"Postmodernism"?

Before History as Fiction started, I had never heard of postmodernism. As we delved further into reading about what different scholarly people thought postmodernism is (or was) I found myself wondering what was even the point of defining something that was so complicated/elusive/indescribable. Why even bother? It seems so wannabe elitist to spend so much time writing a paper on the definition of postmodernism while at the same time claiming that it can' be defined. After the first two days I still had no idea what postmodernism meant. Obscure comparisons between two film directors and their really old movies, and how one was postmodern while the other wasn't, helped nothing.

I forgot about feebly attempting to pin down the definition of postmodernism once we started Ragtime, which I am heartily enjoying. In fact, just at a glance I think the books we read will be really interesting this semester. I was excited when I saw Slaughterhouse Five was on the list because I thought it was really interesting and I read through it in a day, which is saying a lot. There are very few books that I will sit down and read straight through. There's something refreshing about both Slaughterhouse Five and Ragtime compared to other books I've read. I can't quite pin it down; perhaps it's the way the writing is so nontraditional and doesn't follow the normal layout of a story where the reader follows one character straight through a chronological order of events with obstacles that the character overcomes and then lives happily ever after. Maybe it's more interesting because sex is interspersed throughout both stories so unabashedly. I don't know the reason, but both Ragtime and Slaughterhouse Five are postmodernist works. Even though I may not be able to define postmodernism, I think I like it.