Is postmodern literature really difficult to read?

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?

It depends on the story, and what you mean by difficult to read. Kurt Vonnegut wrote a lot of fiction that's generally called postmodern and much of it is still very accessible as fiction at least in my opinion. But there's some that's a lot harder to chew on.

What are the examples of easy to read postmodern literature? And also when youa re reading postmodern works, do you need to be aware of concepts such as forms, tropes, idioms and even some cultural values?

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.

I am not a literary critic so I cannot say too much but what makes a postmodern story well....postmodern? I know it is more than just a subversion of tropes but I do know that it can overlap with subverting tropes.

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

I see. I wonder if those same postmodern works use binaries in order to highlight and make a point about a trope that is being used? If postmodern works avoid being categorized then what separates postmodern works from modernist ones?

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.

This thread might help a bit.

Short answer to the OP question: no. It's not difficult to read.

So postmodern have no set definition and form but it constantly reinvents, interprets and analyze certain artistic movements if I understand it. I know Derrida style deconstructions need binaries to make them work as opposed to the definitions we have here.