Literature and Postmodernism

Like many university teachers, I have had to switch to online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. As part of this endeavour, I recorded a few of the lectures that I teach as part of the BA1 course History of the Western Arts 4: 1945–present.

In the final lecture, I discuss a second important movement, postmodernism. In general, postmodern narratives tend to question our experience of the reality in which we live. We can find manifestations of this tendency not only in philosophical prose such as W. G. Sebald's ​Austerlitz, but also in popular genres such as the adventures of Tintin or a computer games such as the Stanley Parable. In this lecture, we trace the emergence of these complex works to the acceleration of globalisation after WWII.