Literature, cinematography, creativity, philosophy, and, in general, the culture of postmodernism have had a tremendous impact on modern society and the perception of some familiar things, such as time, parent-child relationships, and space. The postmodern literature authors abandon the classical understanding of linear narrative and prefer a cyclical or rhizomatic version (the term belongs to Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze). In a new way in postmodern literature, the authors boldly describe their own intimate experiences concerning previously taboo topics.
Their works are full of reflections of human experience and deeply personal experiences. These experiences are applied to universal human knowledge or each person’s experience individually. For the first time, the authors started talking about the horrors of war and the animal fear that a person experiences. Authors no longer romanticized the war; its participants were not described as heroes. An ordinary person, yesterday’s student or worker, turned out to be in the war.
Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton paid considerable attention to mental problems in their prose and poetry. In addition, their diaries, especially the diaries of Sylvia Plath, in which she vividly describes her relationship with her father, became creative property. Sylvia Plath calls her father God or an opportunity to speak with God. It refers the reader to another author, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, a severe postmodern figure. For Lacan and later developing his ideas and supporting him Slavoj ZiĹľek (in particular in the work of Hegel in a connected brain), the Christian God is the figure of the Father. With the figure, the child has innate contradictions, which he tries to solve during his (or her) life; these sayings are related to Sigmund Freud.
Ann Sexton and Sylvia Plath turned their personal experiences of spiritual excitement, sex life, love failures, and perception of themselves and their bodies into creativity. For them, creativity was therapy and a fight against their fears and mental disorders. For the publishers of the 70s, their works were too personal because they described too detailed and precise relationships with loved ones, including the experience of violence and cruelty.
Another example of postmodernism in literature is Amy Tan and The Joy Luck Club. It is not only the emotional experiences and the hard life of people who have gone through the revolution and the civil war that deserves attention here. Tang boldly talks about the hard-hitting details of the past of the main characters, who made many mistakes, disdained their principles, acted meanly, but at the same time tried to save themselves at all costs. Tang’s work is composed in a bizarre form that is characteristic of this genre. The Tang novella resembles fragments folded logically, stories that are almost not intertwined but proceed from similar circumstances or meet in the same result. It is the rhizome, the root from which the plots and lives of different people, subsequently brought together by fate, come. The Tang characters are randomly brought together in the United States and create a hobby club to play mahjong. The symmetry of the form in which Tang writes the piece is similar to the mahjong.
Emotionality and courage in expressing feelings are some of the techniques of postmodern literature, which strives to be close to any reader. It is easier to become a creator within this work and become the author of a unique performance. Sylvia Plath, through her works, demonstrated committed mistakes, suffering from depression and mental disorders. Ann Sexton battled depression and bipolar disorder by creating interesting results in which she did not try to idealize herself and others. Amy Tan, in her work The Joy Luck Club, not only works with a bizarre and complex form of writing but also tells a large-scale story of an entire nation (in the faces of several main characters), faced with destruction and war and ended up in one place by accident.