Hugh Silverman: “Postmodernism enframes modernism without identity or unity.  It is fragmented, discontinuous, multiple, and dispersed.  Where modernism asserts centering, focusing, continuity —once the break with the tradition has already occurred—postmodernism decenters, enframes, discontinues, and fragments the prevalence of modernist ideals” (5).

Frederich Jameson: ve la postmodernidad como una respuesta al cansancio del reclamo de la modernidad a la autonomía del arte y a la noción realista del arte como reflejo del mundo exterior.  El postmodernismo es una crisis de la creencia en la posibilidad de una auto-expresión auténtica o una representación objetiva.

Ihab Hassan: “Postmodernism strikes us by contrast [with modernity] as playful, paratactical and deconstructionist” (151). Para explicar el concepto del postmodernismo utiliza dos conceptos esenciales.  Uno es el de “indeterminacies”: “ambiguity, discontinuity, heterodoxy, pluralism, randomness, revolt, perversion, deformation” (153).  La deformación la considera como “unmaking”: “decreation, desintegration, deconstruction, decenterment, displacement, difference, discontinuity, disjuntion, disappearance, decomposition, de-definition, demystification, detotalization, deligitimization… —rethoric of irony, rupture, silence” (153).  El otro concepto es el de “immanences”: “everywhere we encounter that immanence called Language, with all its literary ambiguities, epistemic conundrums, and political distractions” (153).

Julio Ortega: en la modernidad “a narrator who adopts the language of common sense also presupposes a similarly-oriented reader: between happiness and unhappiness this reader contemplates himself in the mirror of language in order to there see his own identity contractually confirmed” (193).  En la postmodernidad, el consenso se rompe, el narrador y el sujeto narrado,se decentran, y se concibe “ [the] representation as a problem” (197).  “The ethnocentrism and the academic authority of the modernist canon are challenged by the critique of representation— a representation that is revealed as false, ideological, or repressive” (198).

Iris Zavala: El postmodernismo “It is said to express a new relation between art and life” (84).  El postmodernismo incluye: “self-referential discourse, heterodoxy, eclecticism, marginality, death of utopia, death of the author, deformation, disfunction, deconstruction, disintegration, displacement, discontinuity, non-lineal view of history, dispersion, fragmentation, dissemination, rupture, otherness, decentering the subject, chaos, rhizoma, rebellion, the subject as power, gender/difference/power…dissolution of semiotics into energetics, auto-proliferation of signifiers, infinite semiosis, cybernetics, pluralism…, critique of reason, precession of simulacra and representations, dissolution of legitimizing ‘narratives’… a new episteme or sign-system…mass media, sculpture, video, television, and performance (85). Sin embargo, el postmodernismo “cannot be regarded as a total break with the past” (96)...

Libros citados:

Hassan, Ihab.  “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism”.  Postmodernism.  A reader.  Ed.  Thomas Docherty.  New York: CUP, 1993.  147-156.

Hutcheon, Linda.  A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction.  New York: Routledge, 1988.

Jameson, Frederic.  Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.  Durham: DUP, 1991.

Ortega, Julio.  “Postmodernism in Latin America”.  Postmodern Fiction in Europe and the Americas. Ed. Theo D’haen.  Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988.

Silverman, Hugh J.  Postmodernism.  Philosophy and the Arts.  New York: Routledge, 1990.

Waugh, Patricia.  Practicing Postmodernism/Reading Modernism.  New York: Routdledge, 1992.

Zavala, Iris M.  “On the (Mis-)Uses of the Post-Modern: Hispanic Modernism Revisited. Postmodern Fiction in Europe and the Americas. Ed. Theo D’haen.  Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988.

Página web recomendada: http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/postmodern.html