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Abstract
Postmodern literature is a form of literature that is characterized by the use of metafiction, unreliable narration, self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and which often thematises both historical and political issues.Initially emerging from a mode of literary criticism, postmodernism developed in the mid-twentieth century as a rejection of modernism, and has been observed across many disciplines. Postmodernism is associated with the disciplines deconstruction and post-structuralism. Postmodernists are sceptical of explanations which aims to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person. It considers reality to be a mental construct. Postmodernism rejects the possibility of unmediated reality or objectively-rational knowledge, asserting that all interpretations are contingent on the perspective from which they are made; claims to objective fact are dismissed as nave realism.George Saunders postmodern fiction serves as exemplar for early twenty first century Americas satires new attention. By categories of age, output of work, and literary style, George Saunders occupies a liminal position among Americas writers at the end of the twentieth century. His fiction is not believed to be part of the early postmoderns, such as Vonnegut, Pynchon, or DeLillo, but nor is he situated with contemporary younger writers such as Joshua Ferris, Karen Russell, or Jonathan Safran Foer. While Saunders contemporaries, as a result of age, may be seen as Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Chuck Palahniuk, among others, his aestheticsparticularly his satire and insistence on writing short stories over novelsis less concerned with directly responding to postmodernism (such as Wallace sought to) than it is proposing a unique style of satire in the current era. As a result of this, there is a clear transition in Saunders work from navigating the achievements of postmodernismpastiche, blankness, sense of exhaustion, Irony, rejection of history, acute self-consciousness with a renewal of sincerity and affect sometimes associated with post-postmodernism. For all its evasiveness as a term, postmodernism remains the best point of demarcation to survey the most significant aspects of American culture for the last seventy or so years. Furthermore, the need to at least explain postmodernisms connection to contemporary fiction is not to settle arguments of its worth or existence, but to convey a sense of the self-aware and literary-conscious environment the majority of writers, such as David Foster Wallace and George Saunders, were writing and responding to do.
Copyright
Copyright © 2023 Anshuma Jain. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License.
