THE DEVELOPMENT OF POSTMODERNISM IN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Аннотация

The article refers to Postmodernism in American literature, which emerged in the mid-20th century as a reaction against the ideals of modernism, embracing complexity, ambiguity, and skepticism toward universal truths. Characterized by fragmented narratives, metafiction, pastiche, and irony, postmodern American writers challenge traditional storytelling conventions and question established cultural and social norms Keywords:Postmodernistliterature,metafiction,fragmentation,sceptecism,narrativeness,irony,stor ytelling,Intertextuality,literary styles,literary trends. A New Shift in the Value Paradigm researchers recognize the United States as the birthplace of postmodernist literature -- it was from here that postmodernism spread across Europe. The theory of postmodernism began skepticism.to take shape in the United States on the wave of interest in the intellectual-philosophical, post-Freudian and literary concepts of the French poststructuralists. Postmodernism in American literature is a literary movement that developed after World War II, roughly beginning in the late 1940s and flourishing from the 1960s onward. It arose as a reaction to Modernism, questioning traditional values, literary forms, and the concept ofobjectivetruth. Thekey features ofpostmodernism are thefollowing: Metafiction (Writing that is self-aware; the textdraws attention to itselfas awork offiction.) Fragmentation (Nonlinear narratives, broken timelines, and disjointed plots reflect the chaos and disillusionment of modern life.) Intertextuality & Pastiche (Mixing different genres, cultural references, and literary styles.) Irony, Parody, and Dark Humor(A common toolfor critiquingculture, politics, and media.) Skepticism toward "Grand Narratives"(Challenges overarching ideologies ortruths (e.g., religion, nationalism,historical objectivity). Simulacra and Hyperreality (Reality is seen as constructed or simulated, often through media and technology (influenced byJean Baudrillard). American soil turned out to be the most favorable for the perception of new trends for a number ofreasons. Here, there was aneed to comprehend thosetendencies in the development ofart and literature that had made themselves known since the mid-1950s (the emergence of popart, which made quotation the leading artistic principle) and were increasingly gaining strength, which led to a change in the cultural paradigm in the mid-1970s: modernism gave way to postmodernism. The time did not inspire hope, it left no way out. The way out was the exciting path of literary play, daring experiment, parody. These two moments: first, the sense of the absurdity of social life and history, and second, the taste for literary play, -- in various combinations, determined the essence of American postmodernism, which was the main trend of US literature in the 60-70s, remained an important factor in its development until the mid-80s and largely influenced its futurefate. As is known,literary postmodernism is not specific toAmerican literature alone. And therefore, the words of some critics sound paradoxical, asserting: "Unlike modernism, which appeared in Europe, postmodernism is a purely American phenomenon." Meanwhile, there is a large grain of truth in this paradox. Indeed, unlike European postmodernism, postmodernism in the USA is not genetically connected with the "high" modernism of the beginning of the century. https://ijmri.de/index.php/jmsi volume 4,issue5,2025 437 Virtually devoid of a literary basis, postmodernism in the USA arose exclusively on a socio- cultural basis. Modern America, with its purely technological superiority, cultural heterogeneity and rapid erosion of moral and political convictions from modern American life, was a country of a distinctly postmodern culture. This tendency characterizes the works of the emerging postmodernist literature, in which the gap between "art for the educated" and its simplified version "for the uneducated" is overcome, an exit beyond the established boundaries of literary trends, genres, reader expectations, etc. is outlined. Theact oftrampling boundaries is considered by Fiedler as an act of gaining freedom. The harbingers of the latter are John Barth and Norman Mailer, who were the first to combine the mass and the elite in their works. The American theologian Harvey Cox in his works of the early 70s, devoted to the problems of religion in Latin America, widely uses the concept of "postmodernist theology". However, the term "postmodernism" gained popularity thanks to the architect and theorist Charles Jencks. In his book,The Language ofPostmodern Architecture, he noted that although theword itself was used in American literary criticism in the 1960s and 1970s to denote ultramodernist literary experiments, the author gave it a fundamentally different meaning. In his article, The Rise of Postmodern Architecture, Jencks proposes ideas about the pluralism of art and the rejection of templates: the more options for reading the mean