Postmodern Texts

The Postmodern world is OUR world. It has shaped the way you and I think, see and know everything. Including what we think about “thinking.” The very way we approach texts (novels, movies, works of art, poems, graffiti, music, advertisements, websites, historical documents, etc.) is a Postmodern approach. Be aware that most of the authors and other text creators that we will read are also aware of this fact.

"Texts are marked by a surplus of meaning; the result of this is that differing readings are inevitable, indeed a condition of meaning at all. This surplus is located in the polysemous nature of both language and of rhetoric. It must be kept in mind that language is what is (for us as cognizant beings), that our sense of reality is linguistically constructed. Consequently the 'meaning of it all' is continually differing, overflowing, in flux.

All texts are constituted by difference from other texts (therefore similarity to them). Any text includes that which it excludes, and exists in its differences from/likenesses with other texts.

A 'text' exists as read. This 'reading' (creation of meaning) is formed, conducted, through certain mediating factors:

• the present structures of discourse, hence understanding, including the present conceptions of the discourse structures of the time of the 'writing' of the text.
  
• the traditions of reading, and the oppositions which those traditions have made possible, of that particular text,
  
• the expectations dictated by the genre of the text and the tradition of genre of the reading,
  
• the relations of meaning which are 'in' the text by virtue of its having been written at all, modified by the fact that these relations have a certain historical existence, a local, situated, and corporeal existence whose reality may or may not be imaginatively recoverable;
  
• the understanding that these 'historical' relations of meaning will to some extent be mystifying and ideologizing relations,
  
• the understanding that insofar as texts have a surplus of meaning they tend to reveal the flaws which the reigning discourse is attempting to mystify,
  
• the conceptual distances between the historical discourse / ideology / cultural codes / genre-traditions of the past and the historical discourse / ideology / cultural codes / genre-traditions of the present, which distance opens up 'new' meanings which the work could not have, in a sense, had before. Post-structuralism is deeply aware of such hermeneutic reading and also suspicious of it, certain that meaning is historical, uncertain that it is recoverable as what it may have meant."
  

-John Lye, 1996