Lyotard (1979) defines it as 'Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards meta narratives.' (La Condition Postmodern: Rapport Sur le Savoir). The rejection of the grand narratives, use of playful irony, humor, and temporal distortion are only a few of several techniques that can be said to define postmodernist writing. Postmodern writers thus question established dogmas and show a sense of uncertainty, unreliability, and anti-authoritarian tendency. Postmodern literature is concerned with a deconstruction of existing factual knowledge and shows how truth is relative and language is unreliable in conveying the intended meaning. Bradbury in this novel describes how books can take us back to a civilized time, and that letting people not read is one of the worst crimes in history. Global surveillance has made most of the world paranoid about the internet and technological gadgets, which are nothing more than spyware for those in power. T.V is also one of the mediums through which we are psychologically conditioned into thinking in particular ways it has also created emotional distance among families. Bradbury in his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 explores the destructive side of technology and dictatorship, which can deprive people of normal life and basic freedom. Relentless slaughter of human lives and psychological trauma left the people in a state of constant fear and distress.

Postmodernism as a literary movement is said to have started after WWII, when man lost all hope in the so-called scientific progress and advancement, because of the range of destruction it caused in the form of the World Wars. I claim that Bradbury's novel typifies a broader tendency in postwar culture to use animal life as a metric by which to gauge the supposed technological attenuation of subjectivity, and I explore how his pessimistic diagnosis of the emergent mass culture discovers a surprising conjuncture of human, animal, and technology in the postwar moment.

Drawing on recent work in posthumanist theory and animal studies, I produce a new reading of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953) in the light of this twofold crisis of human exceptionalism. In the same period, new research into the cognitive and behavioral capacities of nonhuman animals put further pressure on the exceptional status of the humanist subject. The mass production of culture and an increasing dependency on technologies were seen as inimical to individualism, literary culture, and human agency. Postwar literature (and postwar sf in particular) is marked by a concern that emerging techno-cultural developments would undermine the sovereignty of the humanist subject.

Fahrenheit 451 easton press