Extended Essays 2021

Introduction

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979) by Italo Calvino is one of the most famous

postmodern novels and Cloud Atlas (2004) is a more recent rendition of the postmodern genre.

Postmodernism was a late 20 th century movement that followed modernism and has been

current since the 1980s. These movements dominated arts and culture in the 20 th century and

influenced much of the structure of practices in music, painting, literature, and architecture 1 .

In all the arts, what had been the most fundamental elements of practice were challenged and

rejected. In literature, there was a rejection of traditional realism in favour of experimental

forms of various kinds 2 , which is evident in the works of Calvino and Mitchell.

Historical literary approaches supported the notion that ‘literature was an instrument of social

stability, not of social change’ 3 . As a contemporary movement, postmodernism changed the

view on this. In fact, postmodernism rejects the historically distinctive boundaries between

high and low art. It deliberately mixes high art with low art, the past with the future or one

genre with another 4 . In his Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory , J.A. Cuddon

describes postmodernism as characterised by ‘an electric approach, [by liking for] aleatory

writing, parody and pastiche’ 5 . These elements combined allow postmodernists to achieve the

mixing of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, a prominent feature of postmodernism.

The term ‘unreliable narrator’ was first used by Wayne C. Booth in his book The Rhetoric of

Fiction . Booth states that he has ‘ called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in

1 Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory . Peter Barry, 1995 2 Beginning Theory. Peter Barry, 1995 3 Culture and Anarchy. Matthew Arnold, 1869 4 Postmodernism . Nasrullah Mambrol. 5 J.A. Cuddon Book (5 th edition, page 533)

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