Introduction: After Postmodernism
2007; Duke University Press; Volume: 53; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/0041462x-2007-4007
ISSN2325-8101
Autores Tópico(s)Contemporary Literature and Criticism
ResumoT he essays in this issue of Twentieth-Century Literature propose new models for understanding contemporary fiction in wake of postmod ernism's waning influence. By now, as Jeremy Green notes, declarations of postmodernism's demise have become a critical commonplace (19-24). The intellectual historian Minsoo Kang provides a usefully succinct ex ample, dating the death knell of postmodernism in US on June 18, 1993, date that John McTiernan-directed Arnold Schwarzeneg ger vehicle The Last Action Hero brought the standard [postmodern] devices of self-reference, ironic satire, and playing with multiple levels of to multiplex. [L]n US, Kang wryly notes, there's no surer sign of an intellectual idea's final demise than its total appropriation by mass culture. In this formulation, postmodernism was done in by its own success. Postmodern writers had enjoyed a notorious and wild ride of radical challenge to institutionalized art and its generic categories in 1970s and 1980s, but their ironic, skeptical, and knowing (yet celebratory) juxtapositions of high and low, and their rejection of objective (or politi cal) reality as a significant object or limit for representation, no longer worked by 1990s. Mass culture itself had appropriated aesthetics of postmodernism, which-now playing monotonously on everyone's television and computer screens-turned out to be as reproducible as its creators had contemptuously said all previous art was. At least that's one way to tell story. But while there are good rea sons, as contributors to this issue show, for arguing that contemporary fiction is no longer adequately described as postmodern, this particular narrative of postmodernism's decline has three interrelated problems. First and perhaps most obviously, it perpetuates a hierarchical view of culture that confuses aesthetic questions about literary form with sociological
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