Professional Documents
Culture Documents
MODERNISM / POSTMODERNISM
Lecture Notes
BY
ANA-KARINA SCHNEIDER
SIBIU 2008
Table of Contents
. 24
. 51
. 76
... 80
84
Part One:
Modernism: Tradition and Innovation
if the popular conception of human action, before Freud, had been based upon a possibility
of self-knowledge, of presence of mind, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) and other works established the disturbing
possibility that one could never really know more than the ostensible reasons for such
action; if the popular conception of morality, before Nietzsche, was of something in
essence indisputable, anchored by a concept of a god outside the human machine, and so
not subject to the vagaries of mortality, it became, after Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-5)
or The Gay Science (1882), but a necessary and effective human fiction, subject to human
readjustment. (120-1)
qtd. Brooks 124); at worst, it is the expression of the ceaseless incapacity ever quite to
awaken from the nightmare of history (Eagleton qtd. Brooks 125). Brooks comments:
Far from ignoring or defying tradition, they [the works of modernism] attempt to redefine
it, to see beyond the formal imperatives of the immediate past and to re-select from the vast
body, domestic and otherwise, of the literature which preceded them. Finding their impulse
in a creativity highly conscious of its own departure, they must also, as a consequence,
constantly remind us of, and so paradoxically sustain, the very things which they seek to
jettison or modify. Whether or not we see such a phenomenon as definitive of modernism
itself or simply as marking an essential or climactic stage in its development, it would seem
that de Mans points must be accommodated, and that it might be better to see the identity
of modernism as inhering in the nature, range, and profile of its dialogue with history than
in a clear severance from it. (125)
The avant gardes are commonly defined as the highest (shrillest?) expression of the
urge to make it new and leave past modes of expression behind. Distinctions between
Modernism and Avant-Gardes are therefore edifying:
- they overlap over the time period between 1910 and World War II
- distinction in terms of attitude towards the past:
The Modernists tried to recuperate or assimilate the past by means of their
experiments with memory and their intellectual analysis of repetition;
The Avant-Gardists emphasised the notion of forgetting.
=> further distinctions:
Modernism
analysis
detachment
qualification
awareness of the moment
intellectual doubt
Avant-Gardes
action
commitment
rupture
progressiveness
dependence on mtarcits
(Douwe Fokkema 1990: 236)
Orr thus reverses and qualifies the generally held opinion according to which modernism
was essentially a reaction against the materialism (to use Virginia Woolfs term) 1 and
realism of the Victorian age. The definition of the real and therefore also of realism as
a representational mode changed in order to accommodate the modernist intuition that
there is no transcendent and universal truth, only personal perceptions of it; hence the
sense of fragmentariness and alienation. Yet the Real itself, as Orr shows, remains the
predominant quest of the novel until 1950 and beyond. Because the world of modernity
has become more and not less elusive, the Real has become more and not less important
(620). Hence the interest in experience, consciousness, point of view, polymodal and
polyphonal narratives. Andr Bleikasten economically sums up: what characterizes
modernist fiction by and large is neither nave realism nor systematic antirealism, but the
ever renewed tension between mimesis (foregrounding of the referent) and poesis
(foregrounding of the medium and the writing process) (in Weinstein 84).
In this sense, Douwe Fokkemas formulation of the period code of modernism,
cited by Brian McHale, proves helpful in identifying typically modernist fiction as well as
departures from that model:
the compositional and syntactical conventions of the modernist code include textual
indefiniteness or incompleteness, epistemological doubt, metalingual skepticism, and
respect for the idiosyncrasies of the reader. Its semantic aspects are organised around issues
of epistemological doubt and metalingual self-reflection. (8)
1
The reference to Woolf here is far from random: in her Modern Fiction the English novelist pleaded
essentially that the Victorians had been mistaken in their rendering of life and demanded a redefinition of
reality. As Bleikasten points out, Woolfs question reverberates throughout twentieth-century fiction:
modern novelists all knew that there was no such thing as objective reality, only each individuals sense of
it (in The Cambridge Companion 81).
Brian McHale therefore speaks about the dominant (in a slightly modified Jacobsonian
sense) of modernist fiction as epistemological, that is, preoccupied with questions that
foreground the limits of knowledge (9). The context in which McHale explains the
functioning of this period code is contrastive and retrospective, from the vantage-point of
postmodernism. This approach, according to him, has the advantage of outlining not only
the dominant of a particular paradigm but also its trajectory, its departure from the code;
in the terms of our title, the margin for innovation. On the same view, the dominant of
postmodern fiction is ontological.
In similar poetic terms, Jean-Francois Lyotard assesses modernism comparatively
as one possible aesthetic of the sublime. The sublime is here defined as what can be
conceived even though there can be no presentation of it, either in reality or in
imagination. Along these lines,
modern aesthetic is an aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one. It allows the
unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents; but the form, because of its
recognizable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and
pleasure. Yet these sentiments do not constitute the real sublime sentiment, which is in an
intrinsic combination of pleasure and pain: the pleasure that reason should exceed all
presentation, the pain that imagination or sensibility should not be equal to the concept.
According to Roughley, both James Joyce and Jacques Derrida explore and articulate
such spaces between in their fascination with the relationship between speech and
writing.
Fokkema explains the difference in terms of attitudes towards time: Modernism
and earlier paradigms held a linear view of time; Postmodernism prefers simultaneity.
Hence the latters lack of rejection of past modes and artists and its rejection of past
trends and aesthetics (1990: 239).
Speed, intensity, novelty, obsolescence, disruption, rebellion these are some of the
battle cries associated with Western literature at the beginning of the twentieth century.
All the same, the degree to which these features of modernism are relevant to the cultural
phenomena taking place in different countries varies greatly, enhancing the relativisation
of a concept that is already too broad to be functional.
The other essential landmark is the World War I. Brooks again:
The First World War was an event so devastating that it created rapidly a set of demands
upon artists and writers that most would have found inconceivable before it, and that might
therefore be said, if not actually to introduce modernism proper, to divide it into two major
moments, the second of which, for many, condemned dramatically a historical innocence or
ignorance in the first. (125)
In Brooks nomenclature, the period before that event is pre-modernism, whereas the
post-war years are designated as High Modernism. The differences between the two
faces of modernism are obvious in thematic terms. Brooks discusses these differences
along the lines of the new uses the Faustian myth was put to at different times. Before the
War, Brooks explains, there is a sense that the pursuit of knowledge has overreached
itself and resulted in a radical discomfort, an alienation of the human from its former
image of itself. This state of mind resulted in books at the end of which the central
characters, having exploded beneath the surface of or otherwise significantly expanded
their prior knowledge and experience, find themselves isolated, somehow deprived by
their own efforts of the very world they had sought to know or save (125). This element
is common to high literature and popular adventure novels such as Alexandre Dumas
Count of Monte Cristo (published as early as 1844). Brooks goes on:
While the Faustian myth is in no way eradicated by the Great War, several of the major
works thereafter those most often said to characterize High Modernism are dominated
by something quite different. Experience and investigation are seen not as agencies of
alienation, but, for those who can withstand the initial disorientation, as the most likely
means of restitution or accommodation. The Waste Land, Ulysses and the Cantos in
particular are dominated not by a myth of unwitting destruction, but by one of quest for
which, having its origins likewise in the end of a cataclysmic conflict, the story of
Odysseus is particularly suited. The artist, hitherto alienated by investigation, now becomes
its agent. Punished for irreverence, he or she now learns or re-learns, through experience,
lessons which had somehow been disastrously forgotten. (126)
The lesson alluded to here is that every age must create its own forms to contain its
specific anxieties and preoccupations. More concretely, the lesson that had been forgotten
by writers was that the conventions and decorums of English poetry [and prose] as this
generation had inherited them its established forms and meters, its proprieties of tone,
diction and subject curtailed severely its ability to present the real world with any
accuracy and immediacy (126).
Whereas in Europe the modernist experiment started soon after the turn of the
century, having been thoroughly prepared by the aestheticism and millennial pessimism
of the last decade of the nineteenth century, in the United States the characteristic fiction
of the twentieth century begins in the nineteen twenties, with the return from the Great
War of the young men who will become the great modernist writers. Although many of
them choose exile in hopes of finding a more propitious environment, 2 America itself is
an increasingly stimulating cultural milieu, undergoing changes so vast and so rapid as
totally to reshape mores and patterns of human behaviour, as well as change[s] in
literary forms and structures, the growth of a more modernist mode of writing, the shift of
writers towards bohemianism and towards a much more intense obsession both with their
craft and with the distinctive and exposed moral conditions of their generation (Bradbury
in Bradbury & Palmer 7). In the first chapter of The American Novel and the Nineteen
Twenties, Malcolm Bradbury enthuses:
The twenties in America remain fascinating as a cultural spectacle because the decade
enshrines a paradox. It is thought of as a classic decade of materialism, of business-ethics
and of prohibition, of what the writers who so regularly condemned it and expatriated
themselves from it called puritanism; but it is also the decade of the greatest, gaudiest
spree in history, as Fitzgerald told us, when something subtle passed to America, the style
of man, of cultural ebullience and experiment. (in Bradbury & Palmer 6)
Regarded as the spectacle of a society seeking to find its model of historical progress
through the expansion of personal identity (7), this process no doubt has its attractions.
But for those who experienced it immediately the paradox at the heart of the American
nineteen-twenties eventually amounted to a crisis, both cultural and personal, the
comeuppance of a society which fails to invigilate its economics, adjust to the human
interest, question its illusions (12).
It would be difficult to tell to what an extent this double crisis was caused by the
impact of European influences or by inevitable evolutionary processes and reactions to
them within the American society. According to Bradbury (and John Orr would agree),
Paris, as the epitome of Europeanism, was merely a setting which supplemented the
2
For many of them Europe promises to be a more accommodating home, and Fitzgeralds expatriates
represent a romantic, if unsuccessful, attempt to redeem the breakdown of the modern world by living
through it, to hold in balance the sense of futility of effort and the sense of the necessity of struggle.
Faulkner, too, gives Europe a shot, but returns in recoiling disappointment at the anonymity he found
himself enmeshed in.
10
absence of an artistic and intellectual environment at home and gave writers a strong
feeling of assimilating the arts, the new movements of modern culture, consciousness and
sensibility, into American experience (13). In other words, while there, American writers
were most steeped into the realities of their homeland, but had the advantage of critical
distance and artistic emulation. There are, therefore, major differences between the
European and the American types of the paradigm, and Bradbury explicates the most
important ones:
Where in Europe modernism seems largely a crisis of the intellectuals and the social place
of the arts, in the United States it can be seen as a manifestation of a democraticevolutionary society always oriented toward innovation and the future. In short, the
experiment of the decade was not simply an expatriate-bohemian manifestation; it was
often conducted in close relation to the forces for change in American life (15-16)
As the critic explains, this does not exclude the element of crisis in the experimental
American writing of the nineteen twenties. It is clearly there, but it tends to come out of
the forces of the changing world, rather than simply out of form itself. It is less a crisis of
perception and language than a crisis of consciousness, of the strain of living in a
modernizing world (16). The originality of American novelists stems from their double
allegiance to modernism and American realities. Again, in Bradburys words,
They embody something of the novelty of a fictional experiment which generates formal
complexity, encourages the thrust outward from history and into symbolist transcendence
the crisis of the word. But they also embody that novelty of modern awareness and
experience, that sense of expansion and exposure, the experiment of history itself: the crisis
of the world. (19)
What is conspicuously American about this double crisis is that its two facets, the
historical and the formal, complement and moderate each other, resulting in a unique and
viable literary tradition. In Europe, on the other hand, the modernist experiment seemed
to herald the end of things, a point after which, at best, all was to start anew.
I dwell at length on this highly quotable essay because it has the advantage of a
complex perspective on American modernism, which emerges as an autochthonous
product as much as the result of the contemporary dynamics of Western culture. Bradbury
emphasises the double-targeted critique that characterises American modernism, the
unique nature of its experiment, and the continuous outcome of that complex process. The
entire volume in fact takes up the same tone. Chapter two by Lawrence Levine, for
instance, insists that to a very large extent the nineteen twenties in America were a
backwards-looking time, in which the disappointment over the untoward changes brought
about by industrialisation, immigration, war, and unsuccessful involvement in
international politics, was gradually turning into nostalgia for lost bearings and the
puritan ethos. Hence the common and indiscriminate view which the chapter seeks to
detail and correct of the nineteen twenties as a decade dominated by Puritanism,
Prohibition, Main Street, the Red Scare, the Ku Klux Klan. The truth of the matter is,
Levine points out, that America was, throughout the twentieth century, torn between the
11
awareness of the impingement of the new and the older dreams of a new world. This was
a deep conflict within the individual, between what he knew and what he felt.
Thus, American modernism emerges not as a confused response to European
fashions and influences, but primarily as the product of local dilemmas and tensions. The
European impact is especially present at the formal level and its magnitude is, in the case
of certain writers, overwhelming to the point of displacing any interest in conventional
notions of plot, character, setting. To a large extent, formal innovation is determined by
the newly-imported social and scientific theories. Of these, the most difficult to come to
terms with was perhaps Freudian psychoanalysis, which made the last stronghold of
rationalism collapse as it was discovered that mans many-layered consciousness is
uncontrollable and unaccountable, governed by desire. Hence the frequency of characters
drifting through life towards death, or of mad or demonic characters, especially in
Southern literature: they represent so many heretofore-silenced viewpoints on reality.
Their deviant perceptions and responses serve the essential purpose of questioning both
reality, and the knowledge and representation thereof.
Hence, also, the problem of representing experience in credible, viable ways that
range from multiple perspectives, through stream of consciousness or the more coherent
interior monologue, to collages of materials and methods borrowed from the mass-media
of the time. The epiphany, the mysterious instant of recognition and realisation displaces
the unified perspectival sequence, as reality is a swiftly moving target bombarded by
heteroglot styles from all angles and distances (Orr 620). By using such devices as
multiple narrators and perspectives, episodic structure and poetic form, and by dismissing
chronology and clock time, the modernist novel foregrounds the process of storytelling,
thus thematising questions about cognition and self-reflexivity. The conventional bounds
of traditional genres and of language are transgressed, paralleling the collapse of the
formerly clearly defined, though generous and comprehensible, boundaries of the human
psyche. One essential way of perceiving modernism is to see it as an art that insists on its
internal frame, on the active presence of the medium used, on the foregrounding of the
artistic activity, so that the achievement of the storys form is part of the story (Bradbury
1992: 62). Therefore, another of the paradigmatic marks of modernism can be said to be
the replacement of the moral with the aesthetic. The former moralising or didactic
function of literature is superseded by formal virtuosity as the main criterion of cultural
value; at the same time, morality and history are redefined as essentially materials for
fiction rather than an external frame of reference. William Faulkners work eminently
illustrates both the foregrounding of the creative process and the stylisation of the past
and its ethos as a means of mediating between art and reality.
John Orr half-jokingly explains the cause of this many-sided openness of the
literary text:
The great feat of the twentieth century is not to show that vision triumphs over fact or that
experiment triumphs over experience. It is to show that the world, once flat and later round,
is now a cube. It has to be seen from all sides, even though there are no sides. We can
never be sure that the whole is the sum of its parts, nor that perception exhausts experience.
12
If science shows the world to be infinite in its complexity, the modernist novel shows
experience to be limitless. (619-20)
As the real becomes more elusive, the novel tends to become more and more inclusive, in
an attempt to reinvigorate the real, to bring it into focus, as it were. No facet of life is
excluded or repressed, not even the most trivial, and by no means can myth and tradition
be ignored in the quest for the real. A deeper, archetypal meaning resides in every aspect
of human existence and it resurfaces as it is attached to mythical correlatives. Hence the
need to go back in time, to the very sources of life, in quest for meaning. Faulkner is the
master of transcendence: the world he creates, though solidly anchored in the realities of
the South, is in fact ordered around timeless archetypes. Michael OBrien defines
modernism as an invocation of the romantic myth of an organic culture before the fall
(qtd. in Moreland 24). This definition is especially true of the American South. Of the two
main forms of myth (1) classical and biblical mythology, used only as a correlative, and
not as a pattern that shapes reality (as in Joyce and T.S. Eliot); and (2) the mythologising
of the past the latter is particularly well adapted to Southern literature. It engages both
the Calvinistic morality and millennial ambitions of the regions early settlers, and the
sense of inadequacy that characterised their nostalgic twentieth-century heirs.
David Brooks ends his insightful essay by enumerating the main sources of the
difficulties that readers experience in dealing with modernist texts:
[Difficulty] may spring from a predisposition toward the writerly rather than the readerly
text, or from a desire rather to stimulate the faculty of thought itself than to dictate the
particular nature of things thought. It may spring from a concern on the writers part to
maintain in the texture of their work an evident presence of the past, or from a postNietzschean insistence on the role of the will in overcoming eternal recurrence. Whatever
its origins, however, it is perhaps best seen not as a conscious arrogance toward the reader,
but in the light of that ostranenie the estrangement that might prepare the way for a fresh
seeing for which, unbeknown to most of the English modernists, the Russian Formalist
Viktor Shklovsky and others were arguing at the time (see Shklovsky, 1965). (128)
Hence the apparent elitism of modernist literature, its aloofness and inaccessibility.
As such, this effort of defamiliarising reality is a residue of the conservative politics
embraced by many of the modernist writers most notably Pound and Wyndham Lewis,
but also Yeats, Eliot and D.H. Lawrence in Britain, and the Fugitives and Agrarians in the
American South. Thus, even the most daringly experimental of the modernists were
tradition-haunted, to use Andr Bleikastens phrase. The critic goes on to explain that
the modernists very desire for a fresh start points to an acute sense of belatedness.
For there is presumably no way of writing against tradition than to write through it (in
Weinstein 80-1). Throughout the century, tradition remains a very powerful presence that
takes a surprising multitude of regionally determined forms that are also, in many cases,
inseparably imbricated with political conservatism and formal experimentalism.
13
Part Two:
Postmodernism(s)
end of WWII?
1960s civil rights movements?
1969 John Fowles The French Lieutenants Woman?
15 July 1972 at 3:32 p.m. (Charles Jencks, qtd. Ray 131) demolition of
modernist Minouru Yamasakis Pruitt-Igoe housing project in Saint Louis, USA
Robert B. Ray offers several other variants (132)
From the beginning we decided that the best way to understand Postmodernism is by
comparing it with other cultural trends, especially though not exclusively modernism
and the avant gardes. We talked last time about the various uses to which reality has
been put in literature over the past two centuries. Ihab Hassan, in his essay Toward a
Concept of Postmodernism (1987), synthesises the differences between Modernism and
Postmodernism in a by-now famous table:
14
modernism
romanticism/Symbolism
form (conjunctive, closed)
purpose
design
hierarchy
mastery/logos
art object/ finished work
distance
creation/totalization/synthesis
presence
centering
genre/boundary
semantics
paradigm
hypotaxis
metaphor
selection
root/depth
interpretation/reading
signified
lisible (readerly)
narrative/grande histoire
master code
symptom
type
genital/phallic
paranoia
origin/cause
God the Father
metaphysics
determinacy
transcendence
postmodernism
paraphysics/Dadaism
antiform (disjunctive, open)
play
chance
anarchy
exhaustion/silence
process/performance/happening
participation
decreation/deconstruction/antithesis
absence
dispersal
text/intertext
rhetoric
syntagm
parataxis
metonymy
combination
rhizome/surface
against interpretation/misreading
signifier
scriptable (writerly)
anti-narrative/petite histoire
idiolect
desire
mutant
polymorphous/androgynous
schizophrenia
difference/difference/trace
The Holy Ghost
irony
indeterminacy
immanence
(1987: 152)
In an essay titled Culture, Indeterminacy, and Immanence: Margins of the (Postmodern)
Age (1977), Hassan isolates cultural indeterminacies and technological immanences as
quintessential of Postmodernism and collapses them to coin a new term,
indetermanence, which he defines as a synthesis of crucial concepts associated with the
previous two, as follows:
Indeterminacies: openness, fragmentation, ambiguity, discontinuity, decenterment,
heterodoxy, pluralism, deformation, all conducive to indeterminacy or underdetermination. The latter concept alone, deformation, subsumes a dozen current terms like
15
Adriana Neagu proposes a table of her own, which draws upon and synthesizes similar
charts or lists in the works of Ihab Hassan, Donna Haraway, Frederic Jameson, David
Harvey and Jean-Francois Lyotard, among others. Taken as a snapshot of a dynamic set
of processes, it can perhaps be useful in setting up some initial definitions of the
postmodern. But note that in one reading of postmodernism, modernism remains present
even as it is posted:
Modernism
Postmodernism
16
Socioeconomics
Poetics
Representative Fields
and Figures
Architecture
Music
Film
Painting
Dance
Psychology
Philosophy
Sociology
Miscellaneous
Figurations
Monopoly Capital
Production
Goods / Things
Centralized
Semi-Autonomous Culture
Emotions
Subjectivity
Character
Plot
Parody
Art Object
Autonomy
High / Pop Distinct
Detective Model
Historical
Temporal Organization
Original
Closed Form / Product
Epistemology
Universalising
Individual Style
Order
Author
Readerly
Metaphor
Paranoia
Multinational Capital
Reproduction
Services / Images / Information
Decentralized
Commodified Culture
Random Intensities
Decentred Subject
Caricature
Labyrinth
Pastiche
Text
Intertextuality
Highpop Blend
Sci Fi Model
Historical(?)
Spatial Organization
Copy
Process
Ontology
Localizing
Free-Floating Codes
Chance
Discursive Field
Writerly
Metonymy
Schizophrenia
Le Courbusier / Wright
Stravinsky
Hitchcock / Renoir
Van Gogh / Expressionism
Duncan
Freud
Sartre
Marx
Representation
Organism
Biology
TB
Physiology
Reproduction
Mind
Labour
Portman / Venturi
Cage
DePalma / Lynch
Pop/ Photorealism
Cunningham
Lacan
Derrida
Baudrillard
Simulation
Cyborg
Immunology
AIDS
Biotechnology
Replication
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
2. responses to such things as a world lived under nuclear threat and threat to the
geosphere, to a world of faster communication, mass mediated reality, greater
diversity of cultures and mores and a consequent pluralism,
3. acknowledgments of and in some senses struggles against a world in which, under
a spreading technological capitalism, all things are commodified and fetishized
(made the object of desire), and in which genuine experience has been replaced by
simulation and spectacle,
4. resultant senses of fragmentation, of discontinuity, of reality as a pastiche rather
than as a coherent texture
5. reconceptualizations of society, history and the self as cultural constructs, hence
as rhetorical constructs.3
Brian McHale, however, believes that lists of contrastive features are not sufficient in
explaining the specific difference of Postmodernism and in Postmodernist Fiction (1987)
he seeks instead to isolate a dominant, or the organising principle of a period code
i.e., the focusing component of a paradigm that encodes all the other features (6-7 pass)
and guarantees its integrity (Jacobson qtd. McHale 6). Weve seen that the dominant he
assigns to Modernism, following Fokkemas period code, is cognitive, or epistemological;
the Postmodernist dominant is post-cognitive, or ontological. Furthermore, what he
identifies is not only the differences between the two, but the shift of dominant from
problems of knowing to problems of modes of being from an epistemological dominant
to an ontological one (1987: 10, my emphasis).
Adriana Neagu explains:
The benefits of working with the dominant to render coherent the systemic nature of
change embodied in the postmodernist poetics are clearly evidenced by the in-progress
observations it allows for when applied to textual analysis. Fictional discourse, it may be
argued, is the intersection of a number of dominants, each yielding to an interpretive
angle. However, as McHale points out, it is the function of one master dominant to
foreground a set of traits at the expense of another, thus signalling the most immediately
urgent questions to ask of a particular text (1987: 11):
This in a nutshell is the function of the dominant: it specifies the order in which different
aspects are to be attended to, so that, although it would be perfectly possible to interrogate a
postmodernist text about its epistemological implications, it is more urgent to interrogate it
about its ontological implications. In postmodernist texts, in other words, epistemology is
backgrounded, at the price for foregrounding ontology. (1987:11)
The process that describes a first movement toward the ontological is the
radicalisation of uncertainty from a state of things to a mode of being that conditions the
epistemological quest, calling into question the very possibility of knowledge. The
3
Source: Adriana Neagu, Modernism/ Postmodernism and the Intellectual Adventure of the Twentiethcentury Mind, a collection of lecture notes for Distance Education Students, abridged and adapted.
18
fragmentary, the unstable, and the disorderly foregrounded by the modernist discourse as
manifestations of an unreliable subjectivity give way to an aesthetic of oscillation, in
which the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to an activity of moving between limitless
alternatives, and knowledge becomes a matter of approximation and transaction. In
literary discourse terms, the relatively stable and contained universe projected by the
modernist text breaks off, and weaker, secondary or sub-worlds emerge, displacing what
centrality the discourse may display, and threatening to take over. Cognitive questions of
the kind invoked by McHale in the epigraph to his poetics and taken up again later:
How can I interpret the world of which I am a part? And what am I in it? What is there
to be known?; Who knows it?; How do they know it, and with what degree of certainty?;
How is knowledge transmitted from one knower to another, and with what degree of
reliability?; How does the object of knowledge change as it passes from knower to
knower?; What are the limits of the knowable? (1987: 9)
make way to post-cognitive enquiries: Which world is this? What is to be done in it?
Which of my selves is to do it? (1987: 10). Ontological ambiguity contaminates the
world projected by the text as well as the identity of the voice that speaks in it.4
Common elements
Divergent attitudes
Modernism
Postmodernism
Formal fragmentariness
Lamented
Celebrated
Formal experimentation
Elitist
Writerly text
Readerly text
Celebrated
Cynically resisted,
radically doubted
Sought
Constructed
History
Embraced
Diversified
Plot
Rejected
Foregrounded
Chrono-topical
contextualisation of the text
Rejected
Foregrounded
Foregrounding of the
constructedness of the text
Cultural progress
Truth
Ibid., my emphasis.
19
Harphams estimate, this comprises the loss of a unitary culture, the loss of confidence
in authority in general and in the moral character of American or Western culture in
particular, and the loss of cultural status for humanists in a university system increasingly
dominated by the spirit and values of science (in PMLA 2007: 1641). The generalised
celebrative mood thus emerges as the heady and ambivalent expression of the liberation
from earlier constraints brought about by these two, far deeper, emotions: scepticism and
loss.
Recap:
Modernism
Tension between experience and
representation, between mimesis and
poesis.
The self is fragmented, many-layered,
tributary to the past, but ultimately a certain
coherence of the self can be recuperated
through introspection, epiphanies, the
mythical method etc.
The disjunction between experience and
value is lamented.
Postmodernism
Its all about depthless surfaces, about
representation and self-reflexivity.
The existence of the subject is in doubt:
Am I really I? How much of my self is my
self and how much is a construct (social,
cultural, consumerist, political etc.)? How
much of it is language?
There are only experiences and no values.
Value, Truth, Good, Beauty are constructs.
20
In architecture:
In art, the term postmodernism was at first used to refer to changing tendencies in
architecture, then spread very quickly to the other arts. Modernist architecture had meant
an ostentatious rejection of the past, including the past of the citys historical fabric;
postmodern architecture, on the other hand, constituted a deliberate (if ironized) return to
the history of the humanly constructed environment (Linda Hutcheon, Irony, Nostalgia,
and the Postmodern, http://www.library.utoronto.ca/ utel/criticism/hutchinp.html).
e.g. the Seagram Building in New York vs. 1000 de la Gauchetiere in Montreal or the
Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao; but also the fantastic, expressionist avant-gardes (Art
Nouveau?) buildings of Antoni Gaudi: Sagrada Familia, Casa Mila, Casa Batllo etc., for a
very interesting example of a forerunner of pomo in architecture
(http://www.greatbuildings.com/architects/Antoni_Gaudi.html).
In painting:
See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
with illustrations at http://www. idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/pm/jameson-vangogh.htm.
There he speaks of the current need to grasp [art work] as a symbolic act in its own right,
as praxis and as production rather than merely a reified end product. Yet, he shows, it
is precisely this kind of reification that postmodern art courts and at the same time
debunks. Jameson calls this the waning of affect.
e.g. Van Goghs Peasant Shoes vs. Andy Warhols Diamond Dust Shoes: there is a
flatness and depthlessness in the latter which is typical of postmodernism, a deathly
quality which is very different from the expressivity, pathos and lived-in quality
(historicity) of Van Goghs Shoes.
In film:
Douglas Sirk (in the 1950s) and his later remotivations of his films (see Robert B. Ray);
Charley Chaplin (before Sirk)
In literature:
Martin Amis:
I can imagine a novel that is as tricksy, as alienated and as writerly as those of, say,
Robbe-Grillet while also providing the staid satisfactions of pace, plot and humour with
which we associate, say, Jane Austen. In a way, I imagine that this is what I myself am
trying to do. (interview)
21
22
Nick Anderson. The Houston Chronicle editorial cartoon, January 29, 2003.
See Randall Stevenson for a brief generic discussion of English literature after the Second
World War.
Attitudes to reality:
Victorianism: photographic rendering of external (social) reality;
Modernism: experimental reflection of inner (psychological) reality; defamiliarisation;
Postmodernism: refraction of commodified, mass-reproduced simulacra off the surface of
discourse/ the medium; return to pleasure and plot/ anecdote.
e.g. Modernism:
A day of dappled seaborne clouds.
The phrase and the days and the scene harmonised in a chord. Was it their colours?
He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple
orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was
the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words
better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as
he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world
through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the
contemplation of an inner world of individual emotion mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple
periodic prose?
(James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
Stories are one of those things you kept making up to keep the void out just another of
those old tales to keep the void from pouring in on top of you (Samuel Beckett, That
Time).
e.g. Postmodernism:
B.S. Johnsons Albert Angelo (1964) has holes in the pages to allow the readers to
23
see into the future; his The Unfortunates (1969) has 27 unbound, unnumbered sections
placed in a box, with only the first and last marked as such, whereas the others are meant
to be read in random order.
Ex.1: Comment on the way in which reality is represented in these various fragments. What is the
significance and relevance of language and narrative?
Ex.2: How is reality represented in the art of Andy Warhol?
Robbe-Grillet:
After Les Faux Monnayeurs, after Joyce, after La Nause, it seems that we are more and
more moving towards an age of fiction in which the problems of writing will be lucidly
envisaged by the novelist, and in which his concern with critical matters, far from
sterilising his creative faculties, will on the contrary supply him with motive power
Invention and imagination may finally become the subject of the book. (qtd. Stevenson
273, my emphasis)
Postmodern features:
Narcissism
Self-conscious experimentation
Metafiction
Self-reflexivity
Parody, pastiche
Recuperation
Remotivation
Recontextualisation
Mechanical reproduction
Post-industrial mass consumerism
Pop art
Overexposure
24
the demise of meta-, or grand narratives, i.e. of a set of universal, absolute and
25
above narrative, the discourse of science, like other forms of knowledge, depends on
narrative for its legitimation:
Scientific knowledge cannot know and make known that it is the true knowledge without
resorting to the other, narrative, kind of knowledge, which from its point of view is no
knowledge at all. (Lyotard 1984a: 29)
27
unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents; but the form, because of its
recognizable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and
pleasure. Yet these sentiments do not constitute the real sublime sentiment, which is an
intrinsic combination of pleasure and pain: the pleasure that reason should exceed all
presentation, the pain that imagination or sensibility should not be equal to the concept.
The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in
presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a
taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable;
that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to
impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable. The sublime is exactly that: what we
conceive of the infinitely great, for instance but is not in our power to represent.5
II. Fredric Jameson and the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Jameson has made an indelible mark in the sphere of macro-analysis and cultural
theory.
The amplitude of his theorising effort, connecting postmodernism as a cultural
phenomenon to the economic system of late capitalism without submission to
essentialism and uniformisation of differences.
Integration of Marxist literary and cultural criticism in the postmodern debate:
mutually informing readings of poststructuralism and postmodernism against Marxian
culture theory, working with assimilative rather than exclusive principles, and seeking to
uncover the contributions of postmodern studies to the enrichment of Marxian theories.
Postmodernism and consumer society (1983) & Postmodernism, or the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism (New Left Review 1984): a large-scale theory of the
postmodern phenomenon that would contextualise it within the very system of capitalism
of which it is a part.
Prefigured by a whole range of works linking Hegelian Marxism and New French
Theory:
o Marxism and Form (1971), which proposes an upgraded postindustrial
Marxism, able to make the leap to the current phase of postindustrial monopoly
capitalism in the United States;
o The Prison House of Language (1972), the study that established Jamesons
reputation as the theorist of capitalist representations, announcing his adoption of
the end of modernity thesis;
o early 1980 articles on film (The Shining and On Diva): examination of the
political economy of art productions; first explicit references to postmodernism;
o The Political Unconscious (1981), one of his most frequently quoted and
debated texts, observes in parallel lines the construction in literary texts of the
5
Ibid.
28
There is a fundamental rift causing abstract painting, existentialism, the films of the
great auteurs, and the modernist school of poetry, to appear as the final, extraordinary
flowering of a high-modernist impulse which is spent and exhausted with them (in
Docherty 62). This rift, Jameson implies, goes far beyond the emergence of new aesthetic
styles. Postmodernism is the current stage of cultural development of the logic of late
capitalism (63), manifesting itself as the cultural dominant of late-capitalist society, in
ways that entail new forms of consciousness and experience, and engage manifold
cultural shifts. The culture of postmodernism is fostered by the emergence of a new type
of social life and economic order (64). The cultural mutations illustrated by the new art
forms are directly reflective of the multinationalism, the consumerism, and the new
consumption patterns characterising late capitalism.
Jamesons placing of postmodernism in the paradigm of Marxist theory (his cultural
politics):
like Foucault, Jameson opts for the recovery of the historical past as a form of
resisting presentism;
like Deleuze and Guattari, he devotes extensive attention to radiogramming the
schizoid breakdown of the subject and the colonization of the unconscious by
capitalism;
like Baudrillard, he sees postmodernism as a culture of images, codes and simulacra,
projecting a vast hyperreality;
like Baudrillard and Lyotard, he situates fragmentariness at the heart of postmodern
culture;
like all poststructuralists, he places a strong emphasis on the notions of instability and
indeterminacy in his examinations of the indecipherability and unmappable character of
postmodern space.
29
30
Part Three:
The Sense of Endings: Postmodernism and the Millennial Syndrome
The last two decades of the century represent an ironic distancing from the earlier reversal
of values, a retreat into radical scepticism, with the eighties as transitional from
postmodernism to postmodernity. Literature is shown to participate anachronistically but
critically in the economic and demographic changes of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. It also becomes possible for critics to allow their exclusive interest in literature
to be replaced by a drastic redefinition of the concept of text. In the nineties there is
practically no critical reading that does not engage, embracingly or polemically, with the
issues of the theoretisation and academisation of literary studies: theory turns selfreflectively upon itself and heralds its own end.
Q: How is text defined now, in the wake of that redefinition?
The 70s, 80s and 90s are the era of the post-: post-modernism, post-structuralism,
post-Marxism, and, by the end of the 1990s, even post-history, post-politics, post-ethics,
post-theory, some would claim. It is significant in this nomenclature that the name of an
anterior phenomenon is preserved in the new compound nouns, being suggestive of
repudiation, chronological succession, and return. The temporal factor may be
foregrounded, but it is the underlying relational aspect that is essential: postmodernism
defines itself in ostensible opposition to what came before, but without its reference to
modernism it would lack much of its own epistemological identity. Although it would be
both presumptuous and arbitrary to claim any definitive moment for the beginning of the
post phenomenon,6 it is beyond doubt that these three decades represent one of the most
effervescent polemical periods to date. Comparison is therefore essential to the definition
of postmodernism: whereas modernism decried the fragmentation of perception,
6
See Brian McHales, Robert B. Rays, and Patricia Waughs respective work on postmodernism.
31
postmodernism celebrates it; to elitist taste it opposes popular culture; to readerly texts,
the writerly; to formal experiment, jouissance and plot (see Roland Barthes).
e.g. Jeremy Hawthorn distinguishes between modernism and postmodernism along the
lines of a common feature: fragmentariness. Thus, while modernism laments the
fragmentation of consciousness and proceeds to seek patterns to reorganise the perception
of the world, postmodernism revels in fragmentation, finds it liberating, encouraging
play, parody, and pastiche (211-219).
Q: Can you think of any patterns or narrative strategies devised by modernist writers in order to
lend coherence to the fractured contemporary world? 7 Are they still used by postmodern writers?
If yes, what is the effect?
The relevant feature for our discussion is the involvement with leftist politics
developed in capitalist countries. Poststructuralisms claims to political relevance,
however, are contentious, Rivkin and Ryan show, and a source of intense polemics with
Marxists (354). However, the will to political involvement and socio-cultural relevance
7
32
remains one of the major frameworks of current thought. We might therefore say that the
late twentieth century and early twenty-first is an age of politics and of ideological
commitments. This designation is supported by the unprecedented widespread awareness
of and involvement with politics that has been induced by the increasing accessibility of
the mass media, as well as by the development of a post-industrial (hence, post-capitalist)
economy in the West, in parallel with the demise of communism in Eastern and Central
Europe.
The coexistence of differences at the end of the twentieth century makes it more
useful to distinguish between critical trends in terms of focus and ideologies rather than
chronologically, in spite of important temporal turning points that mark quasiparadigmatic shifts and changes in priorities.8 Rivkin and Ryan advance a useful
hypothesis along these lines:
We are not in a new paradigm. Rather, there are no paradigms or models of knowledge that
stand apart from the world and outside the play of its movements (repetition, difference,
spacing, energetics, agonistics and antagonism, aesthetics or figuration, etc.). We are
simply in the world we have always been in without knowing it, without being able to
know it because we were preoccupied with one move (cognition in language) within that
world and because the world somehow, even though we can describe it from within (the
planetarium of knowledge), cannot be known (summed up in identitarian categories that
stand outside, etc.). It can only be lived in knowingly. (355)
The two scholars hint at the fundamental poststructuralist thesis according to which what
needs to be reconsidered is the very definition of knowledge in relation to the world and
the knowing subject. In this sense, poststructuralism marks not a break with, but a return
to the roots of language, reason, identity, etc. from inside the discursive practices they
have been couched in, in order to expose the assumptions and strategies that have
conditioned their definitions. It is for these reasons that I group the critics examined in the
second part of this book in terms of the (often extra-literary) epistemological reference
points to which they have turned and returned: the grand narratives of history and society,
the writing/written subject, the text and its reading subject.
Postmodernism and Its Discontents
Regardless the endless variety of theoretical positions available to contemporary
critics at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there seems to be a consensus
concerning the fact that both reading and writing are conditioned by the evolution of
paradigmatic dominants, to use Brian McHales term. Douwe Fokkemas formulation
of the period code of modernism, as cited by McHale, proves helpful in identifying
modernist fiction in contradistinction to later tendencies:
8
Rivkin and Ryan, for instance, show that 1979 was such a turning point. It was the year of the publication
of J.-F. Lyotards The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, the book that replaced
poststructuralism with postmodernism as the catchword of the age. It should also be noted that it was at
about the same time that in Central and Eastern Europe communism was entering the decade of major crisis
that eventuated in its collapse. The year 1989 would perhaps also fit the description of the moment of a
paradigmatic change in the East-Central bloc.
33
the compositional and syntactical conventions of the modernist code include textual
indefiniteness or incompleteness, epistemological doubt, metalingual skepticism, and
respect for the idiosyncrasies of the reader. Its semantic aspects are organised around issues
of epistemological doubt and metalingual self-reflection. (8)
McHale therefore speaks about the dominant (in a slightly modified Jakobsonian sense)
of modernism as epistemological, that is, preoccupied with questions that foreground the
limits of knowledge (9).
Q: What is the difference between modernism and modernity? 9
The context in which McHale explains the functioning of this period code is
contrastive and retrospective, from the vantage point of postmodernism. This approach
has the advantage of outlining not only the dominant of a particular paradigm but also its
trajectory, its departure from the code, the margin for innovation. On the same view, the
dominant of postmodern fiction is ontological. Thus, the reading of a novel as an
example of verbal art (i.e., a formalist interpretation) will yield its aesthetic function as
its dominant, whereas as a document of a particular moment in cultural history (i.e., a
historicist approach), the same book will show itself to be dominated by its periods
dominant (6). Conversely, a modernist writer might have been concerned with
epistemological (cognitive) questions of the type, How do I know the world?, whereas
his postmodern readers are tormented by ontological (post-cognitive) questions such as
What is a world? (see McHale 9-11). Or rather, What is a world, that it cannot be
defined? Both the forms of fiction and the investigative instruments of the critic
consequently evolve with the shift in dominants.
In similar poetic terms, Jean-Francois Lyotard assesses modernism and
postmodernism comparatively as two possible aesthetics of the sublime. In his
celebrated Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism (1983), the sublime is
defined as what can be conceived even though there can be no presentation of it, either in
reality or in imagination. Along these lines, both modernism and postmodernism emerge
as self-reflective, but in different ways:
modern aesthetic is an aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one. It allows the
unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents; but the form, because of its
recognizable consistency, continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and
pleasure. Yet these sentiments do not constitute the real sublime sentiment, which is in an
intrinsic combination of pleasure and pain: the pleasure that reason should exceed all
presentation, the pain that imagination or sensibility should not be equal to the concept.
The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable
in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a
taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable;
9
A: Modernism is a cultural and artistic trend, beginning in Western Europe around the turn of the
twentieth century and lasting roughly until the end of the Second World War. Modernity is a quality that
even Renaissance scholars claimed they possessed. Remember the Battle of the Ancients and the
Moderns? We usually speak about the Modern Age beginning with the Renaissance i.e., with
Humanism. Modern English began to be spoken at about the same time. (Before that, we speak of
Medieval English, preceded by Old English, and, in paradigmatic terms, the Middle Ages etc.)
34
that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart
a stronger sense of the unpresentable. A postmodern artist is in the position of a
philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by
preestablished rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by
applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those 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. Hence the fact that work
and text have the characters of an event; hence also, they always come too late for their
author, or, what amounts to the same thing, their being put into work, their realization
[mise en oeuvre] always begins too soon. Post modern would have to be understood
according to the paradox of the future [post] anterior [modo]. (in Docherty 1993: 45-6)
The post-cognitive self-reflexivity, relativity and indeterminacy of postmodernism have been magisterially theorised by Jean-Francois Lyotard, Ihab Hassan, Patricia
Waugh, Brian McHale, Linda Hutcheon, and many others, especially in the nineteen
seventies and eighties. Their roots are as firmly planted in the sciences (especially
quantum physics and relativity theory) as in Derridean deconstructive philosophy,
Foucauldian philosophy of history, and the emerging media and cultural studies. In the
absence of epistemological certainties, postmodern man celebrates the opportunity to play
with floating signifiers and centres that cannot hold. The ontological boundaries
between philosophy (or theory) and art vanish, as do those between literature as
knowledge and literature as experience.
However, there is a mounting sense towards the end of the twentieth century that,
despite the inventiveness of all the new theories available in the wake of structuralism,
their usual end product is aporia, beautifully defined by David Richter as the intellectual
vertigo caused by looking into an apparently endless hall of mirrors (826). 10 That is to
say, theory (and especially deconstruction) has generated methodically pursued and
philosophically sophisticated repetition, and failed to adequately explain or deal with the
crises of the postmodern world. In what follows I intend to dwell on the complications of
postmodern theory at the turn of the century. Ihab Hassan and Patricia Waugh, among
others, propose a return to humanism as the way out of the epistemological aporias and
methodological relativism that have marred recent critical thinking; yet it is a new brand
of humanism that is free of the tyranny of rationalism. Others simply advocate reading.
In a paper delivered in 1999, Ihab Hassan confessed with endearing puzzlement and
sincerity: I imagine that I have been invited to this conference on the premise that I
know something about postmodernism. This is a terrible misapprehension: after writing
about postmodernism for thirty years, I know less about it now than I did then (2002: 1).
And yet he proceeds to attempt a definition. He in fact comes up with several definitions:
postmodernism seems a contested signifier floating in a field of hype (1); the
equivocal autobiography of an age, a mode of collective, sometimes chaotic, sometimes
mocking, self-reflection (2); a continual exercise in self-definition (2); a cultural and
artistic phenomenon whose mercurial character was subsumed by his own earlier
neologism Indetermanence (indeterminacies + immanences) (2); an age of radical
10
Aporia = a true opposition which blocks, a paradox which ultimately cannot be solved and which cannot
be assimilated by a trope; a conflict between the materiality and phenomenality of language (Paul de Man).
35
spiritual privations (1), an arid land we all need to traverse (17). Hassan discerns a
deterioration of postmodernism in the interval since his first engagement with it in the
1960s: cultural postmodernism has mutated into genocidal postmodernity (Bosnia,
Kosovo, Ulster, Rwanda, Chechnya, Kurdistan, Sudan, Afghanistan, Tibetso goes the
baleful litany of our time). But cultural postmodernism itself has metastasized into sterile,
campy, kitschy, jokey, dead-end games or sheer media hype (4).11 In other words, before
the turn of the century the battle cry of the 1970s and 80s was undergoing a severe crisis
that made obvious the split between cultural trends and the spirit of the age.
Hassan hopes that writers might teach the postmodern man a very important moral
lesson in what he calls kenosis defined elsewhere, as here, as self-emptying, yes, but
also the self-undoing of our knowledge in the name ofReality (Hassan 2003: 9).
Through the arid land of postmodern privations, writers like William Faulkner may
prove our guide: they inhabit a different, a richer, moral universe, Hassan says, and
not moral only, but also richly spiritual. The crux of this spirituality is self-emptying, the
terrible courage of renunciation a piercing Virtue, as Emily Dickinson put it (2002:
17). He then qualifies the way in which this kenosis transcends time boundaries:
It moves, past rhetoric or theology, toward absence (Derrida); it touches nihilism
(Nietzsche); it knows the infinite play of irony as of resignation (Kierkegaard). In short, it
invokes the negative conditions of a postmodern spirituality, without disclaiming
transcendence, without repudiating the contexts of values from which [the writers]
language derives its darker, distinctive energies. (17-18)
Hassan uses almost the same words to describe the post-postmodern condition in Beyond
Postmodernism (2003). The solutions he proposes there, too, are not very different from this earlier
conference talk.
36
position is summed up in Stanley Fishs claim that interpretation is not the art of
construing but the art of constructing. Interpreters do not decode poems; they make them.
Knowledge is an art of invention and not a science of discovery. (in Knellwolf & Norris
304)12
Disillusioned with this state of affairs, Waugh states that the critical imperative
now, for literary practitioners, philosophers and political theorists, must be that we learn
from the lessons of postmodernism how to find a way out of the postmodern condition
(305). She, too, suggests a potential solution:
[Postmodernisms] particular epistemological projecthas reached a dead-end and there is
little point any longer in shuffling amongst the remains. The exit from postmodernism for
literary criticism lies somewhere in that excluded middle between the concepts of
autonomy and aestheticisation, science and art. It lies, in other words, in our capacity to
continue struggling toward the discrimination of these orders without adopting either a
nave aestheticism or an imperialistic scientism; it lies in our recognition of the need to
preserve some distinction between intentional and natural objects; and in a continued
resistance to the seductive temptation simply to subsume one into the other. (305)
12
Waugh admits that [t]his is something of a caricature of course. It is to play postmodernism at one of its
own favourite games of reductio ad absurdum (305).
13
Remember Platos three Fundamental Ideas: Truth, Good, and Beauty, which translate into the main
spheres of human interest, philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics, respectively, or, in lay terms, philosophy and
science, religion/ morality and politics, and art.
37
The golden middle that can keep both the modernist autonomy and the postmodern
aestheticisation in balance again adds up to a form of neo-humanism that has learned the
lessons of postmodernity. In literary studies, Daniel Schwartz pleads even more explicitly
for a return to a new humanistic formalism as the most comprehensive form of literary
criticism (616), and so do many others. Is then neo-humanism the solution? In this our
post-postmodern age, do we need to turn back and start over? What does that tell us about
postmodernism? That we temporarily strayed from the right path and that we should now
learn from our errors? Or that we have taken a necessary detour through radical relativity,
a field trip to explore the land of non-certainty, and are ready now to return to the main
road?
The Taming of Theory
According to Evan Carton and Gerald Graff, the two authors of the chapter on
criticism in The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 8, these constant
reinterpretations of the role and definition of literature come to show that works of
literature are arenas in which communities define themselves and competing values and
self-images are negotiated. It is in this sense that literature is deeply political (271). The
two commentators go on:
If there is a unifying element in the disparate critical theories advanced since the mid1960s, however, it is their argument that no text is ever experienced except through some
interpretation of it, through the selection of appropriate organizing principles, dominant
emphases, and relevant contexts that constitute textual meaning. (274)
Remember?
Brian McHale describes the role of his period codes/ paradigmatic dominants along the same
lines.
The acts of selection, in their turn, are culturally predetermined and so is in fact the
amount of attention that the work receives through very subtle devices controlled by
institutions, from university to advertisers and prize committees. The emergence of
literary theory is consequently explained in the following terms:
The conviction that the meanings of literary texts are always mediated by the critical lenses
through which they are viewed, and that neither literature nor criticism can stand free of
ideology and controversy, has forced contemporary critics to become more reflexive about
their own procedures and assumptions. (277)
As the consensus regarding notions such as literature, literary canons, and reading
has weakened,
essential definitions and functions have become objects of debate and thus have been
theorized. The condition of dissensus [Sacvan Bercovitchs term] has forced even the
most traditionalist literary critics to spell out explicitly what could once have been left
unsaid, thereby revealing traditional argument to be no less theoretical than any other.
(278, my emphasis)
38
Literary jargon has come into existence much in the same way: new language
(metalanguage) was needed to explain what before was taken for granted. According to
Carton and Graff, the fault of contemporary criticism lies not in its use of jargon but in
its failure to translate and explain it adequately. Such translation and explanation is
becoming especially urgent as this criticism comes increasingly under public attack
(280).
Let us then define a few key terms, beginning with reading. Although it is currently
employed to denote critical interpretation of a literary text, I would like now to consider it
in a more basic and at the same time general sense, that of deciphering the signs on the
page and of attaching meaning to them. Reading is traditionally construed in Western
cultures as emancipatory; it constitutes us as citizens and invites our participation in
culture and civilisation. Recently, critics such as Ihab Hassan, Thomas Docherty, and
Catherine Belsey have come to celebrate reading as an undertaking that has the potential
to reveal something fundamental to human nature, a cultural activity whose significance
goes beyond the making of choices about a meal in a restaurant, and even beyond the
recuperation of previously marginalized cultures. In the subtle dialogue established
between text and reader, in the questions they ask of each other and the expectations they
form and frustrate, there is meaning. Reading is inherently justified as long as it does not
assume any programmatic and pragmatic agenda, but remains inquisitive and, above all,
comparative.
Belsey associates this meaning with that attached by Freud to the activity of
writing, on the one hand, and, on the other, to the transferential relationship of
psychoanalysis. Docherty proposes a type of critical reading that is a matter of entering
the realm of epistemological uncertainty, an exercise in negative capability, a reading
which is but another word for thinking, for a thinking that is a humble not-knowing; and
to dwell in such consciousness is to seek an identity that must always elude us, thereby
making us constantly differ from ourselves, constantly grow; and the word for this is
culture (16). It is here, in this undecidability, he continues, that we find it possible to
read (17). It is here, one might add, that we find it possible to think. In his article
interrogating what lies beyond postmodernism, Ihab Hassan suggests that reading
literature is, and enables, reading the world. His rhetoric is one of trust, responsibility,
truth, and humility. Moreover, in an earlier article, he salutes the blurring of the
distinction between literature as experience and literature as knowledge (1993: 14) and
exposes the inadequacy and pre-emptive nature of theories and ideologies as modes of
thinking (4-5, 9 etc.). Jacques Derrida speaks about learning to live (another form of
thinking) as taking place in the same space between presence and absence: learning from
the self that is not in life, in the presence of the dead letters that are undead (1994: xviii).
The inhabiting of this undecidability amounts to an ethics beyond morality, justice, or
duty.
Although from very different positions, all these thinkers demand a reconsideration
of the fundamental concepts with which philosophical and critical thinking operates at the
39
end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the next. Derrida advocates the
acknowledgement of boundaries as constitutive of all key concepts in Western
philosophy, politics and culture. That is to say, no concept ever makes sense in abstracto;
all definitions must take into account the concrete circumstances to which that concept
applies. Using language unreflectively, he pleads, perpetuates and iterates a body of
normative assumptions of which we may not even be aware. For Hassan, the wounds of
postmodernity (and they are many and deep) can only be healed through a fiduciary
realism, an aesthetics of trust that starts with kenosis. What the two thinkers have in
common, then, is the belief that it is not dialogue that will solve the conflicts of the
postmodern world (as Lyotard and Bercovitch had believed), but a thorough
reconsideration of ones own knowledge and operational instruments. It is knowledge
itself, alongside the avenues by which we arrive at it, that must be interrogated and
ultimately discarded (without, however, being discredited) if we are to open ourselves to
the real, to be hospitable/ attentive to the other (Derrida in Borradori 129-30, and
Hassan 2003: 8, respectively).
There are at least two points at which all these texts meet. The first is the opening
up of critical thinking to undiscriminating reading that questions previous theoretical and
methodological assumptions. The second is the trust in the humanities and more
specifically in reading as the point from which the revision of attitudes and assumptions
can begin. Hassan recognises that Literary theory has now become a cynosure of the
humanities; criticism has become a paradigm of the intellectual life (1993: 13). Derrida,
whose orientation is philosophical and, especially towards the end of his life, ethical, is
still devoted to the practice of reading, whether it is Marxs Communist Manifesto or
Shakespeares Hamlet. The epistemological separation of the spheres is no longer tenable
and perhaps not even desirable, but the connections between them need redefinition.
I am obliterating the differences between the two scholars, of course, but it is
instructive to consider their recent work intertextually since they address very similar
issues, although from different vantages. After all, Derridas greatest impact has always
been in literary studies, while Hassans aesthetics of trust is essentially a philosophical
construct, even though he identifies its avatars in the arts and literature as well as
philosophy and science. More to the point, they both seem devoted to a critical
recuperation of the Humanist tradition of intellectual curiosity, and, though not in so
many words, so is Docherty.
Let us at this point attempt a definition of that which must be invoked and exorcised
here: ideology.14 It is a multifunctional, polysemic term, whose definitions vary from a
system of interpretive principles that reflect a certain world view (i.e., a theory), to an
insidious mechanism that infuses all fields of activity and is kept in motion by the sociopolitical dominant in order to preserve the status quo power distribution. At its most
drastic, the definition of ideology claims that epistems and discursive practices are
ideologically conditioned and turned into mechanisms that generate and justify the need
14
See further definitions of ideology in the first essay in the second part of this volume, as well as entry on
Marxist Criticism in Lecture VI.
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for power-enforcement. In all these acceptations ideology informs critical thinking and
determines its conclusions by means of foregrounding a number of questions and issues
and positing them as central to the current cultural paradigm. Hence, the inevitability of
engaging critically with ideology. We are inhabited by ideology just as we inhabit
ideologically-circumscribed cultural spaces. The question is, as always since the
Enlightenment, to what a degree do we gain control over the external (i.e., ideological)
forces that would otherwise control us? It is a question of freedom to the same extent to
which it is also a question of responsibility, of politics, and, implicitly, of ethics.
According to Louis Althusser and Fredric Jameson, ideology is the individuals
imaginary relationship to trans-personal entities such as the social structure, power
dynamics, the collective logic of history, etc. As we have seen, throughout the twentieth
century, under the influence of Marxist dialectics and historicist readings of culture, but
especially with the emergence of linguistics as a foundational discipline, the verbal nature
of both ideologies and histories comes under scrutiny. Radical critique and redefinition of
the grand narratives of Truth, History, Morality, and Canonicity, along with the
crossing of disciplinary boundaries, are the two most important consequences of the new
awareness of the informative power of ideology. The extinction of absolutes is
symptomatic of the postmodern mood of radical critique and scepticism, enabling the
current multiplicity of valid interpretive perspectives. In itself, this interrogation of
paternalist assumptions proved to be a prolific and beneficent project, whose
ramifications revolutionised philosophical and cultural thought. Yet while countless
interpretive possibilities are opened up, the historical and political underpinnings of
ideology also generate the need to circumscribe, prescribe and coerce.
The relationship between the literary work and its cultural and ideological contexts
has therefore come to be interpreted in at least two ways, either as reflection of, or as
resistance to, those contexts. A number of questions devolve from these respective
interpretations: in the first case, what is the value and role of literature? And in the
second, if the text is confined to the language of the existing social order, how can it
articulate a resistance to that order? As Donald Kartiganer points out,
To conceive of the text as capable of challenging the limits of its language suggests an
elitist stance: a mystification of the literary text and a New Critical heroization of the
author. There is also the problem of the reader of such a text. Given the immersion in
ideology of every member of the society, if a text could somehow speak beyond its own
socially derived language, who but a reader as revolutionary (and as heroic) as the writer
could read it? (in Kartiganer & Abadie xii)
It follows from these questions that both views of the literary text as reflection or as
challenge contain in themselves the seed of their own critique.
These distinctions put into perspective the liberties taken by some critics with
chronology and context. When justified along the lines of gnoseological relativism,
anachronistic approaches are generally regarded as a defensible position. Postmodernism
itself is by definition a new and problematical phase in which a good many hitherto
well-established values, methods and beliefs are henceforth open to question, in literary
41
theory as well as history, the natural sciences etc. (Norris in Knellwolf & Norris 411). On
the one hand, the current rhetoric of disguise, latent content, and the suspicion of the
failure of previous critics to completely lay bare the devices have brought about the
demystification of hindsight. On the other, relativity theory, the uncertainty principle, the
complementarity hypothesis, the awareness of the metaphorical bearing on scientific
language, all indicate that our maps of reality reflect our relative position or experimental
methods rather than deliver absolute truth or show the road to progress. It is in the niche
opened up by this sort of epistemological and ontological doubt that neo-humanism seeks
to insert itself.
Achievements of Postmodernism:
it revealed the constructedness of many concepts that had hitherto been taken for
granted as natural
o most importantly, it exposed hierarchies and dichotomic thinking
o it demystified and demythologised identity
o however, significantly, it does not attempt to reform what it perceives as
being questionable, or to replace it with some other, allegedly positive,
unit or value
it textualised the world and thus opened it up for interpretation
it opened culture up to low or pop culture and even sub-cultures
it enabled heretofore unwarranted re-contextualisations and re-motivations of
earlier texts
it instated dissensus (see Lyotard, but also Sacvan Bercovitch): The condition of
dissensus has forced even the most traditionalist literary critics to spell out
explicitly what could once have been left unsaid, thereby revealing traditional
argument to be no less theoretical than any other. (Carton & Graff 278)
trust in the humanities and more specifically in reading as the point from which
the revision of attitudes and assumptions can begin (see Hassan 2003)
it has encouraged the practice of reading
Reading
Proponents: Ihab Hassan, Thomas Docherty, and Catherine Belsey, among others
it has the potential to reveal something fundamental to human nature,
it is a cultural activity whose significance goes beyond the making of choices
about a meal in a restaurant, and even beyond the recuperation of previously
marginalized cultures
it must remain inquisitive and, above all, comparative (Docherty)
reading literature is, and enables, reading the world (Hassan)
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REQUIREMENTS:
To complete the course successfully the students are expected to:
perform thorough and reflective readings of full bibliography which they are provided with or
referred to;
submit a brief report on one theoretical article of their own choice on closing session (about
500 words) (25% of the final mark);
take active part in any of the short debates that might accompany the lectures;
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evince proficiency in critical and theoretical vocabulary as well as aptitude for analytical
thinking;
sit a two-hour written exam consisting of the discussion of an excerpt from an article
examined in class (60% of the final mark).
LECTURE TOPICS:
WEEK ONE: Hypostases of the modern: Progress and the Dynamics of Change in Western
Thought and Civilisation.
TWO: Modernism, Modernity and the Avantgardes: Knowledge, Aesthetic and ExtraLiterary Culture in Epistemic Perspective.
THREE: High Modernism: Radical Innovation and the Religion of Art: Disunity and the
Fragmentation of the Subject.
FOUR: Crossing over: Postmodernisms Breakthrough A Change of Dominant?
FIVE: Literary Postmodernism: Highlights of the Postmodern Repertoire.
SIX: Continuities and Discontinuities in Modernist/ Postmodernist Theory and Fictional
Practice: Complementarities and Dichotomies
SEVEN: The Sense of Endings: Postmodernism and the Millennial Syndrome.
SEMINAR TOPICS: Theme-targeted discussions of excerpts from the studies listed below.
WEEK ONE: Configurations of the Modern Subject in Philosophical,
Psychoanalytical and Linguistic Discourse:
Martin Heidegger Being and Time.
Sigmund Freud Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
Ferdinand de Saussure Course in General Linguistics.
All in Rivkin and Ryan.
TWO: Foundations of Modernist Aesthetic: Christopher Butler: Early Modernism, sbchs:
Language and Innovation
Subjectivity and Primitivism
The Poet in the City
Progress and the Avant-garde
THREE: The Postmodern Turn: Theories and Meta-Theories of the Postmodern
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BIBLIOGRAPHY:
General:
Allen, Walter. Tradition and Dream, London: The Hogarth Press, 1986.
Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects in Rivkin & Ryan, 408-421.
Benjamin, Walter. Theses on the Philosophy of History in Davis and Schleifer, 445-453.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture in Rivkin & Ryan, 936-45.
Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern American Novel. Oxford& New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
- - -. Contemporary American Fiction. 1987. Sigmund Ro (eds)
- - -. The Modern British Novel. London: Secker & Warburg, 1993.
- - -. (ed). The Novel Today. Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1978.
Bradbury, Malcolm and Richard Ruland (eds). From Puritanism to Postmodernism. A History of American
Literature. New York: Viking, 1991.
Calinescu, Matei. Faces of Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977.
- - -. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1987.
Calinescu, Matei and Douwe Fokkema (eds). Exploring Postmodernism. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John
Benjamins Publishing Co, 1987.
Cixous, Hlne. Sorties in Rivkin & Ryan, 578-585.
Connor, Steven. The English Novel in History 1950-1995. London and New York: Routledge, (1996) 2001.
Davis, Robert Con and Ronald Schleifer (eds). Contemporary Literary Criticism. Literary and Cultural
Studies. (1986). London & New York: Longman, 1994.
De Man, Paul. The Resistance to Theory in Lodge, 355-431.
Docherty, Thomas. Postmodernism. A Reader. Cambridge Harvester Wheatsheaf: Cambridge University
Press, 1993.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilisation and Its Discontents. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: W.W. Norton,
1989.
Foster, Hal (ed). The Anti-Aesthetic. Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend, Wash: Bay Press,
1983.
Gates, Henry Louis. The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique on the Sign and the Signifying Monkey in
Rivkin & Ryan, 903-23.
Girard, Ren. Triangular Desire in Rivkin & Ryan, 225-231.
Habermas, Jrgen. Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987.
Hamzea, Liliana. New Dis-Orders: A Survey of Contemporary British Fiction. Editura Universitara
45
46
47
Comment on Lyotards statement, then illustrate it with reference to your own readings.
OR:
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Comment on the paragraph below, taken from Roland Barthes Death of the Author,
with reference to the bearing of authorial intention on the act of reading/interpretation.
Support your views with illustrations from modern language theories as reflected in the
literary works of modernity:
Let us come back to the Balzac sentence. No one, no 'person, says it: its source, its voice,
is not the true place of the writing, which is reading. Another very precise example will
help to make this clear: recent research [...] has demonstrated the constitutively ambiguous
nature of Greek tragedy, its texts being woven from words with double meanings that each
character understands unilaterally (this perpetual misunderstanding is exactly the tragic);
there is, however, someone who understands each word in its duplicity and who, in
addition, hears the very deafness of the characters speaking in front of him -- this someone
being precisely the reader (or here, the listener). Thus is revealed the total existence of
writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into
mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this
multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.
OR:
In The Postmodern Condition, Jean-Francois Lyotard defines the postmodern as a
proliferation of metanarratives, or totalising explanations of the world, such as history,
philosophy and education included:
Simplifying to the extreme, I define the postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.
This incredulity is undoubtedly a product of progress in the sciences: but that progress in
turn presupposes it. To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation
corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university
institution which in the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functors, its
great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds
of narrative language elements--narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and
so on [...] Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside?
Discuss this quote in relation to the erosion of legitimacy and the radical questioning of
authority that characterises our contemporary world, and illustrate with reference to
recent literary works which you have read in English.
OR:
In an informal interview, John Barth, one of the foremost postmodern novelists, compares
postmodern fiction to the process of tying ones necktie:
that which not only follows Modernism but follows from it. Postmodernism is tying your
necktie while simultaneously explaining the step-by-step procedure of necktie-tying and
chatting about the history of male neckwear -- and managing a perfect full windsor
anyhow. The postmodernist novel is aware of itself as words on paper, a made-up story;
aware too of its predecession, what Umberto Eco calls the already said -- and yet able to
say something new, or differently, and to satisfy our so-human pleasure in hearing a good
story.
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