If you're doing literary criticism then you probably do need to know those things; but the thing is, back when Umbert Eco published The Name of The Rose, it was a smart mystery novel, not a college course req. That's pushing it, but my point is more that there's a lot of these books that work as stories as much as critical theory. For a relatively easy-to-read postmodernist work, I would go to Slaughterhouse-Five. It's a weird book but I think casual readers can put the premise ("time travel," a war narrative, a tormented adult life) ahead of the heavy discourse on reality and truth and perception and enjoy it even if they aren't up to date on their Descartes.
Well, that's tricky; one of the things that makes postmodernism itself is a rejection of strict categorization. But a big hallmark is deconstruction. A lot of postmodern literature rejects and breaks down established, traditional literary relationships, between reader and author, between perception and reality, between tropes and genres. A lot of postmodern literature plays with and parodies genre tropes, refuses to provide a tidy conclusion to events, and sometimes refuses to order events in a traditional way. It's often a rejection of pacing, of ordered narrative, and even the author's own credibility (by abandoning verisimilitude and "realism" in a "real" work).
You can find these things in a lot of modern works though, but that's because we're influenced by them a lot. They've had a lot of time to break out. In the 40s and 50s though, none of this stuff was as established as it is nowadays. Today we can find all this in like, Homestuck.
edited 10th Apr '15 12:09:12 AM by Nanoka
following fredric jameson, posmo is an era, ie, a way of thinking and being. As such, easy and hard to read literature can be within its boundaries. so are economy, and politics. And within literature, you can find both Pynchon and dan brown as examples of the post modern.
De atrás para adelante grabar/El mundo al revés./Pero no: la vida no tiene sentido.

You know one of things that I had learned that when looking at a postmodern story is that you not have to look at the narrative but at forms that they represent. You have to look at the story tropes as well as it what the book is saying as a medium. I got to wonder if that makes certain stories really difficult to read? Postmodernism is a surprisingly broad subject but at same time it is an unstable subject that can interpreted in different ways. It isn't about breaking the fourth wall but it is also about crafting a good plot as well as a message about the itself. Are these types of stories difficult to read because of it?
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