Browsing by Author "The article is devoted to American postmodernism, its iconic texts and the most interesting representatives from Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Richard Brautigan, William Gaddis, Donald Barthelme, John Hawkes to Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace. The article mentions experimental, intellectual, innovative texts of modern American literature, which fundamentally rethought old artistic conventions and established new rules of the genre game. It has been proven that postmodernism, as a general name for certain trends in art, emerged after modernism and avant-garde. It is considered as a whole, multi-meaning, dynamic, dependent on the social and national environment, a complex of artistic, philosophical scientific and theoretical ideas, distanced from classical and neoclassical literature, as a direction in art, which is characterized by a departure from the aesthetic criteria and traditions of classical art. The article attempts to prove that postmodernism did not appear instead of modernism, but as an addition to it or as a continuation of modernism. The authors prove that modernism, which arose from the denial of past foundations and created many new ones, eventually lost the potential for further development, because development without a connection with the past is impossible. The article proves that, in contrast to modernism, postmodernism is built on the combination and mixing of different styles. At the same time, postmodernism can also be considered a denial, for example, of monotony and monotony, which gradually began to manifest in modernism. However, the symbiosis and pluralism of cultures corresponded to the trends of the second half of the 20th century to a greater extent, and therefore developed. Among other main features of postmodernism, intertextuality, non-linear organization of the text, double code, lack of authorial position are considered."