Individual Voice in the Collective Discourse

Since World War II, a new aesthetic and social configuration-the postmodern-has appeared in Europe and the Americas. Studied, but only imprecisely defined, by scholars, artists and writers alike, the postmodern signals a significant change in the nature of the individual's relationship to society. Like the dominant aesthetic traditions of the past 150 years, modernism and the avant-garde, postmodernism displays an alienated, if not antagonistic, response to the aesthetic, ethical and spiritual concerns of bourgeois culture. But with few exceptions, contemporary writing is much less anguished and is narrower in scope than its predecessors. Rare are the heroic modernist efforts to conceive metaphoric or mythic systems to both encompass and transcend the social referent. At the same time, the bravado of the avant-garde assault on culture is curiously lacking. At the heart of recent innovative writing is a troubled and problematic creative sensibility. The writer's analytic stance still fosters a critical response to culture, but there is clearly less faith in one's assumptions of self-knowledge and mastery, in one's perception and knowledge of the external world, and even more importantly, in the writer's very means of expression. Gone are the modernist and avant-garde premises of the privileged nature of the writer's perspective and language. No longer does the feeling of alienation suggest a compensating critical and totalizing vantage point from which the writer can declare his independence from his culture. Instead, the essential dynamics of postmodernism indicate a major re-evaluation of the individual's response to his society, and in particular to society's semiotic codes of behavior, value and discourse. The postmodern individual, the writer, and the text now experience and articulate themselves self-consciously from within the social context-from which, nevertheless, they may still feel alienated and of which they may still be critical. Postmodern literature recognizes that all perception, cognition, action and articulation are shaped, if not determined, by the social domain. There can be no simple opposition to culture, no privileged perspective or language, no secure singular selfdefinition, for all find their meaning only within the social context

Aesthetics · Art · Literature · Postmodern theatre · Postmodernism · Sociology · Contemporary Literature and Criticism

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