LUCIAN BLAGA UNIVERSITY

FACULTY OF LETTERS AND ARTS

DEPARTMENT OF BRITISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES

MODERNISM / POSTMODERNISM
Lecture Notes

BY
ANA-KARINA SCHNEIDER

SIBIU 2008

Table of Contents

Part One: Modernism: Tradition and Innovation . 3

Hypostases of the Modern
3
Modernism, Modernity and the Avantgardes . 3
Radical Innovation and the Religion of Art . 13
Part Two: Postmodernism(s)

. 24

Crossing over: A Change of Dominant? .. 24

Literary Postmodernism
. 35
Continuities and Discontinuities in Modernist/ Postmodernist Theory and Fictional
Practice
.......................................................... 41
Part Three: The Sense of Endings
Course Description
Bibliography

. 51

. 76

... 80

Sample Exam Questions

84

Part One:
Modernism: Tradition and Innovation

Hypostases of the modern

Modern = of, or belonging to, the present; contemporary
- the word was first recorded in 1585
Enlightenment: the moderns vs. the ancients
English: Old, Middle & Modern
Modernism: Edwardian literature/ protomodernism, High Modernism, the avant gardes,
late modernism etc.
Modernism, Modernity and the Avantgardes
John Orr begins his contribution to the Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism by
enunciating the existence of a paradox: There is no such thing as the modernist novel. It
is a critical artefact, largely Anglo-American in origin and use. The French normally
speak of la modernit and le postmoderne, the British and the Americans of their
derived isms which are aesthetic constructs, not cultural processes (619). The
constructedness of modernism, the attempt, couched in the suffix -ism, to fix it
chronologically and epistemologically, conceals the fact that a unified, coherent meaning
of that term is not supported by concrete cultural evidence. Is modernism an age? A
trend? A cultural paradigm? Part of a larger cultural phenomenon? Is it what is known as
High Modernism? Is there a difference between what we call modernism and modernity?
A second fundamental difficulty has to do with the period of time that can be said to
have comprised modernism: did it begin in 1859 (publication of The Origin of Species),
1910 (December, according to Virginia Woolf: the date of the first post-Impressionist
exhibition in London), 1912 (the debut of Imagism in the tearoom of the British Museum
in April of that year), 1915 (when, according to D.H. Lawrence, the old world ended),
1922 (the annus mirabilis of modernism, with the publication of The Waste Land and
Ulysses)? And does it end in 1929 (the Wall Street Crash in New York), 1939 (the
beginning of World War Two), 1945 (the end thereof), 1960 (the beginning of the civil
rights movements), or 1969 (publication of John Fowles The French Lieutenants
Woman)? The difficulty of reaching a proper and effective definition of that concept
becomes even more apparent when one considers the various contexts in which the term
is used. After all, the humanists of the Enlightenment referred to themselves as modern,

in contradistinction to the backward-looking ancients, who opposed the development of

a distinctive national culture. Moreover, the noun can be qualified (early modernism, high
modernism etc.), or turned into an adjective, thus becoming a volatile label (modern vs.
modernist), and then re-converted into a noun (modernity).
In what follows, I endeavour to present a selection of definitions of modernism,
given at different times by various critics, from a whole range of theoretical stands, all
pivoting on the dialectics of experience and representation. These definitions will amount
to a sketchy and inevitably partial rendering of that construct: individual writers at their
best derive their strength from the spirit of the age, yet depart from what is already
becoming ossified and definitive in their time. Moreover, not only are all definitions
tainted by the prejudices of the age in which they are given, but in the case of modernism
especially, there are at all times at least two principal schools of thought. David Brooks,
like Orr above, points out the duality inherent in the very etymology of the term:
Modernism can be seen on the one hand as applying to a particular group of writers and
artists in a particular period, and on the other as describing a certain artistic posture, an
attitude toward the Modern, as viable today as it was seventy years ago, and just as
possible long before that (119). A binary terminology is usually employed to deal with
this double meaning: modernism covers the former part of the definition, whereas
modernity refers to the latter. Brooks cites Paul de Mans definition of modernity as
not the one, isolable historical period but a series of incandescent moments of a desire
to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at last a point that could be
called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure (qtd. 123). While
modernity is generally allowed to remain as broad as possible, the concept of
modernism is further subdivided and qualified according to chronological as well as
taxonomic criteria (Edwardian literature, High Modernism, the avant gardes, late
modernism etc.), until it becomes virtually impossible to assign any major work to the
category of modernist novels.
The easiest way out of the maze of possible definitions is the mainstream one. Thus,
most critics, as M.H. Abrams shows, agree that modernism involves a deliberate and
radical break with the traditional bases both of Western culture and of Western art, and
that the precursors of this break are thinkers who questioned the certainties that had
hitherto provided a support to social organisation, religion, morality, and the conception
of the human self (1981: 109). David Brooks, in his essay on modernism in the
Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism simplifies (quite crudely, he admits) the impact
of the main late nineteenth-century theories on the early twentieth-century writers as they
were attempting to come to terms with the world they lived in. He explains the break in
terms of the simple dichotomy of before and after:
Ifthe popular conception of the human being before Darwin had been as a fallen angel, it
became, after The Origin of Species (1959), far more likely as but a risen ape; if the popular
conception of history, before Marx, had been of something in which individual effort could
sometimes play a crucial part, it had to contend, after Das Kapital (first volume 1867), with
the possibility that a great deal of it had been responding instead to economic imperatives;

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)

As a result of these radical reassessments of the most fundamental certainties and

values of the previous, Victorian Age, by the end of the nineteenth century literature, as
well as the world whose anxieties it voices, develops a new form of the fin de sicle
syndrome. Hence the lucid and transparent pessimism of the realist Thomas Hardy, on the
one hand, and the glum gothic of Oscar Wildes Picture of Dorian Gray and Robert Louis
Stevensons Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Brooks describes this state of mind as a kind of
future-shock, a sense that one view of the world and the meaning and place of human
existence had been taken from them, and that a replacement had not yet arrived, or that a
sometimes bewildering array of possible replacements were contending for sovereignty
(121). He goes on to argue that [t]he broadest view of modernism is that, unconsciously
as well as consciously, technically as well as thematically, it encompasses not only
comprehensions and accommodations, but also the initial apprehensions of this change,
and that the range of its works extends from George Moore and George Gissing to Joyce
and Wyndham Lewis, from Browning and Arnold to Eliot and Pound. And even before,
Brooks pleads, there is a whole array of writers French, American, Scandinavian,
Russian (e.g., Flaubert, Whitman, Poe, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Ernest Fenollosa, etc.) whose
work had a tremendous influence on the so-called high modernists, and who fully deserve
to be considered pre-modernist, representing the first stages of what might ultimately
be seen as an epistemological shift beginning some time before The Origin of Species and
arguably still not over (121).
In spite of the difficulty in chronologically delimiting modernism, there are some
stable features and historical landmarks that circumscribe it in thematic as well as
temporal terms. One of them is the need to respond to the various apparent determinisms
and certainties of the nineteenth century, whether by attempting to assimilate them or to
escape or transcend them. The most commonly accepted view is that modernism is
characterised by the desire to awaken from [what Nietzsche called] the nightmare of
history and to achieve an immediacy of contact with a hypothetical reality uninhibited
by accumulated and often obsolete techniques and cultural assumptions (124). David
Brooks quotes Paul de Mans development of this view, according to which the radical or
ruthless forgetting of the past is succeeded by the realisation of the impossibility to
overcome history in the name of life or to forget the past in the name of modernity,
because both are linked by a temporal chain that gives them a common destiny (qtd.
124). On the contrary, according to de Man as well as Terry Eagleton, the urge to make
it new is, at best, the expression of a generative power that is itself historical (de Man

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)

Both were replaced by Postmodernisms something new.

It is therefore useful to discuss modernism comparatively, within the equally
artificial sequence of romanticism, realism, modernism and postmodernism. Its median
position in this series suggests the complex interrelations that exist between all these
trends: not only is each of them influenced by the preceding ones, but each defines itself
in contradistinction to the others and with a view to the future. In T.S. Eliots works,
individual talent and innovation can only exist within the context of a tradition: the
measure of their originality lies in the extent to which they differ from what came before
(see Tradition and the Individual Talent). Ihab Hassan, a postmodernist theoretician, on
the other hand, speaks about the way in which the present constantly defines itself as
distinct from what it has left behind, constantly looking ahead: History in the West
seems to be consumed before it is made. The modern age belongs already to the past, the
contemporary period yields to the immediate present and the present in America fades in
6

pursuit of an uncreated future. Obsolescence is the tribute we pay to our faith in

perfectibility (1966: 61). What emerges from this quote is not only the typically
modernist imperative to make it new, but also its ontological centrality to the American
ethos, to which we will return briefly.
Both Eliots theory and Hassans, although in many ways divergent and in fact
referring respectively to the two periods on either side of the Second World War, have the
merit of foregrounding the changing relationship between society and literary form that
distinguishes the twentieth century from the previous ones. In John Orrs words, this is a
century when the contours of space and time take on a new and bewildering meaning
(619) due to the epistemological and technological progress. Society is confronted with
changes that modify the coordinates of both knowledge and existence and question the
nature of artistic representation. Orr draws a rather startling conclusion:
In this intimidating context the old distinction between the Real and the Modern, realism
and modernism, should be finally buried. Narrative becomes difficult because the real
itself is more elusive than materialists ever thought. The real cannot be wished away
simply because it is not absolute, because in finding out more we also find we know less.
We find that the real has no absolute Truth. One of the profound experiences of the Real is
the discovery of limits. (619-20)

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.

Postmodernism, on the other hand,

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. (in Docherty 1993: 45-6)

Alan Roughley clarifies Lyotards distinction in terms of the sublime-subliminal-liminal

concatenation:
The sublime of modernity helps characterize the relationship between mimesis and that
which resists mimesis or representation. The liminal spaces between that which can be
represented and that which withdraws from representation...are characteristic of a postmodernist, subliminal relationship or the sublime relation between the presentable and the
unpresentable (Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition 79). (Roughley in Kay et al. 210)

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).

Radical Innovation and the Religion of Art

In connection with this constant redefinition and repositioning of the individual in
relation to his world, David Brooks offers what might be regarded as a synthesis of the
modernist literary phenomenon:
The central, if not the definitive feature of modernism becomes accordingly a re-evaluation
of literary tradition and a dislocation from immediate formal models, differing from
previous revolutions of this kind in its breadth, its intensity, and the rapidity even
synchronicity with which it produced its major works (the appearance of Joyces Ulysses,
Eliots The Waste Land, Rilkes Duino Elegies and many other significant works in the one
year, 1922, might in this sense mark a modernist climax). (122)

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)

Crossing over: Postmodernisms Breakthrough A Change of Dominant?

Ihab Hassan: Postmodernism is over: we have entered the age of postmodernity
What was Postmodernism?
Modern = contemporary
Postmodern = ?
Howcan something which exists now be said to come after the present? (Ray
131)
Postmodernism = that which comes after Modernism, a cultural movement
Term coined in 1946, simultaneously by Arnold Toynbee (he speaks of a Post-Modern
historical age), and by Randall Jarrell (who described Robert Lowells poetry as post- or
anti-modernist) (see Ray 132).
When does it begin?
-

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)

When does it end? Has it ended?

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

deconstruction, decreation, disintegration, displacement, difference, discontinuity,

disjunction, disappearance, de-definition, demystification, detotalization, delegitimation,
decolonisation. Through all these concepts moves a vast will to undoing, affecting the
body politic, the body cognitive, the erotic body, the individual psyche, the entire realm
of discourse in the West. In literature alone, our ideas of author, audience, reading,
writing, book, genre, critical theory, and of literature itself, have all suddenly become
questionable questionable but far from invalid, reconstituting themselves in various
ways.
Immanences: the capacity of mind to generalize itself in symbols, intervene more and
more into nature, act through its own abstractions, and project human consciousness to
the edges of the cosmos. This mental tendency may be further described by words like
diffusion, dissemination, projection, interplay, communication, which all derive from the
emergence of human beings as language animals, homo pictor or homo significans,
creatures constituting themselves, and also their universe, by symbols of their own
making. Call it gnostic textualism, if you must. (Hassan, From Postmodernism to
Postmodernity: The Local/ Global Context (2000), http://www.ihabhassan.com/
postmodernism_to_postmodernity.htm)
The most ubiquitous immanence is of course language (1987: 153).
Hassan elaborates the contradiction at the heart of indetermanence and, implicitly, of
postmodernism:
as an artistic, philosophical, and social phenomenon, postmodernism veers toward open,
playful, optative, provisional (open in time as well as in structure or space), disjunctive, or
indeterminate forms, a discourse of ironies and fragments, a white ideology of absences
and fractures, a desire of diffractions, an invocation of complex, articulate silences.
Postmodernism veers towards all these yet implies a different, if not antithetical, movement
toward pervasive procedures, ubiquitous interactions, immanent codes, media, languages.
(1987: 154)

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

'Postmodernism' is thus a broad range of

1. responses to modernism, especially refusals of some of its totalizing premises and
effects, and of its implicit or explicit distinction between 'high' culture and
commonly lived life,
17

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

Drawing on popular culture

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

Postmodernism gathered momentum in the 1970s when developments in Continental

philosophy seemed to justify a more generalised scepticism of claims of authority of all
kinds, cultural canons and legitimating grand narratives included. Like poststructuralism,
postmodernism crystallised around a multifaceted sense of loss: in Geoffrey Galt
4

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

Literary Postmodernism: Highlights of the Postmodern Repertoire

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

Generic/ Thematic predilections

Generic borders become increasingly permissive; however, genre remains a valid
category for classificatory and comparative purposes. Thus:
The realist novel
Angus Wilson
The gothic
Muriel Spark, Beryl Bainbridge, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Peter Ackroyd
Impact of the war in the case of these two genres: (see Stevenson 233-240)
The campus novel
David Lodge, Malcolm Bradbury
The novel of ideas
Iris Murdoch, John Fowles
New Women
Jean Rhys, Anita Brookner, Edna OBrien, Margaret Drabble, Doris Lessing, Emma
Tennant, Fay Weldon
The Lost Empire
Ian Fleming, Julian Barnes
Historical romance/ Historiographic metafiction
Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis, Edna OBrien, V.S.
Naipaul
Fictional biography vs. biographical fiction
Peter Ackroyd, V.S. Naipaul
Psychological investigation
D.M. Thomas
Formal experimentalism
Flann OBrien, B.S. Johnson, Julian Barnes, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth
Genre Lit.:
Detective fiction: Ian Fleming
Cyberpunk: Michael Marshall Smith
Manga/ Comic books: Paul Duffield, Nick Anderson

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

Continuities and Discontinuities in Modernist/Postmodernist Theory and Fictional

Practice: Complementarities and Dichotomies
I. Lyotards Micrological Postmodern Theory
Jean-Franois Lyotard the postmodern theorist par excellence, a giant of social,
ethical, and aesthetic theory and political science, and the first major definer of
postmodernity as a civilisational stage
the radical champion of difference, coupure, and pluralism

attacks modern theory and methods

represents postmodern multivalence

the exponent of a relativistic system, legitimating narrative knowledge

Lyotards contribution lies in de-hegemonising universalistic philosophy, and

launching plural, local and dissensual scrutiny.
Early work: Discours, figure (1971), Drive partir de Marx et Freud (1973), and
Economie libidinale (1974)
1984: publication of the English translation of La condition postmoderne: rapport sur
le savoir (1979): in a sense, the act of baptizing the present age.
The Postmodern Condition:
Commissioned by the Canadian government and intended as an assessment of the
structures of knowledge in advanced capitalist societies
examination of postmodern knowledge in the light of the massive reconfigurations of
cultural production and consumption effected by postindustrialism:
o transformation of knowledge into an informational commodity (1984a: 46),
under the impact of the global computerization of society (67).
o assaults of high technology on the nature of knowledge have incalculable
implications, shifting priorities from the validation of knowledge to its
compatibilisation with the demands of the culture of informatics.
Lyotards key prediction: the status of scientific discourse falls under the incidence of
the mechanisms of power, which control and modulate the worldwide informational
flow. The original integrity of science and the direction of new research will be
dictated by the possibility of its eventual results being translatable into computer
language (4)
transfer of objective, from the defining of the condition of knowledge in the most
highly developed societies (xxiii) to an ample comparative approach to modernist vs.
postmodernist discourse
sharp polemicising with modernity and what he views as its liquidated project

the demise of meta-, or grand narratives, i.e. of a set of universal, absolute and

25

transcendent assumptions underpinning Western civilisations. These grandes

histoires objectifying and legitimating modernist discourses offer the foundationalist
grounding of modern Cartesian rationality: Simplifying to the extreme, I define
postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives (xxiv)
equating modernity with modern reason and the totalising thought of the
Enlightenment, Lyotard distinguishes three conditions for the manifestation of
modern knowledge:
1. the appeal to metanarratives to legitimate foundationalist claims;
2. the inevitable outgrowth of legitimation, delegitimation, and exclusion;
3. the desire for homogeneous epistemological and moral prescriptions.
(see Best & Kellner 1991: 165)
The problem of legitimation (borrowed from Habermas) becomes the governing
concept of The Postmodern Condition.
postmodern knowledge: strongly devoted to plurality, heterogeneity and locality;
adversary to metanarratives and foundationalism, and implicitly against absolute
legitimation; it rejects the universalistic premises of metaphysical philosophy, and of
the philosophies of history, be they Hegelianism, liberalism, Marxism, or positivism.
the metanarratives of modernity manifest a high propensity toward exclusion and an
unquenchable desire for universal metaprescriptions. Through the systematic act of
universal-ising and homogenising, modernity does injustice to the heterogeneity of
language games
hence Lyotards plea for dissensus over consensus, dissent and diversity over
conformity, heterogeneity over homogeneity, the incommensurable over universalities
Dissensus is an apprenticeship in resistance (1984b: 18), i.e. the only modality in
which discourse resists assimilation by the established thought (1988: 302), and
therefore, the realisation of political emancipation. Habermasian consensus he views,
by contrast, as the end of freedom and of thought.
To the validating metadiscourses that modern knowledge resorts to, postmodern
knowledge opposes the micro-politics of language games, varying from
Wittgensteinian models of discourses to full-scale narratives or petits rcits. Given the
immanent status of narrative games, legitimation is inevitably of a limited kind for it
is object and subject, agent and agency of validation at one and the same time:
Narrativesdefine what has the right to be said and done in the culture in question,
and since they are themselves a part of that culture, they are legitimated by the simple
fact that they do what they do (23).
all discourses (whether the denotative, prescriptive and performative forms of
utterances identified by Wittgenstein, the socio-professional ones, or the so-called
little narratives) make transparent the loss of power of modern types of
legitimation.
exposes the false transcendent claims of scientific knowledge: instead of finding itself
26

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)

Postmodernism, in rejecting grand narratives, favours mini-narratives, stories that

explain small practices, local events, rather than large-scale universal or global
concepts. Postmodern mini-narratives are always situational, provisional,
contingent, and temporary, making no claim to universality, truth, reason, or stability.
knowledge becomes functional you learn things, not to know them, but to use that
knowledge => the irreversible change from knower to consumer of knowledge
who decides what knowledge is (and what noise is), and who knows what needs to
be decided?

The rules of language games:

It is useful to make the following three observations about language games. The first is that
their rules do not carry within themselves their own legitimation, but are the object of a
contract, explicit or not, between players (which is not to say that the players invent the
rules). The second is that if there are no rules, there is no game, that even an infinitesimal
modification of one rule alters the nature of the game, that a move or utterance that does
not satisfy the rules does not belong to the game they define. The third remark is suggested
by what has just been said: every utterance should be thought of as a move in a game.
This last observation brings us to the first principle underlying our method as a
whole: to speak is to fight, in the sense of playing, and speech acts fall within the domain of
a general agonistics. This does not necessarily mean that one plays in order to win. A move
can be made for the sheer pleasure of its invention: what else is involved in that labor of
language harassment undertaken by popular speech and by literature? Great joy is had in
the endless invention of turns of phrase, of words and meanings, the process behind the
evolution of language on the level of parole. But undoubtedly even this pleasure depends
on a feeling of success won at the expense of an adversary at least one adversary, and a
formidable one: the accepted language, or connotation.
This idea of an agonistics of language should not make us lose sight of the second
principle, which stands as a complement to it and governs our analysis: that the observable
social bond is composed of language moves.

(The Postmodern Condition)

The Postmodern Sublime
Lyotards definition of modern art: that which presents the fact that the unpresentable
exists. To make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can
neither be seen, nor made visible.
=> difference:
Modern aesthetics is an aesthetic of the sublime, though a nostalgic one. It allows the

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

bourgeois subject across various stages in the evolution of capitalism.

Postmodernism: the latest stage in the odyssey of the subject, whose schizophrenic
and fragmentary disintegration within contemporary postmodern culture (Best & Kellner
1991: 183) he analyses under The Waning of Affect in Postmodernism:
Edward Munchs painting The Scream is, of course, a canonical expression of the great
modernist thematics of alienation, anomie, solitude, social fragmentation, and isolation, a
virtually programmatic emblem of what used to be called the age of anxiety. It will here be
read as an embodiment not merely of the expression of that kind of affect but, even more,
as a virtual deconstruction of the very aesthetic of expression itself, which seems to have
dominated much of what we call high modernism but to have vanished away for both
practical and theoretical reasons in the world of the postmodern. The very concept of
expression presupposes indeed some separation within the subject, and along with that a
whole metaphysics of the inside and outside, of the wordless pain within the monad and the
moment in which, often cathartically, that emotion is then projected out and externalized,
as gesture or cry, as desperate communication and the outward dramatization of inward
feeling.

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

Critics point out inconsistencies:

unlike Deleuze and Guattari, Jameson performs purely linguistic and narrative
enquiries into the unconscious, placing its ideological content above its operational form,
and thus defending a Marxist hermeneutics which he postulates as the absolute horizon
of all reading and interpretation (1981: 17).
unlike Lyotard, Jameson disputes the disappearance of master narratives, claiming
that these are perpetuated in the form of the allegories structuring the political
unconscious, a statement that determined Lyotards assailing of Jamesons totalizing
dogmas (1984b). Whereas to a large extent, Jameson dismisses the common
postructuralist attacks on totalising methods, he agrees with postmodern discourse theory
that history is inaccessible to us except in textual form, yet argues that history is
nevertheless not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise; rather, history is what
hurts and its alienating necessities will not forget us, however much we might prefer to
ignore them (1981: 102).
in sharp contrast with Foucaults theory of the discontinuous epistemic shifts in
history, Jameson sees history as a coherent narrative relating the story of class struggle.

30

Part Three:
The Sense of Endings: Postmodernism and the Millennial Syndrome

The Age of Post-s

By the early 1980s, theory is in full swing and literary scholarship is informed by a
new self-consciousness: all serious criticism is urged to turn into metacommentary.
Patricia Waugh points out the most important achievement of this decade:
the term [postmodernism]shifted from the description of a range of aesthetic practices
involving double-coding, playful irony, parody, parataxis, self-consciousness,
fragmentation and the mixing and meshing of high and popular culture, to a use which
encompassed a more general shift in thought and which seemed to register a pervasive
cynicism towards the progressivist ideals of modernity. (in Knellwolf & Norris 293, my
emphasis)

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?

It is customary to designate the temporal age which encompasses these cultural

phenomena as postmodernity a highly controversial polysemantic term with very fluid
temporal limits, as Robert B. Ray shows. In epistemological terms, the trend
accommodating the critical positions current during this age is commonly referred to as
poststructuralism. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan explain poststructuralism in relation
to a number of theories that are routinely included under this umbrella. As opposed to
structuralism, poststructuralism uses linguistics as its starting point in demonstrating not
that all systems of signification are governed by the kind of order epitomised by
language, but that, on the contrary, there is an essential endemic disorder at the heart of
language itself. Paul de Man explains this as the work of rhetorical forces within language
(Semiology and Rhetoric). This disorder, according to poststructuralist thinking, is
replicated in the world that can never be mastered by any structure or semantic code that
might assign it a meaning (Rivkin & Ryan 334). Whatever order or meaning there is in
the world, it is superimposed on it through strategies of power and social control, ways
of ignoring reality rather than understanding it (334). Poststructuralism thus branches out
into a wide variety of radical critical approaches, committed to exposing the insidious
discursive strategies of power in fields as varied as philosophy, historiography, sexual
politics, art, economy or international politics.
Remember!
This is, to a large extent, a matter of definition: Postmodernism can refer to an artistic trend
(especially in the 1970s and 80s, especially in architecture and literature), a theoretical school
(represented by Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Ihab Hassan, etc.), or the period after the
Second World War (in which case it overlaps with postmodernity). Similarly,
poststructuralism may be defined as synonymous with deconstruction or as the sum of literary
theories flourishing in the wake of structuralism.

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

A: The mythical method, quotation, epiphany etc.

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)

In short, Hassans solution to the privations of the postmodern, or even post-postmodern

age, amounts to the neo-humanist self-dispossession and recuperation of human
essences (here Hassan quotes Saul Bellows declaration regarding the province of the
storyteller and novelist, 18). It is a quest for wisdom which starts in self-knowledge, an
attempt to recuperate the universals that begins with the individual but renounces the
subjective. It also renounces the arrogance of gnosis and embraces John Keatss negative
capability.
Hassans repeated statements regarding this crisis of postmodernity beg to be
contrasted with the erudite ethics of the postmodern age as portrayed, half-tongue-incheek, by Patricia Waugh towards the end of an essay on postmodernism:
The pragmatist solution [that is, radical indeterminacy] offered by postmodernism is
useful because it circumvents larger questions about mind and more specific problems
about the nature of critical knowledge or the possibility of a validity in interpretation
which would not be the outcome of a reductive scientism. If we cannot establish the
grounds for believing one interpretation to be more true than another, then we can claim
that the text is simply more useful for one set of purposes than another and then pursue a
strategic reading (political, moral, social etc.). We may then simply judge the text in
terms of how well it does this job that we ask of it, and thereby exclude the issue of
whether it is appropriate in the first place to demand of it this particular function. The
11

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

Waughs representation of postmodern ethics showcases one of the main grounds on

which postmodernism and poststructuralism have been critiqued, namely their avoidance
strategies that permit them to aestheticise, or textualise, the contemporary world i.e.,
treat it as if it were a text, interpret it rather than confront its socio-political and
epistemological problems. Waugh notes that relativism has had the strongest impact
precisely where resistance to it should have been most adamant, in Marxist criticism: the
sphere of ethics, after all, translates in the modern world into that of politics. 13 The result
is that where Marxism should have been revolutionary and asserted the rights of the
marginal, there is now a sense that the marginal is not more defensible than the
normative: their claims are equally relative.
The point is well taken: while on the one hand postmodernism proclaims the
inappropriateness of believing in subjectivity, on the other it has invented new, subtler
forms of subjectivity that, while working within the close confines of a specific discourse,
still manage to express personal preferences, interests, and agendas. In the rhetoric of
postmodernity, these new types of subjectivity are called authenticity. And the most
baffling aspect of postmodernism is precisely its attempt to cover over its inconsistencies
with the blanket of indeterminacy and play, as if these could justify political
irresponsibility. By claiming that everything is discourse, it hopes that the problems of
the world will go away as soon as they are articulated.
Q1: What is the sense in which I used the term rhetoric here? Remember Paul de Mans use of
the term? Compare these two acceptations with the classical one.
Q2: How does Michel Foucault define discourse? What and who are the initiators of discursive
practices?

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.

40

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)

42

LUCIAN BLAGA UNIVERSITY, SIBIU

DEPARTMENT OF BRITISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES
COURSE TITLE: MODERNISM / POSTMODERNISM
COURSE CONVENOR: ANA-KARINA SCHNEIDER, PhD
SENIORS, ENGLISH MAJORS AND MINORS
ACADEMIC YEAR 2008/2009

MODERNISM/POSTMODERNISM AND THE INTELLECTUAL ADVENTURE OF

THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY MIND
OBJECTIVES:
The course is designed as a theoretical enquiry into Modernism and Postmodernism as modes of
thought that have dominated the intellectual adventure of the twentieth-century mind, engendering
major redispositions of value and calling into question the very foundations of such fundamental
categories as knowledge, truth, time, being and logos. While its main scope is that of examining
contrastively the modernist/postmodernist, modernity/postmodernity paradigms in the area of the
humanities in general, and in that of literary studies in particular, the enquiry will also address
issues pertaining to the great modernist/postmodernist impact in the field of social and natural
sciences with a view to uncover the social-cultural-political determinations that have shaped the
climate of ideas in our century.
The course intends to offer appropriate theoretical background in the
modernist/postmodernist dominants by discussing in depth a corpus of fundamental texts of
literary criticism and theory. In this respect, it can function as an advanced theoretical companion
to the modules of British and American Literature, providing the students with the tools for a
deeper understanding of the aesthetic and stylistic innovations of individual writers within the
modernist and postmodernist canons. To ensure an interactive format and check comprehension,
in-class debates and analyses will conclude all lectures thus enabling the students to apply the
acquired information in close readings of their own. Organised thematically around several key
problematics, among which: discourse, language thought and representation, power, knowledge
and subjectivity, the Self and the philosophies of the subject, etc., the course will be less focused
on the historical approach, and more on an analytical one, ambitioning to contrast the chief
dichotomies of the modernist/postmodernist rapport as construed by a number of leading
theorists. Although occasional references to individual literary works will be made throughout the
course, the range of texts that will form the object of analysis is primarily made of reference
works by French and American philosophers and theorists such as: Michel Foucault, Roland
Barthes, Gerard Genette, Jacques Derrida, Ihab Hassan, Fredric Jameson, Paul de Man, etc.

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;

43

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

John Barth: The Literature of Exhaustion

- - - : The Literature of Replenishment
Brian McHale: Postmodernist Fiction, Part One, ch 1: From Modernist to
Postmodernist Fiction: Change of Dominant.
FOUR: Toward a Postmodernist Poetics: Postmodern Art and The Waning of Affect:

Fredric Jameson: Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, sbch

44

The Deconstruction of Expression, The Rise of Aesthetic Populism &

Postmodernism as Cultural Dominant
Ihab Hassan, Toward a Concept of Postmodernism
Jean-Franois Lyotard: The Postmodern Condition
Jean-Franois Lyotard: Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?

FIVE: Anti-Literature and The Postmodern Story: Practices of the Postmodern

John Barth Lost in the Funhouse
SIX: Postmodernism and the Cultural Studies Revolution: Knowledge and/as Power: Race,
Ethnicity and Gender Revisited:
Michel Foucault: The History of Sexuality, fragments (in Rivkin and Ryan).
Edward Said: Orientalism, fragments (in Rivkin and Ryan).
Luce Irigaray: The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of Women.
SEVEN: Postmodernism and the Millennial Syndrome:
Ihab Hassan, Postmodernism and Beyond.

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

Transilvania, Brasov, 2008.

Hassan, Ihab. The Literature of Silence, New York: Knopf, 1967
- - -. Radical Innocence. Studies in the Contemporary American Novel. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1961.
- - -. The Dismemberment of Orpheus. Toward A Postmodern Literature. New York& Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1971.
- - -. Paracriticisms. Seven Speculations of the Times. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975.
- - -. The Right Promethean Fire. Imagination, Silence and Cultural Change. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1980.
Hassan, Ihab and Sally Hassan (eds). Innovation/Renovation: New Perspectives on the Humanities.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983.
Hassan, Ihab (ed). Liberations: New Essays on the Humanities in Revolution. Middletown, Conn.:
Wesleyan University Press, 1971.
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno. The Culture Industry as Mass Deception in Rivkin & Ryan,
1037-42.
Jakobson, Roman. Linguistics and Poetics in Lodge, 32-57.
- - - . The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles in Lodge, 57-62.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1981.
- - -. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism: Post-Contemporary Interventions.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.
Lee, Alison. Realism and Power. Postmodern British Fiction. London: Routledge, 1990.
Lvi-Strauss, Claude. The Structural Study of Myth in Rivkin & Ryan, 101-119.
Lewis, Barry. Kazuo Ishiguro. Manchaster UP, 2000.
Lodge, David (ed). Modern Criticism and Theory. A Reader. London: Longman Penguin Group Ltd, 1988.
Lyotard, Jean-Franois. (1979) The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Massie, Allan. The Novel Today. A Critical Guide to the British Novel 1970-1989. London: Longman,
1990.
McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 1987.
Mitrea, Alexandra. Highlights of Post-War British Fiction: Lecture Notes. Editura Universtitatii Lucian
Blaga, Sibiu, 2005.
Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms: A Literary Guide. London: Macmillan, 1995.
Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan (eds). Literary Theory: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd,
1998.
Rubin, Gayle. The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex in Rivkin & Ryan, 53361.
Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West (1906-1928). New York: Random House, 1966.
Voloinov, V. N. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language in Rivkin & Ryan, 278-282.
Woods, Tim. Beginning Postmodernism. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999.
Selected (Compulsory):
Barth, John. The Literature of Exhaustion in Bradbury, The Novel Today, 70-83.
- - -. The Literature of Replenishment: Postmodernist Fiction, The Atlantic Monthly, 245, 1:65-71, 1980.
Barthes, Roland. The Death of the Author in Lodge, 167-172.
- - -. What Is Criticism in Davis and Schleifer, 46-51.
Butler, Christopher. After the Wake: An Essay on the Contemporary Avant- Garde, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1980.
- - -. Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 1900-1916, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1994.
Derrida, Jacques. Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences in Lodge, 108-124.
- - -. Diffrance in Rivkin & Ryan, 385-408.
De Saussure, Ferdinand. Selections from Course in General Linguistics (1916) in Davis and Schleifer, 243260 or in Rivkin & Ryan, 76-91.
Eagleton, Terry. Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism in Lodge, 385-399.
Foucault, Michel. The Archeology of Knowledge in Rivkin & Ryan, 421-429.
- - -. The History of Sexuality in Rivkin & Ryan, 683-692.
- - -. What Is An Author? in Lodge, 197-211.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams in Rivkin & Ryan, 128-151.

46

- - -. Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Rivkin & Ryan, 168-175.

Gilbert Sandra and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic in Rivkin & Ryan, 596-612.
Graff, Gerald. The Myth of the Postmodernist Breakthrough in Bradbury, The Novel Today, 217-249.
Gramsci, Antonio. Hegemony (from The Formation of Intellectuals) in Rivkin & Ryan, 277/8.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Invisible Bullets in Rivkin & Ryan, 786-804.
Habermas, Jrgen. The Entry into Postmodernity: Nietzsche as a Turning Point in Docherty, 51-60.
- - -. Modernity An Incomplete Project in Foster, 3-15.
Hassan, Ihab. Toward a Concept of Postmodernism in Docherty, 146-154.
Hegel, G. W. F. Dialectics (from The Science of Logic) in Rivkin & Ryan, 243-247.
Heidegger, Martin. Identity and Difference in Rivkin & Ryan, 370-2.
- - -. Being and Time in Rivkin & Ryan, 368-70.
Irigaray, Luce. The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine in Rivkin & Ryan, 57074.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism in Docherty, 62-92.
Lacan, Jacques. The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic
Experience in Davis and Schleifer (1949), 381-387 or Rivkin & Ryan, 178-184.
- - -. The Insistence/Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious in Lodge, 80-107 or Rivkin & Ryan, 190206.
- - -. The Symbolic Order (from The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis) in
Rivkin & Ryan, 178-84.
Lyotard, Jean-Franois. Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism? in Docherty, 38-46.
- - -. The Postmodern Condition in Rivkin & Ryan, 509-514.
McHale, Brian. From Modernism to Postmodernism: A Change of Dominant; The Dominant (from
Part One: Preliminaries). Postmodernist Fiction. 3-13.
Moi, Toril. Representation of Patriarchy: Sexuality and Epistemology in Freuds Dora in Davis and
Schleifer, 387-400.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power in Rivkin & Ryan, 362-368.
Said, Edward. Orientalism in Rivkin & Ryan, 873-87.
Waugh, Patricia. Practising Postmodernism. Reading Modernism, London: Arnold, 1992.
Williams, Raymond. Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory in Davis and Schleifer, 453467.

47

Sample Exam Questions

In the Preface to his 1975 study Structural Fabulation: an Essay on Fiction of the Future,
American critic Robert Scholes deplores the textualist revelations complicating the
scene of writing in the postmodern age, the fall from innocence of language.
Addressing Scholess remarks excerpted below, comment on the problem of selfreferentiality in postmodern fiction with illustrations from your readings.
Once we knew that fiction was about life, and criticism was about fiction, and everything
was simple. Now we know that fiction is about other fiction, is criticism in fact, or
metafiction. And we know that criticism is about the impossibility of anything being about
life, really, or even about fiction, or, finally, about anything. Criticism has taken the very
idea of aboutness away from us. It has taught us that language is tautological, if it is no
nonsense, and to the extent that it is about anything, it is about itself. Mathematics is about
mathematics, poetry is about poetry, and criticism is about its own impossibility.

Bonus: Define Postmodernism in comparison to Modernism, along the lines of

fragmentariness.
OR:
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;
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)

Comment on Lyotards statement, then illustrate it with reference to your own readings.
OR:

48

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.

Detail his celebration of metafiction and intertextuality, compare it to the modernist

attitude to narrative or the telling of stories, and illustrate with reference to both

49

modernist and postmodern novels.

NB
In the written examination you will have to deal with only one such topic. Please read
the requirements of the exam topic very carefully and address them, without
deviating from them.
In preparing your exam, please read Dr Neagus book on Postmodernism and as much
of the bibliography as you can! Make sure that you are familiar with the critical
terminology and that you can operate with it. A good dictionary of literary terms and
literary theory (such as JA Cuddons) would come in handy at about this time Also,
make sure you brush up on your reading from Modernist literature.
List of suggested reading from Postmodern literature:
A.S. Byatt, Possession
Anthony Burgess, The Clockwork Orange
D. M. Thomas, The White Hotel
Graham Swift, Waterland
Ian McEwan, Atonement
Ian McEwan, Enduring Love
Ian McEwan, The Innocent
John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse
John Barth, The Floating Opera
John Fowles, The French Lieutenants Woman
Julian Barnes, England, England
Julian Barnes, Flauberts Parrot
Julian Barnes, The History of the World in 10 Chapters
Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
Martin Amis, Times Arrow
Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy
Peter Ackroyd, Chatterton
Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor
Salman Rushdie, Midnights Children
Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses
Salman Rushdie, Fury

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