While encompassing a broad range of ideas and projects, postmodernism is typically defined by an attitude of skepticism or distrust toward grand narratives, ideologies, and various tenets of Enlightenment rationality, including the existence of objective reality and absolute truth, as well as notions of rationality, human nature, and progress.[3] Instead, it asserts that knowledge and truth are the product of unique systems of social, historical, and political discourse and interpretation, and are therefore contextual and constructed.

So, truth is contextual and constructed. And what%u0432%u0402%u2122s more, the %u0432%u0402%u045Atruths%u0432%u0402%u045C of humanism and the Enlightenment that have been guiding artists from the Renaissance on are actually only stories that legitimate the West%u0432%u0402%u2122s cultural, economic, and technological dominance in the world? (Routledge Ency. of Narrative Theory 456).

Lets look at this a different way: the photo-copy that I handed out in class from the Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory contrasts the modern with the postmodern by saying that modernism was mostly concerned with epistemology (knowledge) while postmodernism is mostly concerned with ontology (being). Which makes sense: if you start to see “truth” as contingent, as something that is constructed from a certain perspective, or culture, or ideology, then you become less invested in the idea of finding truth (which is what epistemology is all about) and you instead start paying attention to the identities, the cultures, the perspectives (the ontologies) from which different versions of the truth are produced. And you start to see the world’s ontology (its being or nature) as a huge, chaotic, assemblage of competing narratives about the world. Looking at it this way, we can start to see how writers from Romanticism on have been concerned with how we write about ourselves and the world%u0432%u0402%u201Dwhich is akin to saying, they have been concerned with how we should look at the world. Romantics looked inside themselves to find the truth outside; the realists broadened their perspective to see how the individual fits into society; the modernist retreats into phychology (and artistic experimentation) to represent what is truly %u0432%u0402%u045Areal.%u0432%u0402%u045C But with postmodernism, we stop worrying about how to see, or where to look to find the truth and we start asking: who is looking in the first place, where did they come from, what ideology motivates their discourse?

Now, lets try to put this into the context of how we were talking about modernism: Modernism faces the crisis of seeing through the conventions of life and art to the %u0432%u0402%u045Anothing%u0432%u0402%u045C beneath. And therefore, because they hated convention, the only way to avoid the %u0432%u0402%u045Anothing%u0432%u0402%u045C is to create a new world%u0432%u0402%u201Da purely aesthetic, idealistic world of art. This is what Lilly in To the Lighthouse represents for us. Now, postmodernism knows that our attempts to escape the prison of convention is futile. The modernists, in their most radical experiments, are still locked within a story that they tell themselves is truth: this is a story of liberation, of individual freedom and truth. Postmodoernism distrusts all stories of humanistic liberation and sees them all as possible modes of control. In other words, there is no way of writing, or seeing, or thinking that offers transcendence. We are forever trapped within the constructed worlds of our culture, language%u0432%u0402%u201Dnever to be able to get beyond culture and language to what is %u0432%u0402%u045Areal%u0432%u0402%u045C or %u0432%u0402%u045Atrue.%u0432%u0402%u045C

Modernism: the world is broken%u0432%u0402%u201Dnew art can mend it.

Postmodernism: the world has always been broken%u0432%u0402%u201Dso lets stop trying to put it back together.

Take a closer look at the passages from the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory that I have marked. Do any of these passages help us describe Oscar Wao and why it is written the way it is? Think about all the characteristics we mentioned in class: the culturally specific voice; the constant references to other texts; the footnotes; the narrator who is a character, but one that isn%u0432%u0402%u2122t present for many of the events in the story he is telling.