Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern by Linda Hutcheon At the risk of succumbing to New Historicist fashion, I should nonetheless

like to begin
with a personal anecdote. But I shall ask you, the reader, to take an active role: I should like you to pretend you are me and imagine your response to the following situation. he time is a few years ago! you are in "ondon, #ngland. $ou have %ust that hour submitted to your publisher the final version of the manuscript of a book on the theory and politics of irony.& In a celebratory mood, you walk into a bookstore. 'ne of the first things that catches your eye((for obvious and deeply personal reasons((is the cover of an #nglish maga)ine entitled The Modern Review. 'n it is pictured the e*uivalent of a +no smoking+ sign, but this time the barred red circle of forbiddenness surrounds a pair of inverted commas, reinforcing the headline: + he #nd of Irony, he ragedy of the -ost(Ironic .ondition.+ $ou might be somewhat nonplussed: you know you delivered the manuscript a bit later than you had promised((but you had not really counted on the book being utterly out of date before it was even published. -erhaps you might react as I did: you might *uickly /and not a little nervously0 turn to the article inside on the commodification of irony by the very generation /the +twentysomething+ generation0 that was said to be using irony as its only defence against commodification.1 2epending on your temperament, you might think this entire incident was uncannily odd or disturbingly interesting or downright irritating. But stretch your imagination a little more and consider how you might then feel if, on the same pages as this article about the end of irony, you found a companion article about the seven types of /not ambiguity, but0 nostalgia that were said to greet the +end of irony.+ 3emember, you are me in this e4ercise of the imagination: and you have therefore spent not a little time and energy over the last decade arguing that /at least what you would like to call0 the +postmodern+ has little to do with nostalgia and much to do with irony.5 he forces ranged against such a reading of postmodernism were formidable in the e4treme,6 but you have always been a little stubborn. 'f course, you have never denied that a lot of contemporary culture was indeed nostalgic: you cannot close your eyes /and ears0 to everything going on around you. But there was also lots of irony((maybe too much irony((and that is what you have been trying to think through for the last few years. But here was irony7s end and nostalgia7s proliferating types sharing not only the same page, but the same popular culture e4amples. 8hat7s worse, to believe the authors of these articles, the end of irony seemed actually to necessitate this proliferation of nostalgia. Now /use your imagination0 would you feel some kind of challenge in all this, 8ould you feel that welcome /or unwelcome0 sense of unfinished business, 'bviously, I did. I thought this issue of the maga)ine was 2estiny, 9ate, ... and all those other capitali)ed monstrosities by which we e4cuse our obsessions in life. And this essay represents my attempt to deal with this unfinished business, to try to understand why I had earlier chosen to all but ignore the nostalgic dimension of the postmodern in favour of the ironic. It cannot simply be put down to the fact that I am utterly un(nostalgic, though that is a personality fault to which I must admit. I am also relatively un(ironic /and I certainly

miss many ironies0((as countless colleagues and students over the years have learned, much to their consternation and, no doubt, amusement. I simply believed irony to be more complicated, more interesting, more +edgy+ than nostalgia, and in so believing, I all but ignored the very real and very uneasy tension between postmodern irony and nostalgia today. he specific cultural forms of the postmodern are not my only focus here, because I also want to consider more broadly certain forms of contemporary culture, not all of which can be considered complicitously critical and deconstructing((that is, not all of them are postmodern. But it was postmodernism that brought the con%unction of irony and nostalgia *uite literally into the public eye through the forms of its architecture. he early debates focussed precisely on that con%unction in response to postmodern architecture7s double(coding, its deliberate /if ironi)ed0 return to the history of the humanly constructed environment.: his return was in reaction to modern architecture7s ostentatious re%ection of the past, including the past of the city7s historical fabric. he terms of the debate were basically as follows: was this postmodern recalling of the past an e4ample of a conservative((and therefore nostalgic((escape to an ideali)ed, simpler era of +real+ community values,; 'r did it e4press, but through its ironic distance, a +genuine and legitimate dissatisfaction with modernity and the un*uestioned belief in ... perpetual moderni)ation+,< he *uestion soon became: how is it that the same cultural entity could come to be interpreted /apparently0 so widely differently as to be seen as either ironic or nostalgic, 'r as both ironic and nostalgic,= he American television series +All in the 9amily+ was one e4ample of the latter conflation. 2espite its allegedly progressive intent((what its creators intended as ironic de(bunking((it seems that Archie Bunker was popular in large segments of various populations because of the show7s conservative, indeed openly nostalgic, appeal to attitudes perhaps consciously denied but deeply felt.> In general cultural commentary in the mass media((as in the academy((irony and nostalgia are both seen as key components of contemporary culture today.&? In the &>=?s, it was irony that captured our attention most! in the &>>?s, it appears to be nostalgia that is holding sway. 2avid "owenthal has even asserted that, while +@fAormerly confined in time and place, nostalgia today engulfs the whole past.+&& -erhaps nostalgia is given surplus meaning and value at certain moments((millennial moments, like our own. Nostalgia, the media tell us, has become an obsession of both mass culture and high art. And they may be right, though some people feel the obsession is really the media7s obsession.&1 $et, how else do you account for the return of the fountain pen((as an ob%ect of consumer lu4ury((in the age of the computer, when we have all but forgotten how to write, he e4planations offered for this kind of commerciali)ed lu4uriating in the culture of the past have ranged from economic cynicism to moral superiority. hey usually point to a dissatisfaction with the culture of the present((something that is then either applauded or condemned. "eading the applause, an apocalyptic Beorge Cteiner claims that the decline in formal value systems in the 8est has left us with a +deep, unsettling nostalgia for the absolute.+&5 And, I suspect more than one reader longs for a time /in the ideali)ed past0 when knowledge((and its purveyors((had some purchase and influence on what

constituted value in society. But even on the less contentious level of retro fashions or various other commercial nostalgias, it does appear that the +derogatory word 7dated7 seems to have vanished from our language.+&6 It has been taken over by +nostalgic,+ a word that has been used to signal both praise and blame. But, however self(evident /on a common sense level0 it may seem that an often sentimentali)ed nostalgia is the very opposite of edgy irony, the postmodern debates7 conflation /or confusion0 of the two should give us pause. Before beginning to tackle this conflation, I need to lay out briefly the definitions of my principal concepts and the terms of my argument. I have already defined my particular usage of the term +postmodern+((which is not synonymous with the contemporary, but which does have some mi4 of the complicitous and the critical at its ambivalent core. And I am going to trust that readers will all have some sort of sense of what +irony+ means((either in its rhetorical or New .ritical meanings or in its more e4tended senses of situational irony or, with an historical dimension, of +romantic+ irony. 8hat e4actly is +nostalgia,+ though, 'r perhaps the first *uestion really should be: what 8AC nostalgia, 8ith its Breek roots((nostos, meaning +to return home+ and algos, meaning +pain+((this word sounds so familiar to us that we may forget that it is a relatively new word, as words go. It was coined in &;== by a &>(year old Cwiss student in his medical dissertation as a sophisticated /or perhaps pedantic0 way to talk about a literally lethal kind of severe homesickness /of Cwiss mercenaries far from their mountainous home0.&: his medical(pathological definition of nostalgia allowed for a remedy: the return home, or sometimes merely the promise of it. he e4periencing and the attributing of a nostalgic response appeared well before this, of course. hink of the psalmist7s remembering of Dion while weeping by the waters of Babylon. But the term itself seems to be culturally and historically specific.&; his physical and emotional +upheaval ... related to the workings of memory+((an upheaval that could and did kill, according to seventeenth( and eighteenth(century physicians((was seen as a +disorder of the imagination+ from the start.&< But by the nineteenth century, a considerable semantic slippage had occurred, and the word began to lose its purely medical meaning,&= in part because the rise of pathologic anatomy and bacteriology had simply made it less medically credible. Nostalgia then became generali)ed,&> and by the twentieth century, it had begun to attract the interest of psychiatrists.1? But curious things happened in that generali)ing process: nostalgia became less a physical than a psychological condition! in other words, it became psychically internali)ed. It also went from being a curable medical illness to an incurable /indeed unassuageable0 condition of the spirit or psyche.1& 8hat made that transition possible was a shift in site from the spatial to the temporal. Nostalgia was no longer simply a yearning to return home. As early as &<>=, Immanuel Eant had noted that people who did return home were usually disappointed because, in fact, they did not want to return to a place, but to a time, a time of youth.11 ime, unlike space, cannot be returned to((ever! time is irreversible. And nostalgia becomes the reaction to that sad fact.15 As one critic has succinctly put this change: +'dysseus longs for home! -roust is in search of lost time.+16

Nostalgia, in fact, may depend precisely on the irrecoverable nature of the past for its emotional impact and appeal. It is the very pastness of the past, its inaccessibility, that likely accounts for a large part of nostalgia7s power((for both conservatives and radicals alike. his is rarely the past as actually e4perienced, of course! it is the past as imagined, as ideali)ed through memory and desire. In this sense, however, nostalgia is less about the past than about the present. It operates through what Fikhail Bakhtin called an +historical inversion+: the ideal that is not being lived now is pro%ected into the past.1: It is +memoriali)ed+ as past, crystalli)ed into precious moments selected by memory, but also by forgetting, and by desire7s distortions and reorgani)ations.1; Cimultaneously distancing and pro4imating, nostalgia e4iles us from the present as it brings the imagined past near. he simple, pure, ordered, easy, beautiful, or harmonious past is constructed /and then e4perienced emotionally0 in con%unction with the present((which, in turn, is constructed as complicated, contaminated, anarchic, difficult, ugly, and confrontational. Nostalgic distancing saniti)es as it selects, making the past feel complete, stable, coherent, safe from +the une4pected and the untoward, from accident or betrayal+1<((in other words, making it so very unlike the present. he aesthetics of nostalgia might, therefore, be less a matter of simple memory than of comple4 pro%ection! the invocation of a partial, ideali)ed history merges with a dissatisfaction with the present. And it can do so with great force. hink of how visceral, how physically +present+ nostalgia7s promptings are: it is not %ust -roust for whom tastes, smells, sounds, and sights con%ure up an ideali)ed past. If you are not like me /that is, if you are capable of nostalgia0, you can think of your own e4perience((or, if need be, do as I have to do and think of the power of the taste of -roust7s madeleine or the scent of violets in ennyson7s + A dream of fair women+ or of a geranium leaf in David Copperfield.1= here are, of course, many ways to look backward. $ou can look and re%ect. 'r you can look and linger longingly. In its looking backward in this yearning way, nostalgia may be more of an attempt to defy the end, to evade teleology. As we approach the millennium, nostalgia may be particularly appealing as a possible escape from what "ee Guinby calls +technological apocalypse.+1> If the future is cyberspace, then what better way to soothe techno(peasant an4ieties than to yearn for a Font Blanc fountain pen, But there is a rather obvious contradiction here: nostalgia re*uires the availability of evidence of the past,5? and it is precisely the electronic and mechanical reproduction of images of the past that plays such an important role in the structuring of the nostalgic imagination today, furnishing it with the possibility of +compelling vitality.+5& hanks to .2 3'F technology and, before that, audio and video reproduction, nostalgia no longer has to rely on individual memory or desire: it can be fed forever by *uick access to an infinitely recyclable past. hat original theory of nostalgia as a medical condition was developed in #urope +at the time of the rise of the great cities when greatly improved means of transportation made movements of the population much easier+!51 in other words, you would be more likely to be away from home and thus yearn for it. he postmodern version of nostalgia may have been developed /in the 8est, at least0 at the time when the rise of information technology made us *uestion not only /as Hean(9ranIois "yotard told us we must550 what would count as knowledge, but what would count as +the past+ in relation to the present. 8e

have not lacked for critics who lament the decline of historical memory in our postmodern times, often blaming the storage of memory in data banks for our cultural amnesia, our inability to engage in active remembrance. But, as Andreas Huyssen has convincingly argued, the contrary is %ust as likely to be true. In his words: + he more memory we store on data banks, the more the past is sucked into the orbit of the present, ready to be called up on the screen,+ making the past simultaneous with the present in a new way.56 Nostalgia, however, does not simply repeat or duplicate memory. Cusan Ctewart7s provocative study, On Longing suggestively calls nostalgia a +social disease,+ defining it as +the repetition that mourns the inauthenticity of all repetition.+5: he argument is that, denying or at least degrading the present as it is lived, nostalgia makes the ideali)ed /and therefore always absent0 past into the site of immediacy, presence, and authenticity. And here she approaches one of the ma%or differences between nostalgia and irony. Jnlike the knowingness of irony((a mark of the fall from innocence, if ever there was one((nostalgia is, in this way, +prelapsarian+ and indeed utopian, says Ctewart.5; 9ew have ever accused irony /even satiric irony0 of successfully reinstating the authentic and the ideal. Nostalgia has certainly not lacked for defenders, most of whom are psychoanalytically( oriented.5< his is not surprising if you think of the significant relationship psychoanalysis posits between identity and the personal psychic past unearthed by memory. his relationship becomes the model for the link between collective identity and memory for those who see a move to nostalgic transcendence and authenticity as a positive move. As one person in this camp has put it: +"onging is what makes art possible.+5= By +longing,+ he means the emotional response to deprivation, loss, and mourning. Nostalgia has, in this way, been deemed the necessary inspirational +creative sorrow+ for artists.5> his position draws on the original seventeenth(century meaning of the word! it sees nostalgia in our century as the positive response to the homelessness and e4ile of both private +nervous disorder and @publicA persecution of actual enslavement and barbaric cruelty.+6? 8hen I think of the displaced homeless peoples of 3wanda or Bosnia, however, the more triviali)ed, commerciali)ed connotations of the word +nostalgia+ do stand in the way for me. Fy feelings when e4periencing those lushly nostalgic FerchantKIvory film versions of earlier novels must be different /in kind and not only in degree0 from the e4perience of political refugees yearning for their homeland. But perhaps not. In other words, despite very strong reservations /based in part on personality limitations0, I do know that I should never underestimate the power of nostalgia, especially its visceral physicality and emotional impact. But that power comes in part from its structural doubling(up of two different times, an inade*uate present and an ideali)ed past.6& But this is where I must return to that other obsession of mine((irony((for irony too is doubled: two meanings, the +said+ and the +unsaid,+ rub together to create irony((and it too packs considerable punch. -eople do not usually get upset about metaphor or synecdoche, but they certainly do get worked up about irony, as they did a few years ago in oronto, where I live and work, when the aptly named 3oyal 'ntario Fuseum put on an e4hibition that used irony to deal with the relationship of .anadian missionaries and

military to #mpire in Africa. Cometimes, as we all know well, people get upset because they are the targets or victims of irony. Cometimes, though, anger erupts at the seeming inappropriateness of irony in certain situations. 8itness the remarks of the .urriculum Advisor on 3ace 3elations and Fulticulturalism for the oronto Board of #ducation at the time: + he implied criticism of colonial intrusion and the bigotry of the white missionaries and soldiers relies heavily on the use of irony, a subtle and fre*uently misunderstood techni*ue. In dealing with issues as sensitive as cultural imperialism and racism, the use of irony is a highly inappropriate lu4ury+((especially, I might add, when condemnation is what is e4pected and desired.61 8hat irony and nostalgia share, therefore, is a perhaps une4pected twin evocation of both affect and agency((or, emotion and politics. I suspect that one of the reasons they do so is that they share something else((a secret hermeneutic affinity that might well account for some of the interpretive confusion with which I began, the confusion that saw postmodern artifacts, in particular, deemed simultaneously ironic and nostalgic. I want to argue that to call something ironic or nostalgic is, in fact, less a description of the #N I $ I C#"9 than an attribution of a *uality of 3#C-'NC#. Irony is not something in an ob%ect that you either +get+ or fail to +get+: irony +happens+ for you /or, better, you make it +happen+0 when two meanings, one said and the other unsaid, come together, usually with a certain critical edge. "ikewise, nostalgia is not something you +perceive+ in an ob%ect! it is what you +feel+ when two different temporal moments, past and present, come together for you and, often, carry considerable emotional weight. In both cases, it is the element of response((of active participation, both intellectual and affective((that makes for the power. Because people do not talk about this element of active attribution, the politics of both irony and nostalgia are often written off as *uietistic at best. But irony is what Hayden 8hite calls +transideological+: it can be made to +happen+ by /and to0 anyone of any political persuasion. And nostalgia too is transideological, despite the fact that many would argue that, whether used by the right or the left, nostalgia is fundamentally conservative in its pra4is, for it wants to keep things as they were((or, more accurately, as they are imagined to have been.65 But, the nostalgia for an ideali)ed community in the past has been articulated by the ecology movement as often as by fascism,66 by what Hean Baudrillard calls +@mAelancholy for societies without power.+6: 9rom the seventeenth century on, nostalgia seems to have been connected to the desire to return specifically to the homeland. In nineteenth(century #urope, that homeland became articulated in terms of the nation state, and nostalgia began to take on its associations with nationalism((and chauvinism.6; #ven its more innocent(seeming forms((such as the preparing and eating of familiar foods by immigrant groups((can be seen as a nostalgic enactment of ethnic group identity, a collective disregarding, at least temporarily, of generational and other divisions.6< 'ne brave anthropologist has claimed that, unlike such searches for ethnicity, feminism has +no tendency toward nostalgia, no illusion of a golden age in the past.+6= It has been suggested that this lack of nostalgic response is because the narratives of nostalgia((from the Bible onward((are male stories, 'edipal stories which are alienating to women /who

usually remain at home like -enelope, while men wander the world and risk getting homesick0.6> And, in support of such a theory, literary and film critics alike have located strains of a current antifeminist, nostalgic retreat to the past in the face of the changes in culture brought about by the rise of feminism.:? Humankind has not infre*uently responded with a nostalgic defensive retreat into the past when feeling threatened: for e4ample, despite its forward(looking ideology, the late nineteenth(century Jnited Ctates gave great new value to its .olonial past((as an +e4clusive 8AC- @8hite Anglo(Ca4on -rotestantA heritage+((in part to combat the mass immigration that was accompanying industriali)ation and that felt so new and so un(+American.+:& he politics of nostalgia are not only national or gender politics, of course. hink of the popularity in the &>=?s of the 2avid "ean film of 9orster7s A assage to !ndia or of The "ewel and the Crown, the television adaptation of -aul Ccott7s The Ra# $uartet. he intended anti(nostalgic e4posL of the corruption and e4ploitation of empire in India may have been less the cause of their success than either a nostalgic liberal(utopian hope that two races might have been able to live as e*uals((despite history((or a nostalgic memory of the time when Britain was not a minor world power but, rather, ruler of an empire upon which the sun never set.:1 his is what 3enato 3osaldo calls +imperial nostalgia,+ the kind that makes racial domination appear innocent through elegance of manners.:5 But, this nostalgia puts us, as viewers, into the same position as the very agents of empire, for they too have documented at length their parado4ical nostalgia for the cultures they had coloni)ed((in other words, the ones they had intentionally and forcefully altered. his is the nostalgia of those who believe in +progress+ and innovation, a nostalgia /again, parado4ically0 for more simple, stable worlds((such as those of the putatively static societies they destroyed. -ost(colonial critics have pointed to nostalgic moments in the history of the coloni)ed, too, however. o some, the +nLgritude+ move in African cultural theory, with its focus on the pre(capitalist, pre(imperial past, was the sign of a nostalgic search for a lost coherence.:6 Fany oppressed people((Holocaust survivors and North American 9irst Nations peoples among them((have had a strong and understandable nostalgia for what is perceived as their once unified identity. But most often, the post(colonial focus of attention has been on the nostalgia of the /usually0 #uropean coloni)ers, on their sense of loss and mourning for the cultural unity and centrality they once had.:: But, as 9redric Hameson has said, +a history lesson is the best cure for nostalgic pathos.+:; Hameson7s own attack on the postmodern is in itself worth e4amining in this conte4t because it is an attack on both its regressive nostalgia and its triviali)ing irony. 'ne of Hameson7s main targets is what he calls the postmodern +nostalgia film+((a term that he has used to refer to anything from Beorge "ukas7s American %raffiti to "aurence Easdan7s &ody 'eat. hese are what he calls +fashion(plate, historicist films+ that reveal +the desperate attempt to appropriate a missing past.+:< o him, these are the inauthentic, nostalgic +celebrations of the imaginary style of a real past+ which he sees as +something of a substitute for that older system of historical representation, indeed as a virtual symptom(formation, a formal compensation for the enfeeblement of historicity in our own time.+:= his medicali)ed psychoanalytic language((+symptom(formation+,

+compensation+((is used *uite deliberately by Hameson because he feels that the postmodern taste for such films corresponds to certain needs in what he calls +our present economic(psychic constitution.+:> But film theorist Anne 9riedberg has pointed out that what Hameson is really protesting here is the distanced relation of every film from its historical referent. In other words, it is the medium and not postmodernism that gives the illusion of a +perpetual present interminably recycled.+;? 'r, as 2erek Harman put it when rewriting Farlowe in his postmodern film version of (dward !!, +@fAilmed history is always a misinterpretation. he past is the past, as you try to make material out of it, things slip even further away.+;& But, even if Hameson is wrong in where he puts the blame for the nostalgia, what interests me is that, when he finds something nostalgic((be it in the theori)ing of the 9rankfurt Cchool or the novels of H.B. Ballard((nostalgia is meant to be taken negatively as +regressive.+;1 $et his own rhetoric and position can themselves at times sound strangely nostalgic: in article after article in the &>=?s, he repeatedly yearned for what he called +genuine historicity+ in the face of a postmodernism which, in his words, was +an elaborated symptom of the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of e4periencing history in some active way.+;5 And yet, it is precisely nostalgia for this kind of +lost authenticity+ that has proved time and time again to be paraly)ing in terms of historical thinking.;6 Indeed Hameson7s position has been called both regressive and defeatist.;: Is Hameson7s implicit mythologi)ing and ideali)ing of a more stable, pre(late( capitalist /that is, modernist0 world not in itself perhaps part of an aesthetics /or even politics0 of nostalgia, If so, it is one he shares with his Far4ist predecessor, Beorg "ukMcs, for whom it was not modernism but realism that constituted that implied +moment of plenitude+;; in the past around which literary historical nostalgia revolved. Fichael BLrubL has, in fact, suggested that the "eft, in America at least, has at times recently seemed paraly)ed +by dreams of days when things were better.+ As he puts it: +it was only the repeated interventions of women, ethnic minorities and variously *ueer theorists that finally shattered the pernicious sense of nostalgia to which so many men on the antipostmodern left fell victim.+;< Nostalgia can certainly be, in im 3eiss7s strong terms, +functionally crippling.+;= Hameson7s preference for science fiction over these period(recreation +nostalgia+ films is a bit deceptive, for it simply points to his orientation toward the very common futuristic dimension of an e*ually nostalgic utopian drive.;> If the present is considered irredeemable, you can look either back or forward. he nostalgic and utopian impulses share a common re%ection of the here and now. It is not that the here and now, the present, does not have its problems, however. All +presents+ have always had their problems, but there is little doubt that there has been, in the last few decades, a commerciali)ation of nostalgia, especially in the mass media, a commerciali)ation that many have seen as a real evasion of contemporary issues and problems.<? 3alph "auren7s +Cafari+ fashion and perfume line a few years ago allowed us to e4perience the nostalgic style of an era without bearing any of its historical costs! it also offered us, as one writer put it, +a chance to relive the days of the tragically doomed upper class engaging in their white mischief on the plains of the Cerengeti+<&((+living without boundaries+, as the ads said. his is a combination of commercial nostalgia((that

teaches us to miss things we have never lost((and +armchair nostalgia+((that e4ists without any lived e4perience of the yearned(for time.<1 Is this part of the +postmodern+, Cince it is part of late(capitalist culture, Hameson would say it is. But, to generali)e the term +postmodern+ into a synonym for the contemporary is to abandon its historical and cultural specificity((an abandonment Hameson would never condone for modernism, for e4ample. o illustrate what I mean about the need to make distinctions, think of the difference between contemporary postmodern architecture and contemporary revivalist /nostalgic0 architecture! the postmodern architecture does indeed recall the past, but always with the kind of ironic double vision that acknowledges the final impossibility of indulging in nostalgia, even as it consciously evokes nostalgia7s affective power. In the postmodern, in other words, /and here is the source of the tension0 nostalgia itself gets both called up, e4ploited, and ironi)ed.<5 his is a complicated /and postmodernly parado4ical0 move that is both an ironi)ing of nostalgia itself, of the very urge to look backward for authenticity, and, at the same moment, a sometimes shameless invoking of the visceral power that attends the fulfilment of that urge.<6 -erhaps the history of the wider cultural entity called postmodernity would help e4plain this parado4. If, as it has been argued often, nostalgia is a by(product of cultural modernity /with its alienation, its much lamented loss of tradition and community0,<: then postmodernity7s comple4 relationship with modernity((a relationship of both rupture and continuity((might help us understand the necessary addition of irony to this nostalgic inheritance. It has become a commonplace to compare the end of the nineteenth century to the end of our own, to acknowledge their common doubts about progress, their shared worries over political instability and social ine*uality, their comparable fears about disruptive change.<; But if nostalgia was an obvious conse*uence of the last fin(de(siNcle panic((+manifest in ideali)ations of rural life, in vernacular(revival architecture, in arts( and(crafts movements, and in a surge of preservation activity+<<((then some, not all /not the commercial variety, usually0, but some nostalgia we are seeing today /what I want to call postmodern0 is of a different order, an ironi)ed order. If the nineteenth century turned nostalgically to the historical novels of 8alter Ccott and familiar Bothic 3evival architecture, the twentieth has combined nostalgia with irony to produce the historiographic metafictions of Calman 3ushdie and historically suggestive, parodic architectural ideas of .harles Foore7s once splendid -ia))a d7Italia in New 'rleans. Bone is the sense of belatedness of the present vis(O(vis the past! the act of ironi)ing /while still implicitly invoking0 nostalgia undermines modernist assertions of originality, authenticity, and the burden of the past, even as it acknowledges their continuing /but not paraly)ing0 validity as aesthetic concerns. 'ur contemporary culture is indeed nostalgic! some parts of it((postmodern parts((are aware of the risks and lures of nostalgia, and seek to e4pose those through irony. Biven irony7s con%unction of the said and the unsaid((in other words, its inability to free itself from the discourse it contests((there is no way for these cultural modes to escape a certain complicity, to separate themselves artificially from the culture of which they are a part. If our culture really is obsessed with remembering((and forgetting((as is suggested by the astounding growth of what Huyssen calls our +memorial culture+ with its +relentless

museummania,+<= then perhaps irony is one /though only one0 of the means by which to create the necessary distance and perspective on that anti(amnesiac drive. Admittedly, there is little irony in most memorials, and ne4t to none in most truly nostalgic re( constructions of the past((from 2isney 8orld7s Fain Ctreet, JCA to those elaborate dramati)ed re(enactments of everything from the American .ivil 8ar to medieval %ousts restaged in contemporary #ngland. But there is much ironi)ed nostalgia too((in Angela .arter7s meditation on gender and the dawn of the twentieth century in )ights at the Circus or in the wonderful generic parado4 of a new work commissioned by the Fetropolitan 'pera of New $ork: 8illiam Hofman and Hohn .origliano7s The %hosts of *ersailles. It is ironically and parado4ically called a +grand opera buffa+((for +grand+ is the only kind of +intimate+ opera buffa you can put on at that particular opera house, with its more than 5??? seats and its penchant for spectacle and indeed for +grand opera.+ 9rom a postmodern point of view, the knowingness of this kind of irony may be not so much a defense against the power of nostalgia as the way in which nostalgia is made palatable today: invoked but, at the same time, undercut, put into perspective, seen for e4actly what it is((a comment on the present as much as on the past. Ceen from that angle, though, not only have irony and nostalgia gone hand in hand in the postmodern, but perhaps they have done so for a long time /as those who work in earlier periods may know only too well0: 2on Gui%ote gave us those wonderful ironies of incongruity and inappropriateness precisely through his nostalgia for a chivalric past. In like vein, the all too ready attribution of irony to someone like Fadonna in her Farilyn /and maybe even in her #vita0 phase cannot really be separated from nostalgia. his may in part be because irony and nostalgia are not *ualities of ob#ects! they are responses of sub#ects((active, emotionally( and intellectually(engaged sub%ects. he ironi)ing of nostalgia, in the very act of its invoking, may be one way the postmodern has of taking responsibility for such responses by creating a small part of the distance necessary for reflective thought about the present as well as the past.

Endnotes &. !rony+s (dge, The Theory and olitics of !rony /"ondon and New $ork: 3outledge, &>>:0. 1. oby $oung and om Panderbilt, + he #nd of Irony,+ The Modern Review &.&6 /April(Fay &>>60: ;(<. 5. Cee "inda Hutcheon, A oetics of ostmodernism, 'istory- Theory- .iction /"ondon and New $ork: 3outledge, &>=<0! The olitics of ostmodernism /"ondon and New $ork: 3outledge, &>==0! The Canadian ostmodern / oronto: '4ford J-, &>>=0. 6. he list would be endless, but let me simply note the most cited opponent of the postmodern, 9redric Hameson, whose &>=6 essay on +-ostmodernism, 'r he .ultural "ogic of "ate .apitalism+ in the )ew Left Review &6; /&>=60: :5(>1 in many ways provoked my own work in the field.

:. Cee .harles Hencks, The Language of ost/Modern Architecture /"ondon: Academy, &><<0 and ost/Modern Classicism, The )ew 0ynthesis /"ondon: Academy, &>=?0. ;. Cee Fanfredo afuri, Theories and 'istory of Architecture /"ondon: Branada, &>=?0, :1(>. <. Andreas Huyssen, +Fapping the -ostmodern,+ reprinted in Hoseph Natoli and "inda Hutcheon, eds., A ostmodern Reader /Albany: CJN$ -, &>>50, &&1. =. 'f course in the &>;?s Cusan Contag characteri)ed camp in precisely these terms in her +Notes on 7.amp7+ in Against !nterpretation and other (ssays /New $ork: 9arrar, Ctraus Q Birou4, &>;;0, 1<:(>1. >. Cee Cherry "ynne 3osenthal, +9our #ssays on the Nostalgic Appeal of -opular 9iction, 9ilm, and elevision: 'ard Times, The &irth of a )ation, The %rapes of 1rath, All in the .amily.+ -h.2. dissertation, Jniversity of .alifornia, Can 2iego, &>=5. &?. Cee -eter 3ist, +Nostalgia: Ctars and Benres in American -op .ulture,+ Canadian Review of American 0tudies 1?.& /&>=>0: &&&(&<. &&. 2avid "owenthal, The ast !s a .oreign Country /.ambridge: .ambridge J-, &>=:0, ;. &1. Cee .hristopher "asch, + he -olitics of Nostalgia,+ 'arper+s Maga2ine /November &>=60, ;=! "owenthal 1>! Candra #rnst Foriarty and Anthony 9. FcBann, +Nostalgia and .onsumer Centiment,+ "ournalism $uarterly ;? /&>=50: =: on the impact of nostalgic professional design maga)ine advertisements on the media. &5. Beorge Cteiner, )ostalgia for the Absolute, Fassey "ectures, &6th series / oronto: .B., &><60, :?. &6. 3obert 3ubens, + he Backward Blance((A .ontemporary aste for Nostalgia,+ Contemporary Review /Ceptember &>=&0: &6>. &:. Hohannes Hofer, Dissertatio medica de nostalgia- oder 'eimwehe /Basel, &;==0, translated in The &ulletin of the !nstitute of the 'istory of Medicine < /&>560: 5<>(>&. &;. his is in spite of early medical attempts to universali)e it into something felt by all beings((of all ages and temperaments((anywhere on the face of the earth. #.g. -hilippe -inel7s nostalgia entry in the (ncyclop3die M3thodi4ue, M3decine, &? /-aris: Agasse, &=1&0. Cee also B. 3uml, + heory of Nostalgic and #goic Centiments,+ sychological &ulletin 5? /&>550: ;:;(<. &<. Cee Hean Ctarobinski, + he Idea of Nostalgia,+ Diogenes :6 /&>;;0: =&(&?5. he citations are from pages >? and =< respectively.

&=. he medical meaning did see a revival, evidently, during the American .ivil 8ar. Cee H. heodore .alhoun, +Nostalgia as a 2isease of 9ield Cervice,+ Medical and 0urgical Reporter && /1< 9ebruary &=;60! 2e8itt .. -eters, +3emarks on the #vils of $outhful #nlistments and Nostalgia,+ American Medical Times /&6 9ebruary &=;50. &>. Cee Antonio -rete, +"7assedio della lontanan)a,+ in Antonio -rete, ed., )ostalgia, storia di un sentimento /Filan: 3affaello .ortina, &>>10, &<. 1?. Cee the discussion of, among others, Earl Haspers7 'eimweh und *erbrechen /&>?>0 in Ctarobinski >>(&?&. 1&. 9or more on the medical and psychological angle on nostalgia, see 8illis H. Fc.ann, +Nostalgia((A 3eview of the "iterature,+ sychological &ulletin 5= /&>6&0: &;:(=1 and +Nostalgia: A 2escriptive and .omparative Ctudy,+ "ournal of %enetic sychology ;1 /&>650: ><(&?6! Beorge 3osen, +Nostalgia: A 79orgotten7 -sychological 2isorder,+ Clio Medica &?.& /&><:0: 1=(:&. 11. Immanuel Eant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer 'insicht /&<>=0. Fore recently, it has been argued that the appeal of the comic strip in 9rench culture today is nostalgia for childhood. Cee IrNne -ennacchioni, La )ostalgie en images, une sociologie du r3cit dessin3 /-aris: "ibrairie des FLridiens, &>=10. 15. Cee Pladimir HankLlLvitch7s meditation on this in L+!rreversible et la nostalgie /-aris: 9lammarion, &><60. 16. Hames -hillips, +2istance, Absence, and Nostalgia,+ in 2on Ihde and Hugh H. Cilverman, eds., Descriptions /Albany: CJN$ -, &>=:0, ;:. 1:. F.F. Bakhtin, The Dialogic !magination, .our (ssays, ed. Fichael Hol*uist, trans. .aryl #merson and Fichael Hol*uist /Austin: J of e4as -, &==&0, &6<. hanks to 3ussell Eilbourn for calling this to my attention. 1;. Cee -hillips ;:. 1<. "owenthal ;1! 2ouglas . Filler and Farion Nowak, The .ifties, The 1ay 1e Really 1ere /New $ork: 2oubleday, &><<0. 1=. But is this perhaps how nostalgia only +mas*uerades as memory,+ as one theorist puts it, Cee #.B. 2aniels, +Nostalgia: #4periencing the #lusive,+ in Ihde and Cilverman =6. 1>. "ee Guinby, Anti/Apocalypse, (5ercises in %enealogical Criticism /Finneapolis: J of Finnesota -, &>>60, 4vi. 5?. Falcolm .hase and .hristopher Chaw, + he 2imensions of Nostalgia,+ in .hristopher Chaw and Falcolm .ross, eds., The !magined ast, 'istory and )ostalgia

/Fanchester and N$: Fanchester J-, &>=>0, 6. .hase and Chaw also point out that the photograph is the +paradigm case of the moment of nostalgia+ />0. 5&. "owenthal 5?. 51. Ctarobinski &?&(1. 55. Cee Hean(9ranIois "yotard, The ostmodern Condition, A Report on 6nowledge, trans. Beoff Bennington and Brian Fassumi /Finneapolis: J of Finnesota -, &>=60. 56. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories, Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia /New $ork and "ondon: 3outledge, &>>:0, 1:5. 5:. Cusan Ctewart, On Longing, )arrative of the Miniature- the %igantic- the 0ouvenirthe Collection /Baltimore: he Hohns Hopkins J-, &>=60, 15. 5;. Ctewart 15. 5<. Cee, for instance, 3oderick -eters, +3eflections on the 'rigin and Aim of Nostalgia,+ "ournal of Analytic sychology 5? /&>=:0: &5:(6=! or Nandor 9odor, +Parieties of Nostalgia,+ sychoanalytic Review 5< /&>:?0: 1:(5=. 5=. "aurence "erner, The 7ses of )ostalgia, 0tudies in astoral oetry /"ondon: .hatto Q 8indus, &><10, :1. 5>. Fichael F. Fason, + he .ultivation of the Censes for .reative Nostalgia in the #ssays of 8.H. Hudson,+ Ariel 1?.& /&>=>0: 15. It has also been called our +moral conscience+ for it is said to let us know what values we hold most dear and help us fight +the sickness of despair.+ Cee 3alph Harper, )ostalgia, An (5istential (5ploration of Longing and .ulfilment in the Modern Age /.leveland: - of 8estern 3eserve J, &>;;0, 1=. 6?. Harper 1&. 6&. All nostalgia, then, would be what 9red 2avis calls +interpreted nostalgia+ wherein an analysis of an e4perience, however brief or mistaken, comes to be fused with that primary e4perience and thus alters it. Cee 8earning for 8esterday, A 0ociology of )ostalgia /New $ork: 9ree -, &><>0, 1:. 61. he .urriculum Advisor on 3ace 3elations and Fulticulturalism for the oronto Board of #ducation, cited in +Analy)ing 3acism at 3'F+ in The *arsity /Hune &>>?0, 6. 65. Cee Cusan Bennett, erforming )ostalgia, 0hifting 0hakespeare and the Contemporary ast /"ondon and New $ork: 3outledge, &>>;0 :! &;&, n.6.

66. Cee Anthony Arblaster, *iva la libert9, olitics in Opera /"ondon: Perso, &>>10, &=?. 6:. Hean Baudrillard, + he -recession of Cimulacra,+ in Natoli and Hutcheon 5;&. He goes on to call nostalgia +the phastasmal parodic rehabilitation of all lost referentials+ /5<10. 6;. Cee HankLlLvitch! Eathleen -arthL, +Pillage -rose: .hauvinism, Nationalism, or Nostalgia,+ in Cheelagh 2uffin Braham, ed., )ew Directions in 0oviet Literature /"ondon: Facmillan, &>>10, &?;(1&. 6<. Cee 3ichard 3aspa, +#4otic 9oods among Italian(Americans in Formon Jtah: 9ood as Nostalgic #nactment of Identity,+ in "inda Eeller Brown and Eay Fussell, eds., (thnic and Regional .oodways in the 7nited 0tates, The erformance of %roup !dentity /Eno4ville: J of ennessee -, &>=60, &=:(>6. 6=. Fichael F.H. 9ischer, +Autobiographical Poices /&, 1, 50 and Fosaic Femory,+ in Eathleen Ashley, "eigh Bilmore, and Berald -eters, eds., Autobiography and ostmodernism /Amherst: J of Fassachusetts -, &>>60, >1. 6>. eresa Faria Brown, +3ewriting the Nostalgic Ctory: 8oman, 2esire, Narrative,+ -h.2. dissertation, Jniversity of 9lorida, &>=>. :?. Cee Hanice 2oane and 2evon Hodges, )ostalgia and 0e5ual Difference, The Resistance to Contemporary .eminism /"ondon and New $ork: Fethuen, &>=<0, 4iii. Cee also Barbara .reed, +9rom Here to Fodernity: 9eminism and -ostmodernism,+ 0creen 1=.1 /&>=<0: 6<(;< on film nostalgia and issues of gender which 9redric Hameson does N' deal with. 9or a discussion of the condemnation of utopian +future nostalgia+ by feminist writers, see Eathe 2avis 9inney, + he 2ays of 9uture -ast or Jtopians "essing and "eBuin 9ight 9uture Nostalgia,+ in 2onald F. Hassler, ed., atterns of the .antastic /Fercer Island, 8A: Ctarmont House, &>=50, 5&(6?. 9or a general criti*ue of various kinds of utopian thinking, including nostalgic ones, see Pincent -. -ecora, 'ouseholds of the 0oul /Baltimore: Hohns Hopkins J-, &>>;0. :&. "owenthal &1&. :1. 'n Chakespeare7s role in this kind of nostalgia, see Bennett &6:: + o reproduce a classic te4t of the #uropean imperial archive is always to risk its willing and wistfully nostalgic assent to /re0claim its own authority. hose te4ts are simply so heavily overcoded, value laden, that the production and reception of the 7new7 te4t necessarily becomes bound to the tradition that encompasses and promotes the old 7authentic7 version. his remains the argument against the revivalKrewriting of The Tempest or any other classical te4t: that containment is an inevitable effect.+ :5. 3enato 3osando, Culture and Truth, The Remaking of 0ocial Analysis /Boston: Beacon -, &>=>0, ;=. hanks to Fonika Eaup for calling this to my attention.

:6. Cimon Cimonse, +African "iterature between Nostalgia and Jtopia: African Novels since &>:5 in the "ight of the Fodes(of(-roduction Approach,+ Research in African Literatures &5.6 /&>=10: 6:&(=<. ::. Cee Ien Ang, +Hegemony(in( rouble: Nostalgia and the Ideology of the Impossible in #uropean .inema,+ in 2uncan -etrie, ed., 0creening (urope, !mage and !dentity in Contemporary (uropean Cinema /"ondon: British 9ilm Institute, &>>10: 1&(5&. :;. 9redric Hameson, ostmodernism- or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism /2urham, N.: 2uke J-, &>>&0, &:;. :<. Hameson, ostmodernism 4vii and &>, respectively. :=. 9redric Hameson, 0ignatures of the *isible /New $ork and "ondon: 3outledge, &>>?0, =: and &5? respectively. :>. 9redric Hameson, +Nostalgia for the -resent,+ The 0outh Atlantic $uarterly ==.1 /&>=>0: :1<. ;?. Anne 9riedberg, +Les .laneurs du Mal:l;: .inema and the -ostmodern .ondition,+ MLA &?;.5 /&>>&0: 6&>(5&. ;&. 2erek Harman, $ueer (dward !! /"ondon: British 9ilm Institute, &>>&0, =;. ;1. Cee, respectively, 9redric Hameson, The !deologies of Theory, (ssays <=></<=?@A *olume !, 0ituations of Theory /Finneapolis: J of Finnesota -, &>==0, &&? and ostmodernism &:;. ;5. Hameson, ostmodernism &> and 1&, respectively. ;6. Hohn 9row, + ourism and the Cemiotics of Nostalgia,+ October :< /&>>&0: &5:. ;:. Cimon 2uring, +-ostmodernism or -ost(colonialism oday,+ Te5tual ractice &.& /&>=<0: 51(6<. ;;. Cee 9redric Hameson, Mar5ism and .orm, Twentieth/Century Dialectical Theories of Literature /-rinceton: -rinceton J-, &><&0, 5=. he phrase is used to describe Adorno7s criti*ue of theories of history organi)ed around the covert hypothesis of such a +moment of plenitude+ in the past or future. ;<. Fichael BLrubL, +Hust the 9a4, Fa7am, 'r, -ostmodernism7s Hourney to 2ecenter,+ *illage *oice /'ctober &>>&0, &6. ;=. imothy H. 3eiss, +.ritical #nvironments: .ultural 8ilderness or .ultural History,+ Canadian Review of Comparative Literature &?.1 /Hune &>=50: &>5.

;>. But it does so at a time when, as Andreas Huyssen has argued, 8estern culture7s utopian imagination +is shifting from its futuristic pole toward the pole of remembrance.+ Cee Huyssen, Twilight Memories ==. <?. Cee Allison Braham, +History, Nostalgia, and the .riminality of -opular .ulture,+ %eorgia Review 5=.1 /&>=60: 56=(;6. Cee also #li)abeth 8ilson, Adorned in Dreams, .ashion and Modernity /"ondon: Pirago, &>=:, on nostalgia in fashion as a +strangely unmotived appropriation of the past+ /&<10. <&. Panderbilt <. <1. hese are the terms of Ar%un Appadurai, in his Modernity at Large, Cultural Dimensions of %lobali2ation /Finneapolis: J of Finnesota -, &>>;0, <<(=. <5. his is one step beyond what has been called the ironic nostalgia of, say, post(Coviet artists who, according to Cvetlana Boym, +reconfigure and preserve various kinds of imagined community and offer interesting cultural hybrids((of Coviet kitsch and memories of totalitarian childhood.+ Cee Cvetlana Boym, +9rom the 3ussian Coul to -ost( .ommunist Nostalgia,+ Representations 6> /8inter &>>:0: &:&. <6. here may be analogies here with what Bennett calls +*ueer nostalgia+ wherein +identity(forming discourses of the past are both confirmed and fractured at the moment of performance+ /&:>0. <:. Cee .hase and Chaw <. <;. Cee "owenthal 5>6(;. <<. "owenthal 5>;. <=. Huyssen, Twilight Memories :! see "asch for contrasting view: +If Americans really cared about the past, they would try to understand how it still shapes their ideas and actions. Instead they lock it up in museums or reduce it to another ob%ect of commerciali)ed consumption+ /;>