A Poetics of Postmodernism [antikvár]

PREFACE What will no longer do is either to eulogize or to ridicule postmodernism en bloc. The postmodern must be salvaged from its champions and from its detractors. Andreas Huyssen This study is neither a defense nor yet another denigration of the cultural enterprise we seem determined to call postmodernism. You will not find here any claims of radical revolutionary change or any apocalyptic wailing about the decline of the west under late capitalism. Rather than either eulogize or ridicule, what I have tried to do is study a current cultural phenomenon that exists, has attracted much public debate, and so deserves critical attention. Based on the notion that any theorizing must derive from that which it purports to study, my focus here is on those points of significant overlap of theory with aesthetic practice which might guide us to articulate what I want to call a "poetics" of postmodernism, a flexible conceptual structure which could at once constitute and contain postmodern culture and our discourses both about it and adjacent to it. The points of overlap that seem most evident to me are those of the paradoxes set up when modernist aesthetic autonomy and self-reflexivity come up against a counterforce in the form of a grounding in the historical, social, and political world. The model I have used is that of postmodern architecture, as theorized by Paolo Portoghesi and Charles Jencks and as actualized by Ricardo Bofill, Aldo Rossi, Robert Stern, Charles Moore, and others. By analogy, what would characterize postmodernism in fiction would be what I here call "historiographic metafiction," those popular paradoxical works like Garcia Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Grass's The Tin Drum, Fowles's A Maggot, Doctorow's Loon Lake, Reed's The Terrible Twos, Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Findley's Famous Last Words, Rushdie's Shame, and the list could go on. There are also parallel paradoxical