BLiterature

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have made bright signs of intellect through their essay literatures. Murshid is a
celebrated biographer of Michael and Nazrul.
The Postmodern Age (Since 1990)
In the 20 th century, the society and especially family became more and more
disintegrated. Alienation gripped the society, and frustration became an inseparable
part of man’s life. Empathies and other humanistic values slowly diminished. The
inhuman brutalities during the two world wars shattered all previous norms of
civilization, which now seemed meaningless. Life gradually lost all its nobleness. The
new philosophers and artists bore anguish against this meaninglessness of human
existence in the core of their heart. The dictum of the Enlightenment failed resulting
in emergence of the new artistic idea Postmodernism.
The concept of Postmodernism is indebted to the western thinkers Jacques
Lacan (1901-’81), Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-’98), Michel Foucault (1926-’84)
and especially Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). Based on Derrida’s deconstructionist
philosophy, it has in fact, given birth to a typical kind of absurd art – devoid of reason
and remarkably dehumanized. It denies all grand narratives, and opposes all notions
of modernity.
Postmodernism is not merely confined to literature – it has a wider concept.
Postmodernism reached its height even in the Dutch football team’s performance in
1974 world cup. Moreover, the natural tendency of literature is to follow the
Enlightenment values that are opposed by Postmodernism. Postmodernism largely
limits the capacity of the exposition of literature, and is in fact subversive of it. And
Postmodernism can also be called a distorted and poorer form of Modernism. If
Modernism is compared to a dazzling grand palace, Postmodernism is only the
wreck of that palace.
Now our literature and other genres of art are shrouded in a Postmodernist
trait. The comic magazine ‘Rosh+Alo’ is one of the most eligible exponents of
Postmodernism in this country. Its artists have assimilated visual pun, paradox and
parody; and thus have presented a new type of pictorial art. But if we take their
presentations as literature, the entire concept of literature deserves to be rewritten.
Postmodernism has given birth to some new genres: concrete poetry, antinovel,
science-fiction, pop art, installation art, video-music, and electronic and
computer games. Some ‘poetic’ genres are visual poetry, video poetry, digital poetry,
asemic writing, heptic poetry, etc, which in fact do not even qualify as literature.
Postmodernism has allowed the entrance of apparently negligible matters into
art. Poems, for example, now roam around the topics like industrial products,
scientific theories, mathematical formulas, animals, insects, human organs, etc. Thus
it has concentrated the reader’s mind on dehumanized issues, signifying the
hollowness of the new-age humans.
The genre that mostly maintains both the conditions of high intellectualism of
literature and the principles of Postmodernism at the same time, is science-fiction.
The impact of science-fiction is evident on Michael Jackson’s (1958-2009) videomusic,
his movie The Moon-Walker, video games, animation films (and reasonably