Postmodern Literary CriticismPostmodernism attempts to question or challenge the notion of a single, absolute, unified master narrative without simply replacing it with another. It is a paradoxical, recursive and problematic method of criticism. It encourages transcendence through or despite limitation, while simultaneously decentralizing the concept of absolute transcendence. To this end, it encourages the development of a heightened sense of self in relation to oneself and the world around him. Postmodernism presupposes an ontology of fragmented being. Where modernism affirms the primacy of the subject in revealing universal truth, postmodernism challenges the authority of the subject and, therefore, the universal truth based on it. Modernism and postmodernism, however, draw on distinctly different epistemological modes: critical and dogmatic. Modernism presents itself as a source of dogmatic knowledge. Dogmatic knowledge is an immutable and absolute ideology. He has found the Truth or believes it is possible to acquire it. Knowledge is objective, tangible and quantifiable. The dogmatic mode attempts to subordinate further critical thinking in order to spread knowledge of the Truth. Postmodernism, on the other hand, aspires to reflect criticism. Critical knowledge is a process, rather than a product. Absolute knowledge is unattainable, conditional, and, at best, provisional. Every unequivocal sense of reality is rendered superfluous. The truth, therefore, remains elusive, relativistic, partial and always incomplete; it cannot be learned in its entirety. “Truth itself is a contingent matter and takes on a different form in light of different local emergencies and the beliefs associated with them” (Fish 207). Critical knowledge has no choice but to exercise complicity with the cultural-historical context in which it is hopelessly mired. As Lee Patterson states, "Even scholars dealing with chronologically and geographically distant materials are in fact examining a cultural matrix within which they themselves locate themselves, and the understandings they arrive at are influenced not simply by contemporary interests but from the shaping past that originated." they are engaged in recovery" (259). Postmodern literary criticism asserts that art, author, and audience can only be approached through a series of mediating contexts. "Novels, poems, and plays are neither timeless nor transcendent" (Jehlen 264). Canonical issues must also be considered in such contexts. "Literature is not just a question of what we read, but of who reads and who writes, and in what social circumstances... The canon itself is a historical event; belongs to the history of the school" (Guillory 238,44).