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Essay about Features of Post Modern Fictions

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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.
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Choudhary states:
The major feature of this kind of fiction lies in the subversion of the assumptions and generic traits and function of fiction, including modernist novel. Generically postmodernist fiction is self-questioning in nature, skeptical about its possibilities, rules and principles. Its function is disillusionary; it dives into the underside of fiction and explodes its fallacies…Postmodernist text directs itself to the suspension of meaning by using disruptive narrative, polyphony, multiple ending and the like thereby frustrating intelligibility. It is devoid of teleology and causality (12). Some critics are of the view that postmodern fictions do not convey any moral values and imparts untrue elements. “In a postmodern word, literature is just another text. You can forget all that stuff about truth and value—and other alienating lies perpetual by a deliberately selective version of history controlled by crazy power freaks and their lackey dupes. ‘Truth’ is only what circulates as such: hence the importance of technology and the media to an understanding of ‘our’ world today. ‘Values’ are only effects of cultural traditions; hence the importance of becoming cynical today, in order not to be suppressed under the suffocating of ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’” (Lucy viii). A.S.D. Pillai states that:
The contemporary cultural situation, the postmodern text reveals in its construction a world of valueless vaudeville. But, as has been repeatedly pointed out, black

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