Nghe hiểu

Professor

Today we turn our attention to postmodern fiction, a literary movement that emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century and fundamentally challenged the assumptions underpinning both realist and modernist traditions.

Professor

If modernism was preoccupied with the search for meaning in a fragmented world, postmodernism questions whether such meaning exists at all — or whether the very act of searching is itself a narrative construction.

Let's begin with the concept of metafiction, which is perhaps the most distinguishing feature of postmodern literature.

Metafiction is fiction that self-consciously draws attention to its own status as an artifice.

Consider Italo Calvino's "If on a winter's night a traveler," which opens by addressing you, the reader, directly, describing the act of beginning to read the novel you are already reading.

The text continuously frustrates narrative expectations, offering multiple beginnings that never resolve into a single coherent story.

Calvino compels the reader to confront the conventions of storytelling that we typically take for granted.

Another defining characteristic is the rejection of grand narratives — what Jean-François Lyotard termed "metanarratives.