How to Cope With Postmodern Texts: Textual Analysis of Intertextuality, Parody, and Pastiche in Reading Postmodern Texts

Abstract

This work explores how postmodernism has developed its own literary style reflecting the social, political, religious as well as philosophical and intellectual mood of the era. Postmodern texts have been created and recreated out of a blend of varied texts from previous periods, and they succeeded in creating a more conscious and questioning audience. Throughout the postmodern period, readers replaced authors and writerly texts replaced readerly texts. Literary texts began to be deconstructed according to the notions and theories of scholars and philosophers such as Roland Barthes, John Barth, and Jean-François Lyotard. In an attempt to succeed in producing new texts, postmodern writers established a sort of textual relationship between metanarratives and little narratives, applying intertextuality that is in a close interrelation with parody and pastiche – two complicated terms often miscible to one another. This study seeks to clarify the meaning of postmodern literary works by highlighting some postmodern literary devices such as intertextuality, parody, and pastiche in The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles, Night Train by Martin Amis and The Crying Lot of 49 by Thomas Pynchon.