ABSTRACT
From the vantage point of the new millennium, it is clear that the dominant mode of literature in the second half of the twentieth century was postmodernist writing. The fiction later to be classified under this rubric emerged at around the time of the erection of the Berlin Wall in the early 1960s. By 1989, with the Wall demolished and the Cold War almost over, postmodernism had established itself as the dominant paradigm for the culture. After this point, the concept saturated the media and academia to such an extent that the term became problematic as an explanatory force due to its all-embracingness. It came to apply to virtually anything that mixed modes in a knowing manner.
