A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction

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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. Thomas Pynchon allegorizes otherness in Gravity’s Rainbow through the single, if anarchic, “we-system” that exists as the counterforce of the totalizing “They-system” (though also implicated in it). What McCaffery here adds as almost an afterthought at the end of his book, The Metafictional Muse, is in many ways my starting point. I would agree and, in fact, argue that the increasing uniformization of mass culture is one of the totalizing forces that postmodernism exists to challenge. This was the title given to the 1980 Venice Biennale which marked the institutional recognition of postmodernism in architecture.

Modelled on postmodern architecture, postmodernism is the name given here to current cultural practices characterized by major paradoxes of form and of ideology. The same applies to Habermas’s work, though it often appears somewhat less radical in its determined desire to work from within the system of “Enlightenment” rationality and yet manage to critique it at the same time. 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. Ricoeur, Paul (1976), Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning, Fort Worth: Texas Christian Press, ISBN 0-912646-59-4 .It includes other 20th-century theoretical movements such as poststructuralism and deconstruction, mainly through a common emphasis on discourse and the power of language in structuring thought and experience. Theopoetics suggest that just as a poem can take on new meaning depending on the context in which the reader interprets it, texts and experiences of the Divine can and should take on new meaning depending on the changing situation of the individual. Clearly, then, the time has come to theorize the term [postmodernism], if not to define it, before it fades from awkward neologism to derelict cliché without ever attaining to the dignity of a cultural concept. 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. Although Wang Ning observes that “postmodern ideas and ways of thinking have permeated almost all the aspects of contemporary culture and are still influential in many humanities fields” (Wang 2013, p.

In its most extreme formulation, the result is that consensus becomes the illusion of consensus, whether it be defined in terms of minority (educated, sensitive, élitist) or mass (commercial, popular, conventional) culture, for both are manifestations of late capitalist, bourgeois, informational, postindustrial society, a society in which social reality is structured by discourses (in the plural)—or so postmodernism endeavors to teach. The 1960s were the time of ideological formation for many of the postmodernist thinkers and artists of the 1980s and it is now that we can see the results of that formation (see Chapter 12). Most theorists of postmodernism who see it as a “cultural dominant” (Jameson 1984a, 56) agree that it is characterized by the results of late capitalist dissolution of bourgeois hegemony and the development of mass culture (see Jameson 1984a [via Lefebvre 1968]; Russell 1980a; Egbert 1970; Calinescu 1977). Many of the central postmodernist theorists are French and include Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Jean-François Lyotard. Postmodern culture, then, has a contradictory relationship to what we usually label our dominant, liberal humanist culture.

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. What all of these words literally do (precisely by their disavowing prefixes— dis, de, in, anti) is incorporate that which they aim to contest—as does, I suppose, the term postmodernism itself.

In recent times there has been a revitalized interest with new work being done by two schools of thought in theopoetics. And Jameson (1984b) has argued that both Lyotard and Habermas are resting their arguments on different but equally strong legitimizing “narrative archetypes.

It is not just metafictional; nor is it just another version of the historical novel or the non-fictional novel. Postmodernism is a word much used and misused in a variety of disciplines, including literature, visual arts, film, architecture, literary theory, history, and philosophy. g. Stern 1971, 26) in their paradoxical desire for stable aesthetic and moral values, even in the face of their realization of the inevitable absence of such universals.