I also found interesting the criticism of postmodernism as a grand narrative subject to the same criticism it uses on other grand narratives. Perhaps this is why postmodernism is so difficult to pin down. At its very essence, it hopes to avoid becoming a grand narrative.

What I still can’t fully get my head around is that “rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for. The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done.”

Okay. I understand that modern rules of literature are simply a guideline and that authors use them in postmodern work to allude to the unrepresentable. I also understand that the fusion of various forms either leads to a unified result, or doesn’t, and that Lyotard would say that the reader, not the author, determines the outcome. Does this mean that reader interpretation defines rules the author doesn’t fully understand until after their work is read?

Again, I’m stuck in the grand Delorian of time travel. Help a poor girl out.