Editing Postmodernism (section)

=== Literature ===
{{Main|Postmodern literature}}
In 1971, the American literary theorist [[Ihab Hassan]] made "postmodernism" popular in literary studies with his influential book, ''The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature''. According to scholar David Herwitz, American writers such as [[John Barth]] (who had controversially declared that the novel was "exhausted" as a genre), [[Donald Barthelme]], and [[Thomas Pynchon]] responded in various ways to the stylistic innovations of ''[[Finnegans Wake]]'' and the late work of [[Samuel Beckett]]. Postmodern literature often calls attention to issues regarding its own complicated connection to reality. The postmodern novel plays with language, twisted plots, multiple narrators, and unresolved endings, unsettling the conventional idea of the novel as faithfully reflecting the world.{{sfn|Herwitz|2008|loc=History of Postmodernism}}

In ''Postmodernist Fiction'' (1987), [[Brian McHale]] details the shift from modernism to postmodernism, arguing that postmodern works developed out of modernism, moving from concern with what is there ("[[Ontology|ontological]] dominant") to concern with how we can know it's there ("[[Epistemology|epistemological]] dominant").<ref>{{cite book |author-link=Brian McHale |last=McHale |first=B. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ec2HAgAAQBAJ |title=Postmodernist Fiction |location=[[Abingdon-on-Thames]] |publisher=[[Routledge]] |date=2003 |isbn=1134949162 |via=[[Google Books]]}}</ref> McHale's "What Was Postmodernism?" (2007)<ref>{{Cite journal |last=McHale |first=Brian |date=20 December 2007 |title=What Was Postmodernism? |url=https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/what-was-postmodernism/ |access-date=4 April 2013 |journal=Electronic Book Review }}</ref> follows [[Raymond Federman]]'s lead in now using the past tense when discussing postmodernism. Others argue that postmodernism in literature utilizes compositional and semantic practices such as inclusivity, intentional indiscrimination, nonselection, and "logical impossibility."<ref>{{Cite book|title=Narrative Skepticism: Moral Agency and Representations of Consciousness in Fiction|publisher= Fairleigh Dickinson University Press|page=7|author=Linda Schermer Raphael}}</ref>