In the arts , maximalism is an aesthetic characterized by excess and abundance, serving as a reaction against minimalism . The philosophy can be summarized as "more is more", contrasting with the minimalist principal of "less is more".
177-500: The term maximalism is sometimes associated with postmodern novels , such as those by David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon , where digression, reference, and elaboration of detail occupy a great fraction of the text. It can refer to anything seen as excessive, overtly complex and "showy", providing redundant overkill in features and attachments, grossness in quantity and quality, or the tendency to add and accumulate to excess. Novelist John Barth defines literary maximalism through
354-661: A band would continue, Oasis as a legend died with Be Here Now . He further states that while other Britpop bands such as Pulp and Blur moved on from the Britpop-era success, Oasis continued attempting to revisit the success of their first two albums. The Gallagher brothers hold differing opinions about the album. In July 1997, Noel was describing the production as "bland" and some tracks as "fucking shit". He later said: "Just because you sell lots of records, it doesn't mean to say you're any good. Look at Phil Collins ." In Live Forever: The Rise and Fall of Brit Pop , he dismissed
531-457: A "white noise" of television, product brand names, and clichés. The cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson , Neal Stephenson , and many others use science fiction techniques to address this postmodern, hyperreal information bombardment. Perhaps demonstrated most famously and effectively in Heller's Catch-22 , the sense of paranoia , the belief that there's an ordering system behind the chaos of
708-523: A break from the 19th century realism . In character development, both modern and postmodern literature explore subjectivism , turning from external reality to examine inner states of consciousness, in many cases drawing on modernist examples in the " stream of consciousness " styles of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf , or explorative poems like The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot . In addition, both modern and postmodern literature explore fragmentariness in narrative- and character-construction. The Waste Land
885-726: A center piece of the Latin American "boom" , a movement coterminous with postmodernism. Some of the major figures of the "Boom" and practitioners of Magic Realism (Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar etc.) are sometimes listed as postmodernists. This labeling, however, is not without its problems. In Spanish-speaking Latin America, modernismo and posmodernismo refer to early 20th-century literary movements that have no direct relationship to modernism and postmodernism in English. Finding it anachronistic, Octavio Paz has argued that postmodernism
1062-412: A certain dream-like quality. Some of the characteristic features of this kind of fiction are the mingling and juxtaposition of the realistic and the fantastic or bizarre, skillful time shifts, convoluted and even labyrinthine narratives and plots, miscellaneous use of dreams, myths and fairy stories, expressionistic and even surrealistic description, arcane erudition, the element of surprise or abrupt shock,
1239-631: A collection of symbols and myth. The episcopate of this pop-reference movement were the post-Nabokovian Black Humorists , the Metafictionists and assorted franc-and latinophiles only later comprised by "postmodern". The erudite, sardonic fictions of the Black Humorists introduced a generation of new fiction writers who saw themselves as sort of avant-avant-garde, not only cosmopolitan and polyglot but also technologically literate, products of more than just one region, heritage, and theory, and citizens of
1416-484: A combination of multiple genres to create a unique narrative or to comment on situations in postmodernity : for example, William S. Burroughs uses science fiction, detective fiction, westerns; Margaret Atwood uses science fiction and fairy tales; Umberto Eco uses detective fiction, fairy tales, and science fiction, and so on. Though pastiche commonly involves the mixing of genres, many other elements are also included (metafiction and temporal distortion are common in
1593-425: A contract containing a clause requiring that the cassette recipient, according to Select journalist Mark Perry, "not discuss the album with anyone—including your partner at home. It basically said don't talk to your girlfriend about it when you're at home in bed." Reflecting in 1999, Greengrass admitted: "In retrospect a lot of the things we did were ridiculous. We sit in [Oasis] meetings today and we're like 'It's on
1770-598: A culture that said its most important stuff about itself via mass media. In this regard one thinks particularly of the Gaddis of The Recognitions and JR , the Barth of The End of the Road and The Sot-Weed Factor , and the Pynchon of The Crying of Lot 49 ... Here's Robert Coover 's 1966 A Public Burning , in which Eisenhower buggers Nixon on-air, and his 1968 A Political Fable , in which
1947-485: A far better record had we been able to use Noel's guitars and bass and percussion from the Mustique demos. We could've just overdubbed the drums and Liam's singing, and Bonehead's guitar and that would have been a great album. So I very sadly admit that I mucked up royally there. – Owen Morris , discussing the Mustique demos In 2006, Noel agreed that the band should have separated for a year or two instead of going into
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#17328526006092124-430: A few Oasis contacts on the payroll. I don't know whether any were drug dealers, but there was always a few dodgy characters about." Oasis's official photographer Jill Furmanovsky felt the media's focus, and was preyed upon by tabloid journalists living in the flat upstairs from her: "They thought I had the band hiding in my flat." In paranoia, Oasis cut themselves off from their wider circle. According to Johnny Hopkins,
2301-474: A lot of slapping of backs." McGee later admitted to having strong misgivings at first: "I heard it in the studio and I remember saying 'We'll only sell seven million copies' ... I thought it was too confrontational." However, in an interview with the music press a few days later he predicted the album would sell twenty million copies. McGee's hyperbole alarmed both Oasis and their management company Ignition, and both immediately excluded him from involvement in
2478-448: A maximalist except in his early works. Takayoshi Ishiwari elaborates on Barth's definition by including a postmodern approach to the notion of authenticity . Thus: Under this label come such writers as, among others, Thomas Pynchon and Barth himself, whose bulky books are in marked contrast with Barthelme's relatively thin novels and collections of short stories. These maximalists are called by such an epithet because they, situated in
2655-592: A mix of cultural influences. As a response to the often sterile nature of contemporary fashion, maximalism allows for a rich tapestry of self-expression, making it a popular choice among those who seek to stand out and make a statement in their wardrobe. Sources Postmodern literature Postmodern literature is a form of literature that is characterized by the use of metafiction , unreliable narration , self-reflexivity , intertextuality , and which often thematizes both historical and political issues. This style of experimental literature emerged strongly in
2832-463: A number of reviews, with most continuing to criticise the album's production and song lengths. Laura Snapes of Pitchfork described Be Here Now as being "one of the most agonizing listening experiences in pop music", amplified by its "bloated and indulgent" remaster. Snapes further panned Noel's decision to only remix "D'You Know What I Mean?", concluding that "this turgid collection is the ultimate expression of Be Here Now : as bloated and indulgent as
3009-409: A playful and humorous way: for example, the way Heller and Vonnegut address the events of World War II . The central concept of Heller's Catch-22 is the irony of the now-idiomatic " catch-22 ", and the narrative is structured around a long series of similar ironies. Thomas Pynchon 's The Crying of Lot 49 in particular provides prime examples of playfulness, often including silly wordplay, within
3186-429: A preposterous hoot." It's the sound of ... a bunch of guys, on coke, in the studio, not giving a fuck. There's no bass to it at all; I don't know what happened to that ... And all the songs are really long and all the lyrics are shit and for every millisecond Liam is not saying a word, there's a fuckin' guitar riff in there in a Wayne's World stylie. – Noel Gallagher reflecting on Be Here Now In
3363-440: A record deal, I went away and wrote the lyrics in about two weeks." Oasis producer Owen Morris joined Gallagher later with a TASCAM 8-track recorder, and they recorded demos with a drum machine and a keyboard. In August 1996, Oasis performed two concerts before crowds of 250,000 at Knebworth House , Hertfordshire; more than 2,500,000 fans had applied for tickets. The dates were to be the zenith of Oasis's popularity, and both
3540-408: A serious context. For example, it contains characters named Mike Fallopian and Stanley Koteks and a radio station called KCUF, while the novel as a whole has a serious subject and a complex structure. Since postmodernism represents a decentred concept of the universe in which individual works are not isolated creations, much of the focus in the study of postmodern literature is on intertextuality :
3717-462: A subgenre, these characteristics are: In music, Richard Taruskin uses the term "maximalism" to describe the modernism of the period from 1890 to 1914, especially in German-speaking regions, defining it as "a radical intensification of means toward accepted or traditional ends". This view has been challenged, however, on the grounds that Taruskin uses the term merely as an "empty signifier" that
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#17328526006093894-414: A term in the plastic arts is used by art historian Robert Pincus-Witten to describe a group of artists, including future Oscar-nominated filmmaker Julian Schnabel and David Salle , associated with the turbulent beginnings of Neo-expressionism in the late 1970s. These artist were in part "stimulated out of sheer despair with so long a diet of Reductivist Minimalism ". This maximalism was prefigured in
4071-599: A whole, he felt the album was "music built for impact, not explanation". Dele Fadele of Vox describes it as "a veritable rock'n'roll monsoon of an album; a giant jigsaw puzzle, an elemental force, a monster that cannot and will not be contained." Reviews in the British music press for (What's the Story) Morning Glory? had been generally negative. When it went on to become, in the words of Select editor Alexis Petridis , "this huge kind of zeitgeist-defining record",
4248-608: Is " Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote " by Jorge Luis Borges , a story with significant references to Don Quixote which is also a good example of intertextuality with its references to Medieval romances. Don Quixote is a common reference with postmodernists, for example Kathy Acker 's novel Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream . References to Don Quixote can also be found in Paul Auster 's post-modern detective story, City of Glass . Another example of intertextuality in postmodernism
4425-473: Is "often considered as the postmodern novel, redefining both postmodernism and the novel in general." The 1980s, however, also saw several key works of postmodern literature. Don DeLillo 's White Noise , Paul Auster 's New York Trilogy and this is also the era when literary critics wrote some of the classic works of literary history, charting American postmodern literature: works by Brian McHale , Linda Hutcheon , and Paul Maltby who argues that it
4602-420: Is John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor which deals with Ebenezer Cooke 's poem of the same name . Related to postmodern intertextuality, pastiche means to combine, or "paste" together, multiple elements. In Postmodernist literature this can be a homage to or a parody of past styles. It can be seen as a representation of the chaotic, pluralistic, or information-drenched aspects of postmodern society. It can be
4779-404: Is a solution. He can say "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly". At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence. Novelist David Foster Wallace in his 1990 essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" makes
4956-514: Is a style popular among Latin American writers (and can also be considered its own genre) in which supernatural elements are treated as mundane (a famous example being the practical-minded and ultimately dismissive treatment of an apparently angelic figure in Gabriel García Márquez 's " A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings "). Though the technique has its roots in traditional storytelling, it was
5133-528: Is a term coined by Alastair Fowler to refer to a specific type of metafiction in which the story is about the process of creation. According to Fowler, "the poioumenon is calculated to offer opportunities to explore the boundaries of fiction and reality—the limits of narrative truth." In many cases, the book will be about the process of creating the book or includes a central metaphor for this process. Common examples of this are Thomas Carlyle 's Sartor Resartus , and Laurence Sterne 's Tristram Shandy , which
5310-480: Is a vibrant and exuberant style that embraces bold colours , intricate patterns, and eclectic combinations. This aesthetic celebrates the idea of "more is more," encouraging individuals to express their creativity and personality through layered textures, diverse prints, and unexpected pairings. Unlike minimalism , which emphasizes simplicity and restraint, maximalism invites a playful approach to dressing, often incorporating vintage pieces, statement accessories , and
5487-525: Is about the narrator's frustrated attempt to tell his own story. A significant postmodern example is Vladimir Nabokov 's Pale Fire (1962), in which the narrator, Kinbote, claims he is writing an analysis of John Shade's long poem "Pale Fire", but the narrative of the relationship between Shade and Kinbote is presented in what is ostensibly the footnotes to the poem. Similarly, the self-conscious narrator in Salman Rushdie 's Midnight's Children parallels
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5664-401: Is adopted, devoid, in most part, of articles and conjunctions. The text is interspersed with lacunae and everyday language combines with poetry and biblical references leading up to syntax disruption and distortion of grammar. A sense of alienation of character and world is created by a language medium invented to form a kind of intermittent syntax structure which complements the illustration of
5841-661: Is an imported grand récit that is incompatible with the cultural production of Latin America. Along with Beckett and Borges, a commonly cited transitional figure is Vladimir Nabokov ; like Beckett and Borges, Nabokov started publishing before the beginning of postmodernity (1926 in Russian, 1941 in English). Though his most famous novel, Lolita (1955), could be considered a modernist or a postmodernist novel, his later work (specifically Pale Fire in 1962 and Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle in 1969) are more clearly postmodern. Some of
6018-611: Is another described as a "magic realist". Postmodernists such as Italo Calvino ( The Baron in the Trees , 1957), and Salman Rushdie ( The Ground Beneath Her Feet , 1999), commonly use magic realism in their work. A fusion of fabulism with magic realism is apparent in such early 21st-century American short stories as Kevin Brockmeier 's " The Ceiling ", Dan Chaon 's "Big Me", Jacob M. Appel 's "Exposure", and Elizabeth Graver 's "The Mourning Door". Fredric Jameson called postmodernism
6195-452: Is dominated by top-end high frequency tones, and according to Uncut ' s Paul Lester , its use of treble is reminiscent of both late 1980s Creation Records bands such as My Bloody Valentine , and the Stooges ' famously under-produced Raw Power (1973). The vocal melodies continue Noel's preference for "massed-rank sing-alongs", although Paul Du Noyer concedes that not all are of
6372-446: Is essentially a series of clichés taken from a language textbook. One of the most important figures to be categorized as both Absurdist and Postmodern is Samuel Beckett. The work of Beckett is often seen as marking the shift from modernism to postmodernism in literature. He had close ties with modernism because of his friendship with James Joyce; however, his work helped shape the development of literature away from modernism. Joyce, one of
6549-610: Is filled with "a range of musical features—big orchestration, motivic and harmonic complexity, and so on—that he takes to be typical of modernism". Taruskin, in any case, did not originate this sense of the term, which had been used by the mid-1960s with reference to Russian composers of the same period, of whom Sergei Prokofiev was "the last". Contemporary maximalist music is defined by composer David A. Jaffe as that which "embraces heterogeneity and allows for complex systems of juxtapositions and collisions, in which all outside influences are viewed as potential raw material". Examples include
6726-424: Is highly self-reflexive about the political issues it speaks to. Precursors to postmodern literature include Miguel de Cervantes ' Don Quixote (1605–1615), Laurence Sterne 's Tristram Shandy (1760–1767), James Hogg 's Private Memoires and Convessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), Thomas Carlyle 's Sartor Resartus (1833–1834), and Jack Kerouac 's On the Road (1957), but postmodern literature
6903-569: Is marked by moments in critical theory: Jacques Derrida 's " Structure, Sign, and Play " lecture in 1966 or as late as Ihab Hassan 's usage in The Dismemberment of Orpheus in 1971. Brian McHale details his main thesis on this shift, although many postmodern works have developed out of modernism, modernism is characterised by an epistemological dominant while postmodern works are primarily concerned with questions of ontology. Though postmodernist literature does not include everything written in
7080-536: Is more complicated than a single reference to another text. Robert Coover 's Pinocchio in Venice , for example, links Pinocchio to Thomas Mann 's Death in Venice . Also, Umberto Eco 's The Name of the Rose takes on the form of a detective novel and makes references to authors such as Aristotle , Sir Arthur Conan Doyle , and Borges . An early 20th century example of intertextuality which influenced later postmodernists
7257-568: Is not the work of oafs." Du Noyer conceded that Noel often tied himself up in "cosmic knots", but had "written words that sound simple and true, and are therefore poetic without trying to be." Lester read song titles such as "Stand by Me" and "Don't Go Away" as a series of demands, both to members of his private life and his public audience. Du Noyer praised Liam's vocal contributions and described his "Northern punk whine" as "the most distinctive individual style of our time." Lester alluded to Liam as Noel's "mouthpiece", although he qualified that Liam
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7434-675: Is occasionally listed as a postmodernist, although he started writing in the 1920s. The influence of his experiments with metafiction and magic realism was not fully realized in the Anglo-American world until the postmodern period. Ultimately, this is seen as the highest stratification of criticism among scholars. Other early 20th-century novels such as Raymond Roussel 's Impressions d'Afrique [ fr ] (1910) and Locus Solus (1914), and Giorgio de Chirico 's Hebdomeros (1929) have also been identified as important "postmodern precursor[s]". Postmodern literature represents
7611-461: Is often cited as a means of distinguishing modern and postmodern literature. The poem is fragmentary and employs pastiche like much postmodern literature, but the speaker in The Waste Land says, "these fragments I have shored against my ruins". Modernist literature sees fragmentation and extreme subjectivity as an existential crisis, or Freudian internal conflict, a problem that must be solved, and
7788-415: Is related to mastery." Although Ercolino's "maximalist" examples overlapped with LeClair's earlier systems novel examples, Ercolino did not see "mastery" as a defining feature. According to Ercolino, "it would make more sense to speak of an ambiguous relationship between maximalist narrative forms and power." Many modernist critics, notably B.R. Myers in his polemic A Reader's Manifesto , attack
7965-400: Is sometimes used as a rough boundary for postmodernism's start. Irish novelist Flann O'Brien completed The Third Policeman in 1939. It was rejected for publication and remained supposedly lost until published posthumously in 1967. A revised version called The Dalkey Archive was published before the original in 1964, two years before O'Brien died. Notwithstanding its dilatory appearance,
8142-613: Is the "voice of every working-class boy with half a yen to break out and make it big." The cover image was shot in April 1997 at Stocks House in Hertfordshire, the former home of Victor Lownes , head of the Playboy Clubs in the UK until 1981. It shows the band standing by the swimming pool outside the hotel, surrounded by various props. For the photo shoot , a white 1972 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow
8319-524: Is the third studio album by the English rock band Oasis , released on 21 August 1997 by Creation Records . The album was recorded at multiple recording studios in London, including Abbey Road Studios , as well as Ridge Farm Studio in Surrey. Although most tracks retain the anthemic quality of previous releases, the songs on Be Here Now are longer and contain many guitar overdubs . Noel Gallagher said this
8496-538: Is this an exclusive list of features. Linda Hutcheon claimed postmodern fiction as a whole could be characterized by the ironic quote marks, that much of it can be taken as tongue-in-cheek. This irony , along with black humor and the general concept of "play" (related to Derrida's concept or the ideas advocated by Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text ) are among the most recognizable aspects of postmodernism. Though
8673-540: Is understood as a historical period from the mid-1960s to the present, which is different from the (2) theoretical postmodernism, which encompasses the theories developed by thinkers such as Roland Barthes , Jacques Derrida , Michel Foucault and others. The third category is the "cultural postmodernism", which includes film, literature, visual arts, etc. that feature postmodern elements. Postmodern literature is, in this sense, part of cultural postmodernism. Late 19th and early 20th century playwrights whose work influenced
8850-567: The Odyssey of Homer , which Nancy Felson hails as the exemplar of the polytropic audience and its engagement with a work. In The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow to Roberto Bolano's 2666 , (2014) Stefano Ercolino characterised maximalism as "an aesthetically hybrid genre of the contemporary novel that develops in the second half of the twentieth century in the United States, then 'emigrates' to Europe and Latin America at
9027-757: The Bataan Death March , the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , the Holocaust , the bombing of Dresden , the Katyn massacre , the fire-bombing of Tokyo , and Japanese American internment ). It could also imply a reaction to significant post-war events: the beginning of the Cold War , the Civil Rights Movement , postcolonialism ( Postcolonial literature ), and the rise of the personal computer ( Cyberpunk and Hypertext fiction ). Some further argue that
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#17328526006099204-528: The Cat in the Hat runs for president. Hans-Peter Wagner offers this approach to defining postmodern literature: Postmodernism ... can be used at least in two ways – firstly, to give a label to the period after 1968 (which would then encompass all forms of fiction, both innovative and traditional), and secondly, to describe the highly experimental literature produced by writers beginning with Lawrence Durrell and John Fowles in
9381-591: The Lebanese Civil War and various real life political figures. Thomas Pynchon 's Mason and Dixon also employs this concept; for example, a scene featuring George Washington smoking marijuana is included. John Fowles deals similarly with the Victorian period in The French Lieutenant's Woman . Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five has been said to feature a metafictional, " Janus-headed " outlook in
9558-717: The New York School , the San Francisco Renaissance , and so on. These writers have occasionally also been referred to as the "Postmoderns" (see especially references by Charles Olson and the Grove anthologies edited by Donald Allen ). Though this is now a less common usage of "postmodern", references to these writers as "postmodernists" still appear and many writers associated with this group ( John Ashbery , Richard Brautigan , Gilbert Sorrentino , and so on) appear often on lists of postmodern writers. One writer associated with
9735-502: The United States in the 1960s through the writings of authors such as Kurt Vonnegut , Thomas Pynchon , William Gaddis , Philip K. Dick , Kathy Acker , and John Barth . Postmodernists often challenge authorities , which has been seen as a symptom of the fact that this style of literature first emerged in the context of political tendencies in the 1960s. This inspiration is, among other things, seen through how postmodern literature
9912-498: The Vietnam War , features a character named Tim O'Brien; though O'Brien was a Vietnam veteran, the book is a work of fiction and O'Brien calls into question the fictionality of the characters and incidents throughout the book. One story in the book, "How to Tell a True War Story", questions the nature of telling stories. Factual retellings of war stories, the narrator says, would be unbelievable, and heroic, moral war stories don't capture
10089-420: The "cultural logic of late capitalism". " Late capitalism " implies that society has moved past the industrial age and into the information age. Likewise, Jean Baudrillard claimed postmodernity was defined by a shift into hyperreality in which simulations have replaced the real. In postmodernity people are inundated with information, technology has become a central focus in many lives, and one's understanding of
10266-407: The "pub-trashing idiot kind" of previous releases. At the time of release, Q ' s Phil Sutcliffe summarised the lyrics of Be Here Now as a mixture of "hookline optimism, a swarm of Beatles and other '60s references, a gruff love song to Meg, and further tangled expressions of his inability/unwillingness to express profound emotions." David Fricke found the numerous Beatles references, including
10443-466: The 1960s and reaching to the breathless works of Martin Amis and the "Chemical (Scottish) Generation" of the fin-de-siècle. In what follows, the term 'postmodernist' is used for experimental authors (especially Durrell , Fowles , Carter , Brooke-Rose , Barnes , Ackroyd , and Martin Amis ) while "post- modern" is applied to authors who have been less innovative. Be Here Now (album) Be Here Now
10620-678: The 2003 John Dower-directed documentary Live Forever: The Rise and Fall of Brit Pop , music critic Jon Savage pinpointed Be Here Now as the moment where the Britpop movement ended. Savage said that while the album "isn't the great disaster that everybody says", he noted that "[i]t was supposed to be the big, big triumphal record" of the period. Q expressed similar sentiments, writing, "So colossally did Be Here Now fall short of expectations that it killed Britpop and ushered in an era of more ambitious, less overblown music." Irish Times journalist Brian Boyd wrote: "Bloated and over-heated (much like
10797-632: The Beat Generation who appears most often on lists of postmodern writers is William S. Burroughs . Burroughs published Naked Lunch in Paris in 1959 and in America in 1961; this is considered by some the first truly postmodern novel because it is fragmentary, with no central narrative arc; it employs pastiche to fold in elements from popular genres such as detective fiction and science fiction ; it's full of parody, paradox, and playfulness; and, according to some accounts, friends Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg edited
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#173285260060910974-439: The British music scene. Preceded by the lead single " D'You Know What I Mean? ", Be Here Now was an instant commercial success, becoming the fastest-selling album in British chart history and topping the albums chart in 15 countries. It was the biggest selling album of 1997 in the UK, with 1.47 million units sold that year. As of 2016, the album has sold eight million copies worldwide. It has been certified 6× Platinum in
11151-578: The Internet. It's in Camden Market . Whatever'. I think we've learned our lesson." According to Perry: "It seemed, particularly once you heard the album, that this was cocaine grandeur of just the most ludicrous degree. I remember listening to "All Around the World" and laughing—actually quite pleasurably—because it seemed so ridiculous. You just thought: Christ, there is so much coke being done here." Be Here Now
11328-455: The Rolls-Royce, suggested by Arthurs. Jones has said that the partially submerged Rolls-Royce was in reference to Keith Moon 's oft-fabled sinking of a Lincoln Continental into a hotel swimming pool in 1967. The release date in each region was commemorated on the calendar pictured on the sleeve; Harris said the dating "[encouraged] fans to believe that to buy a copy on the day it appeared
11505-565: The Ronettes ' " Be My Baby " and the Beach Boys ' Pet Sounds (1966) (the former, produced by Spector) has been described as maximalist. English rock band Oasis ' albums (What's the Story) Morning Glory? (1995) and Be Here Now (1997), along with rapper Kanye West 's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010) have also been described as maximalist works. Charlemagne Palestine describes his drone -based music as maximalist. Maximalism as
11682-457: The Story) Morning Glory? (1995), the album was highly anticipated. Oasis' management company, Ignition, were aware of the dangers of overexposure, and before release sought to control media access to the album. The campaign included limiting pre-release radio airplay and forcing journalists to sign gag orders . The tactics alienated the press and many industry personnel connected with the band and fuelled large-scale speculation and publicity within
11859-413: The Story) Morning Glory? ", while Noel had previously remarked that he would make three albums in this generic style. Yet the songs on Be Here Now differ in that they are longer than previous releases; an extended coda brings " D'You Know What I Mean? " to almost eight minutes, while " All Around the World " contains three key changes and lasts for a full nine minutes. When "D'You Know What I Mean?"
12036-496: The UK and Platinum in the US, being Oasis' third and final Platinum album in the latter country. According to co-producer Owen Morris , the recording sessions were marred by arguments and drug abuse, and the band's only motivations were commercial. While initial reception for Be Here Now was positive, retrospective reviews have been more negative, with many calling it bloated and over-produced. The band members have had differing views of
12213-505: The US by debuting at number two on the Billboard 200 chart. However, its first week sales of 152,000—below expected sales of 400,000 copies—were considered a disappointment. It missed the top of the chart by sales of only 771 copies. Be Here Now was the biggest selling album of 1997 in the UK, with 1.47 million units sold that year. By the end of 1997, Be Here Now had sold eight million units worldwide. However, most sales came from
12390-482: The actual achievement of order and meaning becomes unlikely. Gertrude Stein 's playful experiment with metafiction and genre in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) has been interpreted as postmodern. As with all stylistic eras, no definite dates exist for the rise and fall of postmodernism's popularity. 1941, the year in which Irish novelist James Joyce and English novelist Virginia Woolf both died,
12567-473: The aesthetics of postmodernism include August Strindberg , Luigi Pirandello , and Bertolt Brecht . Another precursor to postmodernism was Dadaism , which challenged the authority of the artist and highlighted elements of chance, whim, parody, and irony. Tristan Tzara claimed in "How to Make a Dadaist Poem" that to create a Dadaist poem one had only to put random words in a hat and pull them out one by one. Another way Dadaism influenced postmodern literature
12744-551: The age of epistemological uncertainty and therefore knowing that they can never know what is authentic and inauthentic, attempt to include in their fiction everything belonging to that age, to take these authentic and inauthentic things as they are with all their uncertainty and inauthenticity included; their work intends to contain the maximum of the age, in other words, to be the age itself, and because of this their novels are often encyclopedic. As Tom LeClair argues in The Art of Excess ,
12921-403: The album as dense and "colossal" feeling as possible, layered multiple guitar tracks on several songs. In many instances he dubbed ten channels with identical guitar parts, in an effort to create a sonic volume. Creation's owner Alan McGee visited the studio during the mixing stage; he said, "I used to go down to the studio, and there was so much cocaine getting done at that point ... Owen
13098-472: The album is a messy, mucky keg o' sound that constantly threatens to spill over and drown Noel's innately melodic songs." He further criticised the overtly-cluttered mix and overlong songs. Nevertheless, he concluded: "They sound more ferocious and confident than ever, yet less intimate, more distanced." Similarly, Simon Williams called it "one of the daftest records ever made" in NME . Likewise, Chris Norris criticised
13275-502: The album on his show, he received a phone call from Ignition informing him that he would not be able to preview further tracks because he didn't speak enough over the songs. Lamacq said, "I had to go on the air the next night and say, 'Sorry, but we're not getting any more tracks.' It was just absurd. " According to Creation's head of marketing John Andrews, "[The campaign] made people despise Oasis within Creation. You had this Oasis camp that
13452-400: The album's lyricism as deeper and superior to its predecessors while arguing that its backlash reflected "a record that too accurately reflect[ed] the underlying chaos and instability of the era it was made in". In 2020, Luke Holland of The Guardian described Be Here Now as a "flawed masterpiece"; writing that "as a snapshot of 90s excess – a bygone age of pig-headed rock-star bravado – it’s
13629-400: The album, and said that drugs and the band's indifference during recording led to the album having faults. In the same documentary, Liam defended the record, and said that "at that time we thought it was fucking great, and I still think it's great. It just wasn't Morning Glory ." In 2006, Liam said of Noel, "If he didn't like the record that much, he shouldn't have put the fucking record out in
13806-490: The album: Noel has severely criticised it, while Liam Gallagher has praised it, calling the album his favourite Oasis album. Music journalists such as Jon Savage and Miranda Sawyer have pinpointed the album's release as marking the end of the Britpop movement. In 2016, the album was reissued with bonus tracks, including a new remix of "D'You Know What I Mean?" By the summer of 1996, Oasis were widely considered, according to guitarist Noel Gallagher , "the biggest band in
13983-436: The artist is often cited as the one to solve it. Postmodernists, however, often demonstrate that this chaos is insurmountable; the artist is impotent, and the only recourse against "ruin" is to play within the chaos. Playfulness is present in many modernist works (Joyce's Finnegans Wake or Woolf's Orlando , for example) and they may seem very similar to postmodern works, but with postmodernism playfulness becomes central and
14160-480: The author presents multiple possible events occurring simultaneously—in one section the babysitter is murdered while in another section nothing happens and so on—yet no version of the story is favored as the correct version. Magic realism may be literary work marked by the use of still, sharply defined, smoothly painted images of figures and objects depicted in a surrealistic manner. The themes and subjects are often imaginary, somewhat outlandish and fantastic and with
14337-437: The author provides a general context and then allows the reader's imagination to shape the story. Among those categorized as postmodernist, literary minimalism is most commonly associated with Jon Fosse and especially Samuel Beckett . Fragmentation is another important aspect of postmodern literature. Various elements, concerning plot, characters, themes, imagery and factual references are fragmented and dispersed throughout
14514-470: The authors of these ʺ masterworks ʺ even ʺgather, represent, and reform the time's excesses into fictions that exceed the time's literary conventions and thereby master the time, the methods of fiction, and the readerʺ. In his book, Stefano Ercolino lists these seven titles as maximalist novels: Central to his notions of literary maximalism, Ercolino lists ten characteristics which all seven novels show to some extent, and thus leads him to propose maximalism as
14691-425: The band themselves at the time), the album has all that dreadful braggadocio that is so characteristic of a cocaine user." Reflecting in 2007, Garry Mulholland said: "The fact that nothing could have lived up to the fevered expectations that surrounded its release doesn't change the facts. The third Oasis album is a loud, lumbering noise signifying nothing." When reviewing in 2016, Lukowski wrote that although Oasis as
14868-525: The band's attempt to make a "grand, career-defining statement" backfired. In The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), Rob Sheffield described the record as "a concept album about how long all the songs were", comparing it to Elton John 's Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy (1975). Although he offered praise to the title track and "It's Getting Better (Man!!)", he considered the album to be
15045-416: The barriers between drama, fiction, and poetry, with texts of the collection being almost entirely composed of echoes and reiterations of his previous work ... He was definitely one of the fathers of the postmodern movement in fiction which has continued undermining the ideas of logical coherence in narration, formal plot, regular time sequence, and psychologically explained characters. The " Beat Generation "
15222-411: The beginning of postmodern literature could be marked by significant publications or literary events. For example, some mark the beginning of postmodernism with the first publication of John Hawkes ' The Cannibal in 1949, the first performance of En attendant Godot in 1953 ( Waiting for Godot , 1955), the first publication of Howl in 1956 or of Naked Lunch in 1959. For others the beginning
15399-398: The book guided by chance. He is also noted, along with Brion Gysin , for the creation of the " cut-up " technique, a technique (similar to Tzara's "Dadaist Poem") in which words and phrases are cut from a newspaper or other publication and rearranged to form a new message. This is the technique he used to create novels such as Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded . Magic realism
15576-454: The broader pastiche of the postmodern novel). In Robert Coover 's 1977 novel The Public Burning , Coover mixes historically inaccurate accounts of Richard Nixon interacting with historical figures and fictional characters such as Uncle Sam and Betty Crocker . Pastiche can instead involve a compositional technique, for example the cut-up technique employed by Burroughs. Another example is B. S. Johnson 's 1969 novel The Unfortunates ; it
15753-426: The cameras arrived regardless, just in time to record the initially slow trade. It was not until lunch time that sales picked up. By the end of the first day of release, Be Here Now sold over 424,000 units and by the end of business on Saturday that week sales had reached 663,389, making it based on first seven days sales, the fastest-selling album in British history. The album became their highest-charting release in
15930-416: The collapse of the American empire. Fabulation is a term sometimes used interchangeably with metafiction and relates to pastiche and Magic Realism. It is a rejection of realism which embraces the notion that literature is a created work and not bound by notions of mimesis and verisimilitude . Thus, fabulation challenges some traditional notions of literature—the traditional structure of a novel or role of
16107-493: The connection between the rise of postmodernism and the rise of television with its tendency toward self-reference and the ironic juxtaposition of what's seen and what's said. This, he claims, explains the preponderance of pop culture references in postmodern literature: It was in post-atomic America that pop influences on literature became something more than technical. About the time television first gasped and sucked air, mass popular U.S. culture seemed to become High-Art-viable as
16284-756: The country. As of 2016, the album had sold over eight million copies worldwide. Four of the album's 12 tracks were released as singles: "D'You Know What I Mean?", "Stand By Me", "All Around the World" and "Don't Go Away". In 2016, following the album's reissue and the release of the documentary Oasis: Supersonic , the album topped the UK Vinyl Albums Chart, 19 years after its original release. Initial reviews of Be Here Now were, in John Harris 's words, unanimous with "truly amazing praise". According to Harris, "To find an album that had attracted gushing notices in such profusion, one had to go back thirty years, to
16461-443: The creation of his book to the creation of chutney and the creation of independent India. Anagrams (1970), by David R. Slavitt , describes a week in the life of a poet and his creation of a poem which, by the last couple of pages, proves remarkably prophetic. In The Comforters , Muriel Spark 's protagonist hears the sound of a typewriter and voices that later may transform into the novel itself. Jan Křesadlo purports to be merely
16638-498: The description of dreams should play a greater role in the creation of literature. He used automatism to create his novel Nadja and used photographs to replace description as a parody of the overly-descriptive novelists he often criticized. Surrealist René Magritte 's experiments with signification are used as examples by Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault . Foucault also uses examples from Jorge Luis Borges , an important direct influence on many postmodernist fiction writers. He
16815-531: The earliest examples of postmodern literature are from the 1950s: William Gaddis ' The Recognitions (1955), Vladimir Nabokov 's Lolita (1955), and William Burroughs ' Naked Lunch (1959). It then rose to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s with the publication of Joseph Heller 's Catch-22 in 1961, John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse in 1968, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969, and many others. Thomas Pynchon 's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow
16992-422: The embargo, and Ignition panicked. According to Greengrass: "we'd been in these bloody bunker meetings for six months or something, and our plot was blown. 'Shit, it's a nightmare'." BBC Radio 1 received a CD containing three songs ten days before the album's release, on condition that disc jockey Steve Lamacq talked over the tracks to prevent illegal copies being made by listeners. The day after Lamacq previewed
17169-447: The emphasis on "the spiritual experience of the artist in the process of creation as a self-contemplation outside and beyond the artwork itself...These artists pay more attention to the process of creation and the uncertainty of meaning and instability in a work. Meaning is not reflected directly in a work because they believe that what is in the artist's mind at the moment of creation may not necessarily appear in his work." Examples include
17346-463: The entire work. In general, there is an interrupted sequence of events, character development and action which can at first glance look modern. Fragmentation purports, however, to depict a metaphysically unfounded, chaotic universe. It can occur in language, sentence structure or grammar. In Z213: Exit , a fictional diary by Greek writer Dimitris Lyacos , one of the major exponents of fragmentation in postmodern literature, an almost telegraphic style
17523-534: The exemplars of modernism, celebrated the possibility of language; Beckett had a revelation in 1945 that, in order to escape the shadow of Joyce, he must focus on the poverty of language and man as a failure. His later work, likewise, featured characters stuck in inescapable situations attempting impotently to communicate whose only recourse is to play, to make the best of what they have. As Hans-Peter Wagner says: Mostly concerned with what he saw as impossibilities in fiction (identity of characters; reliable consciousness;
17700-438: The fiction pages of The New Yorker , herald either a new chapter of postmodernism or possibly post-postmodernism. Many of these authors emphasize a strong urge for sincerity in literature. Several themes and techniques are indicative of writing in the postmodern era. These themes and techniques are often used together. For example, metafiction and pastiche are often used for irony. These are not used by all postmodernists, nor
17877-540: The first chapter of his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five is about the process of writing the novel and calls attention to his own presence throughout the novel. Though much of the novel has to do with Vonnegut's own experiences during the firebombing of Dresden, Vonnegut continually points out the artificiality of the central narrative arc which contains obviously fictional elements such as aliens and time travel. Similarly, Tim O'Brien 's 1990 short story cycle The Things They Carried , about one platoon's experiences during
18054-535: The first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back. Without lapsing into moral or artistic simplism, shoddy craftsmanship, Madison Avenue venality, or either false or real naiveté, he nevertheless aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal than such late-Modernist marvels as Beckett 's Texts for Nothing ... The ideal Postmodernist novel will somehow rise above the quarrel between realism and irrealism, formalism and "contentism", pure and committed literature, coterie fiction and junk fiction... Many of
18231-565: The first leg of an American tour, complaining that he needed to buy a house with his then-girlfriend Patsy Kensit . He rejoined the band a few days after for a key concert at the MTV Video Music Awards in New York, but intentionally sang off-key and spat beer and saliva during the performance. Amongst much internal bickering, the tour continued to Charlotte, North Carolina , where Noel finally lost his patience with Liam and announced he
18408-492: The first place ... I don't know what's up with him but it's a top record, man, and I'm proud of it—it's just a little bit long." In 2018, the BBC included it in their list of "the acclaimed albums that nobody listens to any more." Noel has observed that many Oasis fans still hold the album in high regard, as do prominent musicians such as Marilyn Manson . In 2017, Liam ranked the album as his favourite release by Oasis. The album
18585-415: The first two weeks of release, and once the album was released to UK radio stations the turnover tapered off. Buyers realised that the album was not another (What's the Story) Morning Glory? , and by 1999, Melody Maker reported that it was the album most sold to second-hand record stores. It has been certified 7× Platinum in the UK and Platinum in the US, being Oasis' third and final Platinum album in
18762-481: The first week as "fucking awful", and suggested to Noel that they abandon the session: "He just shrugged and said it would be all right. So on we went." Liam was under heavy tabloid focus at the time, and on 9 November 1996 was arrested and cautioned for cocaine possession at the Q Awards. A media frenzy ensued, and the band's management made the decision to move to a studio less readily accessible to paparazzi. Sun showbiz editor Dominic Mohan recalled: "We had quite
18939-460: The form of the novel became almost disintegrated. Catch-22 was a collage; if not in structure, then in the ideology of the novel itself ... Without being aware of it, I was part of a near-movement in fiction. While I was writing Catch-22 , J. P. Donleavy was writing The Ginger Man , Jack Kerouac was writing On the Road , Ken Kesey was writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , Thomas Pynchon
19116-403: The future of fiction?", Sam Leith compared Tom McCarthy's The Making of Incarnation with Dave Eggers' The Every . Leith wrote, "The question ultimately posed, or pointed to, by systems novels is: can novels do without people? And the answer I would give is: not completely. The problem is, perhaps, that the part of our minds that responds to old-fashioned novels hasn't changed as fast as
19293-458: The gamut from insightful to insipid", although Du Noyer admitted that Noel is "[to go by his lyrics] something of a closet philosopher ... and often romantic to the point of big girl's blousedom." While the tracks "Don't Go Away" and "The Girl in the Dirty Shirt" were described as unabashedly sentimental, Du Noyer went on to observe that "there is compassion and sensitivity in these tracks that
19470-470: The horrific and the inexplicable. It has been applied, for instance, to the work of Jorge Luis Borges , author of Historia universal de la infamia (1935) is considered a bridge between modernism and postmodernism in world literature. Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez is also regarded as a notable exponent of this kind of fiction—especially his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude . The Cuban Alejo Carpentier ( The Kingdom of This World , 1949)
19647-443: The idea of employing these in literature did not start with the postmodernists (the modernists were often playful and ironic), they became central features in many postmodern works. In fact, several novelists later to be labeled postmodern were first collectively labeled black humorists: John Barth , Joseph Heller , William Gaddis , Kurt Vonnegut , Bruce Jay Friedman , etc. It is common for postmodernists to treat serious subjects in
19824-432: The idea of parody itself. Metafiction is often employed to undermine the authority of the author, for unexpected narrative shifts, to advance a story in a unique way, for emotional distance, or to comment on the act of storytelling. For example, Italo Calvino 's 1979 novel If on a winter's night a traveler is about a reader attempting to read a novel of the same name. Kurt Vonnegut also commonly used this technique:
20001-532: The label "postmodern", wrote an influential essay in 1967 called " The Literature of Exhaustion " and in 1980 published "The Literature of Replenishment" in order to clarify the earlier essay. "The Literature of Exhaustion" was about the need for a new era in literature after modernism had exhausted itself. In "The Literature of Replenishment" Barth says: My ideal Postmodernist author neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates either his 20th-century Modernist parents or his 19th-century premodernist grandparents. He has
20178-481: The line " The Fool on the Hill and I Feel Fine " from "D'You Know What I Mean?" and "Sing a song for me, one from Let It Be " on the title track as lazy songwriting from Noel. Reviewers have also found Beatles references in the music, on tracks such as "All Around the World", which has been compared to the sing-along qualities of " Hey Jude " and " All You Need Is Love ". The lyrics were elsewhere described as "[running]
20355-530: The literary theorist Keith Hopper regards The Third Policeman as one of the first of that genre they call the postmodern novel. The prefix "post", however, does not necessarily imply a new era. Rather, it could also indicate a reaction against modernism in the wake of the Second World War (with its disrespect for human rights, just confirmed in the Geneva Convention , through the rape of Nanjing ,
20532-502: The lyrical content in Spin magazine, calling most of the lyrics on the record "meaningless". Ryan Schreiber of Pitchfork favourably compared the record to its two predecessors, finding that instead of "unforgettable three- to- four minute pop slices", there are now "six- to- ten minute long epics." Be Here Now proved divisive among Planet Sound readers, who voted the album their "most loathed" of 1997, as well as their second-favourite of
20709-414: The main character's subconscious fears and paranoia in the course of his exploration of a seemingly chaotic world. Patricia Lockwood 's 2021 Booker-shortlisted novel, No One Is Talking About This is a recent example of fragmentation, employing the technique to consider the effects of internet usage on quality of life and the creative process. John Barth , a postmodernist novelist who talks often about
20886-402: The maximalist novel as being disorganized, sterile and filled with language play for its own sake, empty of emotional commitment—and therefore empty of value as a novel. Yet there are counter-examples, such as Pynchon's Mason & Dixon and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest where postmodern narrative coexists with emotional commitment. In a 2022 GQ article, "Is the 'systems novel'
21063-407: The medieval Roman Catholic Church's opposition between "two...roads to grace:" the via negativa of the monk's cell and the hermit's cave, and the via affirmativa of immersion in human affairs, of being in the world whether or not one is of it. Critics have aptly borrowed those terms to characterize the difference between Mr. Beckett , for example, and his erstwhile master James Joyce , himself
21240-486: The mid-1960s by certain psychoanalytically oriented paintings by Gary Stephan . Charlotte Rivers describes how "maximalism celebrates richness and excess in graphic design", characterized by decoration, sensuality, luxury and fantasy, citing examples from the work of illustrator Kam Tang and artist Julie Verhoeven . Art historian Gao Minglu connects maximalism in Chinese visual art to the literary definition by describing
21417-485: The music of Edgard Varèse , Charles Ives , and Frank Zappa . In a different sense, Milton Babbitt has been described as a "professed maximalist", his goal being, "to make music as much as it can be rather than as little as one can get away with". Richard Toop , on the other hand, considers that musical maximalism "is to be understood at least partly as 'antiminimalism'". Phil Spector 's highly influential " Wall of Sound " recording technique, present in recordings such as
21594-421: The music press and the band realised it would not be possible for the band to equal the event. By this time, infighting had broken out in the band. On 23 August 1996, vocalist Liam Gallagher refused to sing for an MTV Unplugged performance at London's Royal Festival Hall , pleading a sore throat. He attended the concert and heckled Noel from the upper balcony. Four days later, Liam declined to participate in
21771-483: The music press was "baffled". Petridis believed the initial glowing reviews of Be Here Now were a concession to public opinion. In America, reviews were equally positive. Reviewing for the Chicago Sun-Times on release, Jae-Ha Kim considered the album as good as its two predecessors, writing: "The 12 tracks on Be Here Now aren't as immediately accessible as Oasis' earlier hits "Wonderwall" or "Live Forever". But
21948-539: The narrator, for example—and integrates other traditional notions of storytelling, including fantastical elements, such as magic and myth, or elements from popular genres such as science fiction . By some accounts, the term was coined by Robert Scholes in his book The Fabulators . Strong examples of fabulation in contemporary literature are found in Salman Rushdie 's Haroun and the Sea of Stories . Poioumenon (plural: poioumena; from Ancient Greek : ποιούμενον , "product")
22125-581: The novelist and theorist Umberto Eco explains his idea of postmodernism as a kind of double-coding, and as a transhistorical phenomenon: [P]ostmodernism ... [is] not a trend to be chronologically defined, but, rather, an ideal category – or better still a Kunstwollen , a way of operating. ... I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her "I love you madly", because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland . Still there
22302-547: The pop songs are mesmerising in their intense delivery and clean execution." Elysa Gardner offered similar in the Los Angeles Times , finding that with Be Here Now , the band grew more ambitious and succeeded without losing ground, although Gardner noted the "taut pop craftsmanship" that distinguished the band's two predecessors was "less prominent". Nevertheless, the album did receive some mixed reviews on release. In Entertainment Weekly , David Browne stated: "Much of
22479-798: The postmodern aesthetic. The work of Alfred Jarry , the Surrealists, Antonin Artaud , Luigi Pirandello and so on also influenced the work of playwrights from the Theatre of the Absurd . The term "Theatre of the Absurd" was coined by Martin Esslin to describe a tendency in theatre in the 1950s; he related it to Albert Camus 's concept of the absurd . The plays of the Theatre of the Absurd parallel postmodern fiction in many ways. For example, The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco
22656-491: The postmodern period, several post-war developments in literature (such as the Theatre of the Absurd , the Beat Generation , and magic realism ) have significant similarities. These developments are occasionally collectively labeled "postmodern"; more commonly, some key figures ( Samuel Beckett , William S. Burroughs , Jorge Luis Borges , Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez ) are cited as significant contributors to
22833-402: The previous winter, and said he wrote only a single guitar riff in the six months following the release of (What's the Story) Morning Glory? . Eventually, he disciplined himself to a routine of songwriting where he would go "into this room in the morning, come out for lunch, go back in, come out for dinner, go back in, then go to bed." Noel said "most of the songs were written before I even got
23010-399: The publicist of Oasis's label Creation Records , "People were being edged out of the circle around Oasis. People who knew them before they were famous rather than because they were famous." Hopkins likened the situation to a medieval court, complete with kings, courtiers, and jesters, and said: "Once you're in that situation you lose sight of reality." On 11 November 1996, Oasis relocated to
23187-484: The real is mediated by simulations of the real. Many works of fiction have dealt with this aspect of postmodernity with characteristic irony and pastiche. For example, the virtual reality of "empathy boxes" in Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in which a new technology-based religion called Mercerism arises. Another example is Don DeLillo 's White Noise presents characters who are bombarded with
23364-475: The record itself, the music a secondary concern to the product's status". Andrzej Lukowski of Drowned in Sound felt that when compared to the band's earlier work, Be Here Now lacked "aspirational rock 'n' roll swagger" besides a few tracks; he also agreed that a complete remix of the album would have been beneficial, considering "D'You Know What I Mean?" needed it "the least". In Clash magazine, Clarke Geddes
23541-458: The related term systems novel , the sprawling canvas and fragmented narrative of such writers as Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace has generated controversy on the "purpose" of a novel as narrative and the standards by which it should be judged. The postmodern position is that the style of a novel must be appropriate to what it depicts and represents, and points back to such examples in previous ages as Gargantua by François Rabelais and
23718-534: The relationship between one text (a novel for example) and another or one text within the interwoven fabric of literary history. Intertextuality in postmodern literature can be a reference or parallel to another literary work , an extended discussion of a work, or the adoption of a style. In postmodern literature this commonly manifests as references to fairy tales—as in works by Margaret Atwood , Donald Barthelme , and many others—or in references to popular genres such as sci-fi and detective fiction. Often intertextuality
23895-656: The release campaign. Ignition's strategy from that point on centred on an effort to suppress all publicity, and withheld access to both music and information from anybody not directly involved with the album's release. Fearful of the dangers of over-hype and bootlegging, their aim was to present the record as a "regular, everyday collection of tunes." To this end they planned a modest marketing budget, to be spent on subdued promotional activities such as street posters and music press adverts, while avoiding mainstream instruments such as billboard and TV advertising. According to Greengrass "We want to keep it low key. We want to keep control of
24072-453: The release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band ." While Q described the album as "cocaine set to music", most early reviews praised the record's length, volume and ambition, including Charles Shaar Murray , who called it the "Oasis World Domination Album" in Mojo . David Fricke of Rolling Stone complimented the song formula throughout the album, writing that it "pays off". However, as
24249-584: The reliability of language itself; and the rubrication of literature in genres) Beckett's experiments with narrative form and with the disintegration of narration and character in fiction and drama won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. His works published after 1969 are mostly meta-literary attempts that must be read in light of his own theories and previous works and the attempt to deconstruct literary forms and genres. ... Beckett's last text published during his lifetime, Stirrings Still (1988), breaks down
24426-407: The rural Ridge Farm Studio in Surrey. Though they reconvened with more energy, the early recordings were compromised by the drug intake of all involved. Morris recalled that "in the first week, someone tried to score an ounce of weed, but instead got an ounce of cocaine. Which kind of summed it up." Noel was not present during any of Liam's vocal track recordings. Morris thought that the new material
24603-677: The sake of irony. Historiographic metafiction (see above ) is an example of this. Distortions in time are central features in many of Kurt Vonnegut 's nonlinear novels, the most famous of which is perhaps Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five becoming "unstuck in time". In Flight to Canada , Ishmael Reed deals playfully with anachronisms, Abraham Lincoln using a telephone for example. Time may also overlap, repeat, or bifurcate into multiple possibilities. For example, in Robert Coover 's "The Babysitter" from Pricksongs & Descants ,
24780-399: The self's mastery of itself, economic and political hegemony, force in history and culture, the transforming power of science and technology, the control of information and art. These novels are also about the size and scale of contemporary experience: how multiplicity and magnitude create new relations and new proportions among persons and entities, how quantity affects quality, how massiveness
24957-461: The set, and the lighting crew couldn't start the generator. It was Alice in Wonderland meets Apocalypse Now ." Critics have tried to read into the selection of the cover props, but Johns said Gallagher simply selected items from the BBC props store he thought would look good in the picture. Two props considered were an inflatable globe (intended as a homage to the sleeve of Definitely Maybe ) and
25134-459: The song. A Rolling Stone review described the guitar lines as composed of "elementary riffs". There was some experimentation: "D'You Know What I Mean?" contains a slowed down loop from N.W.A 's " Straight Outta Compton ", while "Magic Pie" features psychedelically arranged vocal harmonies and a Mellotron . According to Noel, "All I did was run my elbows across the keys and this mad jazz came out and everyone laughed." The album's production
25311-408: The studio too quickly. The smart move would have been to take the rest of the year off. But at the time it seemed like the right thing to do. If you're a band and you've got a dozen songs you think are great, why not go and do it." I have to say that I cocked up, and I think Noel did too, in not using and referencing the demos more on the actual album sessions. ... Be Here Now would have been
25488-474: The studio. As with Oasis' previous two albums, the songs on Be Here Now are generally anthemic. The structures are traditional, and largely follow the typical verse – chorus – verse – chorus – middle eight – chorus format of guitar-based rock music. Reviewing for Nude as the News , Jonathan Cohen noted that the album is "virtually interchangeable with 1994's Definitely Maybe or its blockbuster sequel, (What's
25665-523: The studio. However, Morris later wrote: "It was a mistake on everyone's part, management very much included, that we didn't record Be Here Now in the summer of 1996. It would have been a much different album: happy probably." He described the Mustique demos as "the last good recordings I did with Noel", and said his relationship soured following the Knebworth concert. Recording began on 7 October 1996 at EMI's Abbey Road Studios in London. Morris described
25842-631: The term " historiographic metafiction " to refer to works that fictionalize actual historical events or figures; notable examples include The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez (about Simón Bolívar ), Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes (about Gustave Flaubert ), Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow (which features such historical figures as Harry Houdini , Henry Ford , Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria , Booker T. Washington , Sigmund Freud , and Carl Jung ), and Rabih Alameddine 's Koolaids: The Art of War which makes references to
26019-781: The term in relation to Don DeLillo , Tom LeClair chose seven novels as the focus of The Art of Excess . They were: Gravity's Rainbow (by Thomas Pynchon ), Something Happened (by Joseph Heller ), J R (by William Gaddis ), The Public Burning (by Robert Coover ), Women and Men (by Joseph McElroy ), LETTERS (by John Barth ) and Always Coming Home (by Ursula Le Guin ). LeClair's systems novels were all "long, large and dense" and all in some way striving for "mastery", showing similarity to Moby-Dick and Absalom, Absalom! in "range of reference, artistic sophistication, and desire for profound effect." LeClair wrote, "These seven novels are about mastery, about excesses of power, force, and authority in arenas small and large:
26196-468: The theme of technoculture and hyperreality. For example, in Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut , the character Dwayne Hoover becomes violent when he's convinced that everyone else in the world is a robot and he is the only human. This theme is likewise present in the satirical dystopian science-fiction tabletop role-playing game Paranoia . Dubbed maximalism by some critics, and overlapping with
26373-692: The threshold the twenty-first." . Ercolino singled out seven novels for particular attention: Gravity's Rainbow , Infinite Jest , Underworld , White Teeth , The Corrections , 2666 , and 2005 dopo Cristo by Babette Factory. Tom LeClair had previously coined the term systems novel in his 1987 book In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel , exploring the concept further in his 1989 book, The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction . Having introduced
26550-511: The translator of a "chrononaut's" handed down Homeric Greek science fiction epic, the Astronautilia . Other postmodern examples of poioumena include Samuel Beckett 's trilogy ( Molloy , Malone Dies and The Unnamable ); Doris Lessing 's The Golden Notebook ; John Fowles 's Mantissa ; William Golding 's The Paper Men ; Gilbert Sorrentino 's Mulligan Stew ; and S. D. Chrostowska 's Permission . Linda Hutcheon coined
26727-454: The truth. David Foster Wallace in The Pale King writes that the copyright page claims it is fiction only for legal purposes, and that everything within the novel is non-fiction. He employs a character in the novel named David Foster Wallace. Giannina Braschi also has a namesake character and uses metafiction and pastiche in her novels Yo-Yo Boing! and United States of Banana about
26904-421: The way the novel seeks to represent both actual historical events from World War II while, at the same time, problematizes the very notion of doing exactly that. Temporal distortion is a common technique in modernist fiction: fragmentation and nonlinear narratives are central features in both modern and postmodern literature. Temporal distortion in postmodern fiction is used in a variety of ways, often for
27081-547: The well-known postmodern novels deal with World War II , one of the most famous of which being Joseph Heller 's Catch-22 . Heller claimed his novel and many of the other American novels of the time had more to do with the state of the country after the war: The antiwar and anti government feelings in the book belong to the period following World War II: the Korean War , the cold war of the 1950s. A general disintegration of belief took place then, and it affected Catch-22 in that
27258-458: The whole mad thing." However, the extent that Ignition were willing to go to control access to the album generated more hype than could normally have been expected, and served to alienate members of both the print and broadcast media, as well as most Creation staff members. When "D'You Know What I Mean?" was planned as the first single, Ignition decided on a late release to radio so as to avoid too much advance exposure. However, three stations broke
27435-491: The work of a songwriter who has "turn[ed] his brain [in]to cocaine crispies". In a more positive review, Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic calls Be Here Now a "triumphant" record that "steamrolls over any criticism", praising Liam's vocal performances as his finest up to that point, as well as the songs as "intensely enjoyable" and "impossibly catchy". However, he felt that Noel's songwriting wasn't innovative compared to its predecessors. The album's 2016 reissue attracted
27612-486: The work of artists Ding Yi and Li Huasheng . In 1995 the "antipreneurial" one-man artist group Stiletto (artist) [] presented LESS function IS MORE fun as a post- neoist special waste sale of interpassive design-defuncts in a so-called Spätverkauf installation by Laura Kikauka at the Volksbühne Berlin , which she claimed as one of her projects of Maximalism . Maximalism in fashion
27789-574: The world around it." Literary minimalism can be characterized as a focus on a surface description where readers are expected to take an active role in the creation of a story. The characters in minimalist stories and novels tend to be unexceptional. Generally, the short stories are "slice of life" stories. Minimalism, the opposite of maximalism , is a representation of only the most basic and necessary pieces, specific by economy with words. Minimalist authors hesitate to use adjectives, adverbs, or meaningless details. Instead of providing every minute detail,
27966-399: The world is another recurring postmodern theme. For the postmodernist, no ordering is extremely dependent upon the subject, so paranoia often straddles the line between delusion and brilliant insight. Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 , long-considered a prototype of postmodern literature, presents a situation which may be "coincidence or conspiracy – or a cruel joke". This often coincides with
28143-559: The world ... bigger than, dare I say it, fucking God ." The commercial success of their previous two albums had resulted in media frenzy in danger of leading to a backlash. Earlier that year, Oasis members holidayed with Johnny Depp and Kate Moss in Mick Jagger 's villa in Mustique . During their last stay on the island, Noel wrote the majority of the songs that would make up Be Here Now . He had suffered from writer's block during
28320-400: The year, behind Radiohead 's OK Computer . Retrospectively, reception to Be Here Now has been more negative, with critics calling it bloated and over-produced. Reviewing in 2002, Stephen Thompson of The A.V. Club felt that although there were good tracks present, naming "My Big Mouth", "Don't Go Away" and "Stand by Me", the majority suffered from "cumbersome overlength", feeling that
28497-410: Was done to make the album sound as "colossal" as possible. The album cover features a shot of the band members at Stocks House in Hertfordshire. It is the last Oasis studio album to feature founding members guitarist Paul "Bonehead" Arthurs and bassist Paul "Guigsy" McGuigan as the two left in 1999. Following the worldwide success of their first two albums, Definitely Maybe (1994) and (What's
28674-417: Was in the development of collage, specifically collages using elements from advertisement or illustrations from popular novels (the collages of Max Ernst , for example). Artists associated with Surrealism , which developed from Dadaism, continued experimentations with chance and parody while celebrating the flow of the subconscious mind. André Breton , the founder of Surrealism, suggested that automatism and
28851-511: Was leaving the band. He said later: "If the truth be known, I didn't want to be there anyway. I wasn't prepared to be in the band if people were being like that to each other." Noel rejoined Oasis a few weeks later, but the band's management and handlers were worried. With an album's worth of songs already demoed, the Gallaghers felt that they should record as soon as possible. Their manager, Marcus Russell, said in 2007 that "in retrospect, we went in
29028-437: Was like 'I'm sorry, you're not allowed come into the office between the following hours. You're not allowed mention the word Oasis.' It was like a fascist state." One employee recalled an incident "when somebody came round to check our phones because they thought The Sun had tapped them." When Hopkins began to circulate cassette copies of the album to the music press a few weeks later, he required that each journalist sign
29205-427: Was lowered into the swimming pool and half submerged in the water. Photographer Michael Spencer Jones said the original concept involved shooting each band member in various locations around the world, but when the cost proved prohibitive, the shoot was relocated to Stocks House. Spencer remarked that the shoot "degenerated into chaos", adding that "by 8 pm, everyone was in the bar, there were schoolkids all over
29382-477: Was more positive, agreeing that although the album was bloated and over-produced, it still offered highlights, naming "I Hope, I Think, I Know". He also positively appraised the bonus tracks in the box set, believing fans will be satisfied with the extra material. However, in contrast to its later negative reception, Angus Batey of The Quietus offered a highly positive reappraisal of Be Here Now upon its 2016 reissue, calling it "the best Oasis album"; he praised
29559-400: Was not until the 1980s that the term "postmodern" caught on as the label for this style of writing. A new generation of writers—such as David Foster Wallace , William T. Vollmann , Dave Eggers , Michael Chabon , Zadie Smith , Chuck Palahniuk , Jennifer Egan , Neil Gaiman , Carole Maso , Richard Powers , Jonathan Lethem —and publications such as McSweeney's , The Believer , and
29736-413: Was out of control, and he was the one in charge of it. The music was just fucking loud ." Morris responded: "Alan McGee was the head of the record company. Why didn't he do something about the 'out of control' record producer? Obviously, the one not in control was the head of the record company." He said that he and the band had been dealing with personal difficulties the day and night before McGee visited
29913-734: Was particularly prominent in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 21st century, American literature still features a strong current of postmodern writing, like the postironic Dave Eggers ' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), and Jennifer Egan 's A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011). These works also further develop the postmodern form. Sometimes the term "postmodernism" is used to discuss many different things ranging from architecture to historical theory to philosophy and film . Because of this fact, several people distinguish between several forms of postmodernism and thus suggest that there are three forms of postmodernism: (1) Postmodernity
30090-412: Was reissued in several limited-edition formats, including silver-coloured double heavyweight vinyl, a double picture disc and cassette, on 19 August 2022 to celebrate its 25th anniversary. The reissue was promoted with new lyric videos for "D'You Know What I Mean? (NG's 2016 Rethink)" and "Stand by Me". All tracks are written by Noel Gallagher As part of a promotional campaign entitled Chasing
30267-524: Was released as the album's first single, Noel Gallagher expected to be asked to reduce the length of the song by two minutes. However, nobody had the courage. The tracks are more layered and intricate than before, and each contains multiple guitar overdubs . While Morris had previously stripped away layers of overdubs on the band's debut Definitely Maybe , during the production of Be Here Now he "seemed to gleefully encourage" such excess; "My Big Mouth" has an estimated thirty tracks of guitar overdubbed onto
30444-492: Was released in a box with no binding so that readers could assemble it however they chose. Metafiction is essentially writing about writing or "foregrounding the apparatus", as is typical of deconstructionist approaches, making the artificiality of art or the fictionality of fiction apparent to the reader and generally disregards the necessity for "willing suspension of disbelief". For example, postmodern sensibility and metafiction dictate that works of parody should parody
30621-472: Was released in the UK on 21 August 1997. The release date had been brought forward out of Ignition's fear that import copies of the album from the United States would arrive in Britain before the street date . Worrying that TV news cameras would interview queuing fans at a traditional midnight opening session, Ignition forced retailers to sign contracts pledging not to sell the record earlier than 8:00 am. However,
30798-531: Was the youth of America during the materialistic 1950s; Jack Kerouac , who coined the term, developed ideas of automatism into what he called "spontaneous prose" to create a maximalistic, multi-novel epic called the Duluoz Legend in the mold of Marcel Proust 's In Search of Lost Time . More broadly, "Beat Generation" often includes several groups of post-war American writers from the Black Mountain poets ,
30975-645: Was to participate in some kind of historical event." The album cover also spurred controversy from a legal viewpoint. In the case of Creation Records Ltd v. News Group Newspapers Ltd , the court decided that the collection of objects brought together for the album cover was insufficient in creating an artwork that could be protected by copyright. When Alan McGee, Creation's publicist Johnny Hopkins, and marketing executive Emma Greengrass first heard Be Here Now at Noel Gallagher's house, each had their doubts about its artistic value, but kept their doubts to themselves. One Creation employee recalled "a lot of nodding of heads,
31152-417: Was weak, but when he voiced his opinion to Noel he was cut down: "[So] I just carried on shovelling drugs up my nose." Morris had initially wanted to just transfer the Mustique demo recordings and overdub drums, vocals, and rhythm guitar, but the 8-track mixer he had employed required him to bounce tracks for overdubs, leaving him unable to remove the drum machine from the recordings. Noel, wanting to make
31329-451: Was writing V. , and Kurt Vonnegut was writing Cat's Cradle . I don't think any one of us even knew any of the others. Certainly I didn't know them. Whatever forces were at work shaping a trend in art were affecting not just me, but all of us. The feelings of helplessness and persecution in Catch-22 are very strong in Cat's Cradle . In his Reflections on 'The Name of the Rose ' ,
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