A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction

Product Information

Whether in the puckered vortex of the imagist poem or in the dynamic anthologies of allusions, meanings, and voices characteristic of long poems like Eliot’s The Waste Land, Pound’s Cantos, David Jones’s In Parenthesis and William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, the effort of the modernist poem was to condense the complexity of time and history, to make them apprehensible in a single frame. This was the title given to the 1980 Venice Biennale which marked the institutional recognition of postmodernism in architecture. It has certainly meant a rethinking and putting into question of the bases of our western modes of thinking that we usually label, perhaps rather too generally, as liberal humanism.

he admits, not unhesitatingly, that “it has receded into the historical past, albeit a past which is nevertheless still influential and significant to our literary and cultural studies” (Wang 2013, p. Charles Williams gave the name "Romantic Theology" to his project of establishing a subclass of theology at the intersection of imaginative literature and classical theology. In October 2013, another American literary journal Narrative also published a special issue on “Postmodernist Fiction: East and West” with Wang Ning and Brian McHale, two postmodernist scholars with international fame, as its guest editors.PART I 1 Theorizing the postmodern: toward a poetics 2 Modelling the postmodern: parody and politics 3 Limiting the postmodern: the paradoxical aftermath of modernism 4 Decentering the postmodern: the ex-centric 5 Contextualizing the postmodern: enunciation and the revenge of "parole" 6 Historicizing the postmodern: the problematizing of history PART II 7 Historiographic metafiction: "the pastime of past time" 8 Intertextuality, parody, and the discourses of history 9 The problem of reference 10 Subject in/of/to history and his story 11 Discourse, power, ideology: humanism and postmodernism 12 Political double-talk 13 Conclusion: a poetics or a problematics?

Postmodernism works to show that all repairs are human constructs, but that, from that very fact, they derive their value as well as their limitation. It continues the project of Hutcheon's Narcissistic Narrative and A Theory of Parody in studying formal self-consciousness in art, but adds to this both a historical and ideological dimension.

In Carlos Fuentes’s The Death of Artemio Cruz, the title already points to the ironic inversion of biographical conventions: it is the death, not the life, that will be the focus. As Gerald Prince has noted, the novel, as a genre, harbors a range of possible narrative strategies that include metanarrative constructions such as self-reflexivity, and this accounts for why novels with metafictional elements appear at different historical moments, well before the second half of the twentieth century. Given all the confusion and vagueness associated with the term itself (see Paterson 1986), I would like to begin by arguing that, for me, postmodernism is a contradictory phenomenon, one that uses and abuses, installs and then subverts, the very concepts it challenges—be it in architecture, literature, painting, sculpture, film, video, dance, TV, music, philosophy, aesthetic theory, psychoanalysis, linguistics, or historiography. Kritikos: an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image.

Comparatively, McHale’s postmodern poetics is more formalist, while Hutcheon’s more cultural and political, but their approaches, viewpoints and interests can be well complementary.According to Aristotle, the imitation of an action in a tragedy, by producing the fear and pity we feel, ends in a ritual purification of our feelings from some polluting impiety, thus to temper and reduce them to a moderate measure, and finally to be helpful for the social life. The conservatism of the late 1970s and 1980s may have their impact when the thinkers and artists being formed now begin to produce their work (cf.

The most influential books on literary postmodernism, such as Linda Hutcheon’s A Poetics of Postmodernism and Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction, are devoted to postmodern fiction. Postmodernism is a word much used and misused in a variety of disciplines, including literature, visual arts, film, architecture, literary theory, history, and philosophy. One of the functions of art in mass culture, argued Susan Sontag, would be to “modify consciousness” (1967, 304). But in as pluralist and fragmented a culture as that of the western world today, such designations are not terribly useful if they intend to generalize about all the vagaries of our culture.It shows that rather than providing firm answers, Auden's poetry emphasises the absence of certainties. Actually this review essay also involves a comparative study between Hutcheon’s books and Jameson’s postmodern masterpiece Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.