Features of Post Modern Fictions

Some of the dominant features of postmodern fictions include temporal disorder, the erosion of the sense of time, a foregrounding of words as fragmenting material signs, a pervasive and pointless use of pastiche, loose association of ideas, paranoia and the creation of vicious circles or a loss of destination between separate levels of discourse, which are all symptoms of the language disorders of postmodernist fictions.

The postmodern novel may be summed up as:

• Late modernism.

• Anti-modernism.

• Not avant-garde tendency (may be avant-garde within a literary period).

• Emphasizes plot than character.

• Characters are fragmented/multiple.

• Experimental.

• Misogynist.

• Denigration of female writers.

• Matter of packaging.

• Multinational.

• Narcissistic project.

• Disrupt of modernist convention.

• Structural features.

• Use of authorial persona.

• Introducing one ontological level into another ontological level.

• Self-referential/Self-conscious.

• No real story.

• Postmodern metafictional situation which is different from modernist metafictional situation (emphasizing reading rather than the writing).

Practice of postmodernism in novels and other literary fields has almost become an international phenomenon. As A.S.D. Pillai argues:

Post-modernism is the term used in literary parlance to refer to a corpus of literature that has been written in the mid-fifties, sixties and after, largely in America, and to a lesser extent in Latin America, Europe and Britain. Postmodernism is thus an international literary phenomenon, in the first place, that is including as it does in its canon the pioneers: the Argentanian Jorge Luis Borges and the Russian expatriate, Vladimir Nabokov; the chief French practitioner, Alain Robbe-Grillet; su...

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... authorial intrusion in order to comment on his own others’ writings, the involvement of the author as part of fictional character addressing the reader directly from the position of the author, a frank discussion or interrogation of how narrative assumptions and conventions transform and filter reality trying ultimately to prove that no singular truths or meanings exist and deviations and digressions from the accepted unity of the main plot. Thirdly, the use of unconventional and experimental techniques, such as rejection of conventional plot, is refusing to become ‘real life’ or ‘life-like’ in its narrative (rejection of realism), subversion of conventions (fictional/critical). Thus, transforming ‘reality’ into a highly suspect concept is a kind of literary skepticism, flaunting and exaggerating foundations of their instability and displaying reflexivity (18-19).