2. Linda Hutcheon defines, classifies, and
provides specific examples of postmodern
architecture, history, literary theory, and
historiographic metafiction. She intends to
prove that post modern as a cultural
phenomenon attempts to negotiate the space
between centers and margins in ways that
acknowledge difference and challenge any
supposedly monolithic culture( as implied by
liberal humanism)
3. Modernism, hopelessly implicated as it was
with the ideologies of positivism, humanism,
and the 'enunciating subject', has been,
according to Hutcheon, replaced by the
postmodern.
4. The hallmarks of the postmodern stance are:
Irony 2. Contradiction 3. Self-reflexivity
(Diane Long Hoeveler)
5. Postmodernism: 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.
* Some gives postmodernism a “tacit definition” , while
others locate describes it as temporal (after1945? 1968?
1970? 1980?) or economic signposting (late capitalism).
6. It cannot be used as a synonym for the contemporary.
it does not describe an international cultural phenomenon,
for it is primarily European and American (North and
South).
Postmodernism is fundamentally contradictory, resolutely
historical, and inescapably political. Contradictions are
certainly manifest in the important postmodern concept of
“the presence of the past.” It's not a nostalgic return ; it is a
critical revisiting, an ironic dialogue with the past of both
art and society, a recalling of a critically shared vocabulary
of architectural forms.
7. *Most theorists of postmodernism who see it as
“cultural dominant” agree that it is characterized by the
results of late capitalist dissolution of bourgeois
hegemony and the development of mass culture. The
increasing uniformization of mass culture is one of the
totalizing forces that postmodernism exists to
challenge. It does seek to assert difference not
homogeneous identity.
8. The political, social, and intellectual experience of the
1960 helped make it possible for postmodernism to be
seen as writing- experience -of –limits: limits of
language, of subjectivity, of sexual identity, and of
systemaization and uniformization
9. Historiographic metafiction: popular novels which
are self-reflexive and lay claim to historical events and
personages. E.g. The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Historiographic metafiction incorporates all three of
these domains:
its theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as
human constructs(historiographic metafiction) is made
the grounds for its rethinking and reworking of the
forms and contents of the past.
10. II
What is the postmodern scene? Baudrillard’s excremental
culture?Or a final homecoming to a technoscape where a
“body withoutorgans” (Artaud), a “negative space” (Rosalind
Krauss), a “pureimplosion” (Lyotard), a “looking away”
(Barthes) or an “aleatory mechanism” (Serres) is now first
nature and thus the terrain of a new political refusal?
Arthur Kroker and David Cook
11. What is being challenged by postmodernism?
Institutions have come under scrutiny: from the media
to the university, from museums to theatres. Much
postmodern dance contests theatrical space by moving
out into the street.
Challenge the institutions
12. new arts are so closely related that we cannot hide
complacently behind the arbitrary walls of self-
contained disciplines: poetics inevitably gives way to
general aesthetics, considerations of the novel move
easily to the film, while the new poetry often has more
in common with contemporary music and art than with
the poetry of the past.
13. New arts are closely related, and the borders between
literary genres have become fluid
The postmodern text refuses the omniscience and
omnipresence of the third person and engages instead
in a dialogue between a narrative voice and a projected
reader
Kosinski calls this postmodern form of writing “auto
fiction”: “fiction” because all memory is fictionalizing;
“auto” because it is, for him, “a literary genre, generous
enough to let the author adopt the nature of his fictional
protagonist—not the other way around”
14. The paraliterary space is the space of debate, quotation,
partisanship, betrayal, reconciliation; but it is not the space
ofunity, coherence, or resolution that we think of as
constituting the work of art”. This is the space of the
postmodern.
Parody: Parody is a perfect postmodern form, in some
senses, for it paradoxically both incorporates and challenges
that which it parodies. It also forces a reconsideration of the
idea of origin or originality that is compatible with other
postmodern interrogations of liberal humanist assumptions.
15. It is an ongoing process and activity
Art and theory about it should be part of a poetry of
postmodernism
A poetics of postmodernism would be a matter of
reading literature through its surrounding theoretical
discourses rather than as continuous with theory.
Interaction between art and theory
16. A postmodern artist or writer 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
judgement, 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.
(1984b, 81)
17. III
To analyze discourses is to hide and reveal
contradictions; it is to show the play that they set
up within it; it is to manifest how it can express
them, embody them, or give them a temporary
appearance.
Michel Foucault
18. Chapter two: LIMITING THE POSTMODERN:
THE PARADOXICAL AFTERMATH OF
MODERNISM
It is simplistic to make generalities about art,
label these generalities,and then go on to
assume that a unified movement (or its
demise)exists because there is now a label.
Jonathan D.Kramer
19. II
One of the fundamental postmodern acts is
the opening up once again of the question of
where the domain of the arts should be, how
they abut on the social and even natural
sciences. David Antin
20. III
Unfortunately, ‘postmodern’ is a term bon à tout
faire. I have the impression that it is applied
today to anything the user happens to like.
Further, there seems to be an attempt to make
it increasingly retroactive: first it was
apparently applied to certain writers or artists
active in the last twenty years, then gradually it
reached the beginning of the century, then still
further back. And this reverse procedure
continues; soon the postmodern category will
include Homer.
Umberto Eco
21. IV
The great modern achievements were wagers
which made gestures, invented methods, but laid
no foundations for a future literature. They led in
the direction of an immensity from which there
was bound to be a turning back because to go
further would lead to a new and completer
fragmentation, utter obscurity, formlessness
without end.
Stephen Spender
22. V
Assumptions about literature involve
assumptions about language and about
meaning, and these in turn involve
assumptions about human society. The
independent universe of literature and the
autonomy of criticism are illusory. Catherine
Belsey
