The Postmodern Turn on(:) the Enlightenment
1996; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1208771
ISSN1548-9949
Autores Tópico(s)Contemporary Literature and Criticism
Resumo-T _he Enlightenment is generally understood as the birth time of late modernity, the Age of Reason heralded by the 1687 publication of Isaac Newton's Principia and consolidating a Newtonian science of nature as mathematical and mechanical. Anxiety about differentiating the postmodern from the modern has led theory to three contemporary angles of vision concerning Enlightenment modernity: (1) a position, either radical or nostalgic, that critiques from the position of a desired premodernity; (2) a position that attempts to vindicate against its detractors; and (3) a position that attempts an internal (postmodern) critique of key features of modernity.1 In view of this anxious construction of the postmodern boundary in current theoretical circles, what can it mean when this historical period becomes focalized in contemporary fiction? Is it significant that a growing number of contemporary eighteenth-century historical novels are emerging at precisely the time when debates about postmodernity's relation to are at their height? Of course, Hollywood historical romance films as different as Dangerous Liaisons, Orlando, The Last of the Mohicans, and Rob Roy have splashed about in an setting, but Hollywood's attempts to uncover the sins of modernity are usually informed precisely by its desire to remember (re-member) the Enlighten-
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