Characteristics+of+the+Literary+Time+Period

“Here’s Johnny!” This quote from Stephen King’s book, The Shining, is shouted by one of the book’s psychotic characters. The suspense built in all of Stephen King’s books truly exemplifies the postmodern era. Postmodernism is built around the ideas of illusions, complexity and deceit. As put by The encyclopedia of Science and Religion "postmodern is characterized by an incredulity towards metanarratives...[are] the appeal to explanatory principles that presume to tell the story of the ways things are. Metanarrratives are accounts of the origin, foundations, and formations of the various forms of human knowledge: for example, motion (Isaac Newton), the mind (René Descartes and Immanuel Kant), history (George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel), the economy (Karl Marx), psychology (Sigmund Freud), and society (Emile Durkheim.)." (Graham Ward 1) Stephen King uses all of these elements in his writings; and it drives his plots to twist into a suspenseful thriller that captivates its audiences. Many other authors have used Stephen King as an influence, and many more have tried to mimic his unique writing style. His influence on the post-modern era is long standing, and it even transcends the time period and extends into twenty-first century writing. With Stephen King’s life being coupled with an understanding of the postmodern era, and seeing the overall effect of his influence on the time period, Stephen King is put on the top of the list for the most outstanding writer of the 1950’s to the 1980’s.

Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is hard to define and there is little agreement on the exact characteristics of postmodern literature. However, unifying features often coincide with Jean-François Lyotard's concept of the "metanarrative" (Graham Ward 1). For example, instead of the modernist quest for meaning in a chaotic world, the postmodern author eschews, often playfully, the possibility of meaning, and the postmodern novel is often a parody of this quest. This distrust of totalizing mechanisms extends even to the author and his own self-awareness; postmodern writers often celebrate chance over craft and employ metafiction to undermine the author's univocation, or “ an agreement of name and meaning” (Webster-Dictionary.org). The distinction between high and low culture is also attacked with the employment of pastiche, the combination of multiple cultural elements including subjects and genres not previously deemed fit for literature.  Both modern and postmodern literature represents a break from 19th century realism. In character development, both modern and postmodern literature explore subjectivism, turning from external reality to examine inner states of consciousness, in many cases drawing on modernist examples in the "stream of consciousness" styles of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. (Gale) In addition, both modern and postmodern literature explores fragmentariness in narrative- and character-construction. The Waste Land is often cited as a means of distinguishing modern and postmodern literature. The poem is fragmentary and employs pastiche like much postmodern literature, but the speaker in The Waste Land says, "these fragments I have shored against my ruins". Modernist literature sees fragmentation and extreme subjectivity as an existential crisis, or internal conflict, a problem that must be solved, and the author is often cited as the one to solve it. (King 76) Postmodernists, often demonstrate that this chaos is insurmountable; the author is impotent, and the only recourse against "ruin" is to play within the chaos. Playfulness is present in many modernist works and they may seem very similar to postmodern works, but with postmodernism playfulness becomes central and the actual achievement of order and meaning becomes unlikely.