Mourad Romdhani
University of El Manar, Tunisia
Abstract
Linda Hutcheon describes the postmodernist text as a manuscript that
“signals its dependence by its use of the canon, but reveals its rebellion
through its ironic abuse of it” (130). Irony is a key word in postmodernist
philosophy and a key narrative strategy in the postmodernist text. As a
poetics, established through different narrative techniques including intertextuality, parody, and pastiche and it highlights a fragmented text
that deliberately questions totalising systems and lacks historical or
narrative continuity. Highlighting parody, pastiche and intertextuality the postmodernist
literary text reveals an ironic attitude toward unifying theories and
totalitarian and stabilizing concepts. Coherence, unity or continuity become
challenged notions within the postmodernist convention.
In Discourse, Figure and The Postmodern Condition,
Jean François Lyotard hints to another aspect of the ironic postmodernist
practice, namely ‘the language game’. From a postmodernist perspective,
language as a communication as well as reference system falls within the
excluded category of universal, totalitarian, and authoritarian grand
narrative. The structuralist point of view concerning the linguistic system is
called into question within the postmodernist frame of thought. A whole agenda,
which can be referred to as postmodernist politics, is indeed responsible for
such ironic narrative practises. The apocalyptic vision of endism
characterising the postmodern era has actually paved the ground for these
ironic narrative practises and this sense of playfulness in the literary text. Such an apocalyptic
vision of endism is reproduced by postmodern theorists like Ihab Hassan, Jean
François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and Hans Bertens who state that through such
a cynical discourse, “the postmodernists have accepted chaos and live in fact
in a certain intimacy with it” (Natoli 45).
Key Words: Irony, postmodernism, poetics, politics
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