Abstract
Postmodernism criticizes metanarratives. Modern metanarratives including Enlightenment, Hegelianism, and Marxism present general claims about knowledge and truth. Under postmodern condition metanarratives are damageable, criticizable, and finally negligible. In this essay metanarratives are explained and the incredulity towards them is traced. In Finnegans Wake, which is under postmodern condition, metanarratives are targets of Joyce's parody. In this novel, religion is bitterly criticized, Enlightenment is mocked, and Hegelianism and Marxism are disfigured. Joyce shows his incredulity towards metanarratives and employs postmodernist techniques. Finnegans Wake's world is postmodern.
Highlights
In The Postmodern Condition (1979/1984), Lyotard announces the eclipse of all modern metanarratives saying that the "incredulity towards metanarratives" (p. xxiv) characterizes the postmodern era
Finnegans Wake is Joyce's postmodern novel where we find the distrust of organized systems and ideologies
"familiarity with Finnegans Wake is fundamental to the understanding of the postmodern world" (Booker, 1991, p. 191), for, it "registers the tensions between modernism and postmodernism shap[ing] the critical ideologies of postmodernism" (Mays, 1998, p. 22)
Summary
In The Postmodern Condition (1979/1984), Lyotard announces the eclipse of all modern metanarratives saying that the "incredulity towards metanarratives" (p. xxiv) characterizes the postmodern era. Modern metanarratives including religion (Christianity), Enlightenment, Hegelianism, and Marxism, present general, absolute and universal claims about knowledge and truth, supposing the validity of their claims undoubtable. Calinescu (1987) argued that Lyotard's various metanarratives of modernity share the notion of universal finality: essentially different, they are all based on a finalistic vision of universal history. Postmodernism has no faith in finality inherent in modernism's metanarratives and subverts their horizons of emancipation. Expressing their views on postmodernism, JeanFrançois Lyotard, Ihab Hassan, and Umberto Eco see it as a phenomenon recurring in every age. It is a record of the fantasies and dream-thoughts of a family whose head is Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (H.C.E.) He has a wife named Anna (A.L.P.), who becomes the source of all life, a daughter, Isabel (Issy), and twin sons Shem and Shaun, who go by many names and who are all forces in opposition. In this novel, which has not much plot or characters to speak of, man's experience is viewed as fragmentary
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