Postmodern Pfiction with Ptim Callan

I pick out six unambiguous science fiction authors with strong postmodern tendencies and explain what they are. My list includes Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, Gene Wolfe, Stanislaw Lem, Harlan Ellison, and J.G. Ballard.

This episode explores the fascinating world of tabular narrative in fiction, examining how authors create parallel, simultaneous storylines that challenge and engage readers. Join me to explore examples from John Barth, Samuel R. Delaney, Steve Katz, Arno Schmidt, Vladimir Nabokov, Johan Harstad, and Mark Danielewski as we discover how these complex narrative structures reshape storytelling.

Traditional fiction defines specific forms it can take, such as short stories, plays, poetry, and novels. Postmodernism intentionally blurs these lines, challenging the traditional definitions of types of literature. In this episode I examine a handful of books and ask, is this a novel?

I discuss the postmodern focus on the form our writing takes as an empowered response to the Literature of Exhaustion. Form can be structure, or types of documents, or genre and tropes and stock characters. I include plenty of real examples to show how this interest in form manifests itself to the betterment of postmodern literature.

Thousands of years of previous writing captured in millions of books has seemed to many postmodernists to be a massive obstacle to their own original contribution to literature. I describe this sentiment and some of the responses we see to this predicament.

I define irrealism, fabulism, and magic realism and discuss how delightful they can be. I explain the fundamental strategy behind irrealism and how it fits into literary postmodernism.

Our books are full of fictional people, places, and events. But what if the books themselves could be fictional? Some clever postmodernists have done exactly that.

I share the first of what will be many lists, this one of ten undeniable titans of postmodern fiction. Plus, see who didn't make the list and why.

Beowulf, the Wizard of Oz, Jane Eyre, and Hamlet all have one thing in common: Postmodern authors have retold them from the perspective of characters other than the protagonists we imagine. In this episode I discuss this marvelous technique and some of the shining works it has produced.

I define metafiction as fiction that takes at least some its narrative energy from its own status as fiction. I discuss different degrees and types of metafiction and its relationship to postmodernism.

Ptim corrects an error, proves he is unscripted, and digs into recursiveness, loops, Mandelbrot sets, mirrors, and fun stuff like that.

Postmodernism is a broad, complex tent with many occupants. In this episode I attempt a working definition that is clear, defensible, and ultimately useful in driving exploration of this topic. I cast postmodernism as a response to modernism and its earth-shattering effects on all forms of art, with the most salient difference being heightened awareness (self-awareness but also of influences, history, and contemporaneous cultural movements) among postmodernists as opposed to modernists.

Postmodernism afficionado Ptim Callan introduces the purpose and style of this podcast, which is to bridge a gap in quality, deep content about postmodern fiction in a regular cadence of snackable topics in a conversational style.