Postmodernism

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Post-modernism noun a movement in the arts that takes many features of Modernism to new and more playful extremes, rejecting Modernism's tendency towards nihilistic pessimism and replacing it with a more comfortable acceptance of the solipsistic nature of life. There is also an inclination towards mishievous self-referentiality and witty intertextualizing. postmodernist noun, adj.

A worldview characterized by the belief that truth doesn’t exist in any objective sense but is created rather than discovered.”… Truth is “created by the specific culture and exists only in that culture. Therefore, any system or statement that tries to communicate truth is a power play, an effort to dominate other cultures.

Allusions to Shakespeare, in particular, are numerous in English literature, but also simply in

the press, who keep turning out titles with more or less oblique allusions to literary titles and catch-phrases. This

is called intertextuality. The intertext is that part or that region of texts that overlap, the border zone by which

texts are coterminous with one another.

intertextuality noun, literary criticism 1 the extent to which particular text, play, film, work of art, etc makes use of references or allusions to another work or works. 2 the use of this technique by an author, director, artist, text, etc.

ULIKS-The comparative ease of reading this novel in 1922 to a more current attempt is a result of the smaller size of the canon in 1922. To a late twentieth century reader the intertextuality of Ulysses seems impossibly immense, but a catalogue of these allusions will reveal that their sources are very specific. Ulysses primarily references Homer, Plato and Aristotle, the Bible, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. This is by no means a definitive list, but it contains all the most prominent works, and it is quite short. These were naturally the books which were well-known in detail to anyone well-educated in the English speaking world, and so to a reader educated in this period, the references would have been far more accessible. On the other hand, today education is no longer so standardized; these works remain, but interest in them has waned. New canons have arisen to accompany this more traditional one. Colonial and post-colonial writers, women writers, feminist writers, African-American writers, writers of queer theory, to name only a few, have all been recognized and added to various canons, until education in the English-speaking world no longer guarantees a detailed knowledge of the same very specific canon.

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