About Two Concepts: Postmodernism and Rewriting
About Two Concepts: Postmodernism and Rewriting

Summary/Abstract: This article deals with the particularities of postmodernism that designate rewriting as a primary literary technique, at the same time lending it a critical and challenging feature. Consequently, within the postmodernist context, rewriting gains the status of antiwriting, since its goal is to metamorphose the text and relate to it in an ironical manner, according to the socio-cultural demands. For this reason, feminism and postcolonialism take advantage of the favourable framework developed by postmodernism and choose critical rewriting as a weapon to restate their identities and shift the reader’s viewpoint from the centre to the periphery. By promoting pluralism and alterity, postmodernism diverges from the principles of modernism and reconnects with the past, which it subjects to the mechanism of resignification through ludic or ironic means. Naturally, the author-text-reader relationship is also changed; the focus shifts from the author to the readers, the latter being able to coordinate and transform the textual perspective according to their own reading experience and opinion on the textual reality. The reader’s new tasks depend on rereading the text, a process that allows the identification of those elements of interest that prompt the rewriting and give the reader the multiple roles of reader and writer.

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