10 Postmodernism Examples (in Literature, Film & Art)

Postmodernism refers to a wide range of literary, artistic, and philosophical texts that explore the subjectivity of experience and attempt to undermine dominant social and cultural discourses.

Key concerns of postmodernism include the deconstruction of grand cultural narratives, playful use of language and discourse, and questioning of socially-constructed ‘regimes of truth’.

Examples of postmodern art and literature include Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych, Barbra Kruger’s I Shop Therefore I Am, Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.

Below are 10 themes in postmodernism and real-life examples of those themes in postmodern texts.

Postmodernism Examples

1. Fragmentation

Postmodern literature and art often embraces a fragmented narrative structure as a way to challenge the idea of the “grand metanarrative”.

Post-modernists reject the idea that one coherent narrative can explain the world and instead embraces plurality and contradiction.

As a result, you may find postmodern literature with conflicting viewpoints and nonlinear storytelling.

This fragmentation reflects the postmodern embrace of the importance of individual subjective experience rather than the search for objective truth.

2. Intertextuality

Postmodernists believe that reality is constructed through discourse – or in other words, through the immersion in the influential language and texts of your time. 

As a result, postmodern literature and art often incorporates elements of other influential texts and popular culture of the era.

This intertextuality reflects the postmodern interest in the way meaning is constructed within a cultural context rather than in isolation from other texts.

3. Pastiche

Pastiche refers to the mixing and blending of different styles and genres within one single text.

Like fragmentation, pastiche is a technique designed to challenge and undermine tradition with the idea that there is no one ‘best’ or most ‘coherent’ way to approach literature and art.

By playing with forms and undermining them, the postmodern artist is also undermining the metanarratives about truth and beauty that those forms attempt to construct.

4. Irony

Postmodern literature often uses irony as a way to subvert expectations. Irony makes us double-take because it undermines our expectations.

The message from the postmodern writer here is: “Look! You’ve been trained to expect a certain grand narrative. I just subverted it to show you how much society has shaped how you think!

5. Absurdism

Like existentialism, postmodernism plays with absurdism. We might define absurdism as the idea that the world is irrational, meaningless, and literally absurd.

This reflects this postmodern idea that the stories that we are told and that are normalized in dominant discourse are somewhat ridiculous if we can only remove ourselves from our context and take a look at them from some other perspective.

6. Multiple Narrators

You will often find that postmodern literature has multiple narrators. This is an attempt to demonstrate the inherent subjectivity of truth.

Postmodernism critiques the idea that there is one objective truth to be found. Rather, it embraces the idea that there may be multiple truths and that we come to truth through our own social, cultural, and deeply personal contextualization of information.

7. The Nature of Identity

Postmodernism is concerned with undermining metanarratives about identity – particularly when it comes to race, gender, sexuality, and social class.

As a result, you will often find postmodern art and literature challenging our expectations of identity stereotypes. The texts encourage us to re-think our assumptions of identity norms and see identity as a fluid, changing, and even playful concept.

9. Pop Art

Pop art has been used extensively by postmodernists, perhaps most notably by Andy Warhol.

The use of Pop Art can help to demonstrate how popular culture is a highly influential intermediary in helping to shape our perceptions and beliefs. Warhol, and other artists like Barbara Kruger, often play with this idea by presenting pop art in ways that challenge its normative presentation (particularly in advertising) and demonstrate how pop art constructs dominant discourses of gender, identity, and capitalism.

10. Installation Art

Postmodern art often takes the form of interactive installation art. Interactivity is often used as a message that subjective interpretation of art should be encouraged.

Subjectivity, of course, is central to postmodernism: the postmodern theorist believes that everyone comes to understand truth and their world through subjective processes (with the assistance, of course, of the intertextual discourses that surround them).

Conclusion

Postmodernism is one of the most influential approaches to art and literature in the past 50 years. It centers the consumer’s subjective experience, undermines the authority of the creator of texts, and encourages people to play with concepts like identity, truth, and the meaning of life. Through postmodern theory, we can learn to challenge the stories we’ve been told since childhood and re-examine longstanding social and cultural assumptions.