations of the addressee; in this critical ‘phase’ of postmodernism. However, neither mimesis nor defamiliarisation is foregrounded. The addressee increasingly becomes aware that s/he is on the fringes of an ongoing ‘play.’The play of postmodernist representation erases the hierarchies and rules in the game, and the ‘decentredness’ lies at the centre of postmodernist aesthetics.
Arpa’s “Postmodernism or Postmodernity” reveals and elaborates the complexity between postmodernism and postmodernism by referring to not only language also to literary texts. His chapter highlights pioneering critics and their precious and distinctive terms related to postmodern literary text.
Yazıcı and Güven’s “Reconsideration of Historiography in Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion” reveals how Winterson removes the hierarchy between fact and fiction, reality and fiction, scientific strategies of history, and narrative technique in fiction. The chapter provides the readers with a kinda historical book that represents a historical context significantly manipulated. The work is remarkable in that it employs various methods for understanding the past and history.
Ağır’s “Garbage in E. L. Doctorow’s Postmodern Fiction” the hierarchy is carefully erased between fiction and nonfiction. In his influential article “False Documents,” Doctorow outlines the logical outcomes of this line of reasoning, concluding that “there is neither fiction nor nonfiction as we typically perceive the distinction: there is just story.” We remember at this point Hayden White and his suggestions about the timelessness and synchronicity in the realm of texts and narratives.
Canlı’s “Postmodern Dystopias: Salman Rushdie’s Fury and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go” as Critical Dystopias refer to the dystopic worlds with catastrophe, destruction, despair, and what is more, a world of no hope. However, these works never give up their grip over the author’s experience while persistently incorporating a series of postmodernist techniques. Rushdie and Ishiguro are the authors who still have concerns about the human condition, so they do not seek reality or realism in the so-called realistic representation. They always take the human condition very seriously, but at the end of their narratives, the audience acknowledges that “there is no entrance.”
Karabulut’s “An Intertextual Analysis of the Proto-Feminist Narrator’s Gaze in Aphra Behn’s: Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave” not only employs postmodernist techniques, but also explores how “gaze” is constructed in a narrative discourse. Thus, using a deconstructionist attitude, the article presents how the gaze is a construct in a truly postmodernist premise along with varied postmodern techniques.
Yıldız’s “The Patriarchal Reality/Discourse Drowned in Postmodern Flood: Jeanette Winterson’s Boating for Beginners”, as the title suggests, represents how the so-called “Postmodern flood” eradicates the accordance between reality and discourse. The truth is an evasive category as we cannot have a genuine touch with it, and it simply resides in a far-fetched and unachievable realm.
Yıldız and Kırmızı’s “The Representation Of Traumatic Experiences Through Postmodern Narrative Techniques In Slaughterhouse-Five By Kurt Vonnegut” represents and presents postmodern narrative techniques through a psychological perspective. As one of the prominent author in postmodern fashion, Kurt’s usage of parody, pastiche, intertextuality and metafiction is highly impressive all throughout the novel.
Aldemir and Çıraklı’s “Undermining Hierarchies in J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year” reveals how the hierarchies between author and narrator, author and character, narrative levels and narrative layers, author, and intellectual, idealised reality and reality as performance, human ideal and degenerating bodily existence. More importantly, explored -and deconstructed- in the narrative is the hierarchy between “strong opinions and weak action, frail intentions infected subconsciousness. Like the academic novelist Elizabeth Costello and her too strong and confident “Eight Lessons,” these characters’ moral, political and philosophical rhetoric fades away as the narrative progresses. Not surprisingly, these narrative accounts and the way they are presented point to a humorous and witty drama of intellectual and parody of the intellectual speech.
As regards the distinctive features or figures of postmodernity and postmodernism, I have to spend a few words. Steven Connor was not wrong to have referred to Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and many other critics regarding the issue. Highlighting these names, he provides precious hints as to what aspects of postmodernism we should stress. To my understanding and experience, the most crucial element of postmodernism is the lost representation and the fact that textuality overwhelms historicity, language/discourse overcomes [what we call] reality, and the idea of ‘game’ prevails over ‘representation.’ To me, this new phase of the impossibility of representation marks the distinctive feature of postmodernism and postmodernity. Secondly, I humbly argue that many readers and critics are confused, baffled, and puzzled by the differentiation between postmodernity and postmodernism, which paves the way for further complications. I suggest that Baudrillard and Lyotard should be taken as the pioneers of the ‘postmodern historical condition,’ rendering the social, economic, political, and cultural issues central to postmodernity.
In contrast, Derrida, De Man, Barthes, and Culler are the key figures to have emphasised the essential loss of representation. I furthermore think that the latter is more important than the former, for if there is no representation, then there is no reality as such in the Kantian sense. So, what postmodernism has done to us is primarily to rob our humanist ideal and human who has lost their ‘integrity’ after modernism and then ‘reference’ and ‘signification’ after postmodernism. What we should consider now is that we should get ready for the ‘fascisms of post-truth garbage.’
The authors, narrators, characters, and opinion-makers in these fictional worlds or textual realms act as if so serious but they do not look ‘serious’ as they frequently prove ludicrous. Their over-confident discourse does not indicate an ‘epic quest of a heroic persona’ --God save dear Don Quixote! Like a mobius strip, these narratives are caught up in an eternal state of deferral. Hence, lacking a ‘genuine touch upon what we call reality’, these narratives are doomed to refer back to themselves in the fashion of self-referentiality, which brings about another critical issue regarding postmodernity and postmodernism. Then arises the significance of metanarratives, that is, narratives about narratives rather than narratives that represent reality. Thus, the eventual, yet most acute undermining in these novels has to do with ‘referentiality’ and ‘signification;’ and the very idea of binaries or hierarchies gradually dissolve the discourses into “decentredneess,” nurtured by an ongoing manipulation of the readers with overt and covert self-references to history, reality, biography, and politics.
All in all, I should like to congratulate the editor of the book, Dr. Ayar, who called critical papers and colleagues in the field and achieved to bring together insightful and fabulous pieces under the title “Postmodern Trends in Literature and Arts”. Upon witnessing the waning pillars and properties of postmodernism, like the “fading coal of inspiration,” in Shelley’s terms, the present volume is so precious to contribute to the field with fresh ideas and discussions.