The document discusses key themes and devices of postmodern literature, comparing it to modernism. Postmodern literature continues modernism's tendencies of alienation, discontinuity, and social individualism. It focuses on fragmentation, pastiche, and presenting unordered universes. Postmodernist critics like Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault were academically trained in philosophy including Nietzsche, Marx, and Heidegger. The term "postmodernism" began being used in literature in the 1960s to describe styles like "black humor" and "fabulism".