What's lucky about my career in general is that I stumbled into what every writer most wants. Not repeating myself and doing strange things has become my trademark.
Jonathan LethemRead
what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?
Interpretation
What this quote means
Postmodernism can be viewed as an extension of modernism that alleviates some of the existential concerns associated with it.
Jonathan Lethem's quote suggests that postmodernism represents a continuation of modernist ideas but without the accompanying sense of anxiety and existential dread often felt by modernists. It implies that while both movements engage with similar themes, postmodernism may embrace a sense of playfulness and irony that modernism lacked, allowing for a more relaxed engagement with complex cultural narratives.
Themes
PostmodernismModernismAnxietyPhilosophyArt
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on contemporary art, this quote can be used to highlight the shift from modernist anxiety to postmodern playfulness.
More from Jonathan Lethem
All quotes βI learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.
Jonathan LethemRead
Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's--the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance--as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.
Jonathan LethemRead
Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan.... Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self.
Jonathan LethemRead
I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.
Jonathan LethemRead
It was only as I wrote about it that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.
Jonathan LethemRead
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