Literary Postmodernisms

1. Literary Postmodernisms History & Main Concerns-- Self-Reflexivity, Historicity, Double-Coding

2. Outline • The Postmodern Debate • Literary Postmodernisms: Three Approaches • Waterland: Different Views of History

3. Bertens’ Views of the Postmodern Debate • A. History • 1. Postmodernism has itself . . .been protean rather than fixable and has again and again remade itself without, however, losing its most distinct quality. • Against modernism (which is considered as pretentious and privileging timelessness, transcendent meaning and elitism) • 1. avant garde critique of modernism (as institution) • 2. distinguished from avant-garde • 3. 1970’s poststructualist postmodernism • 4. language  subject and discourse (Foucault)  democratizing movement continued

4. Bertens’ Views of the Postmodern Debate B. His Views of Postcolonialism vs. Postmodernism • Different strategies/positions taken by pc. and pm writers; • A lot of postcolonial writers (e.g. Said, Spivak, Bhabha) are poststructuralist. C. His Response to the various attacks by feminism, minority discourses, etc. These attacks pursue the ideals of Enlightenment (democratization; freedom, equity, brother/sisterhood) supported by postmodernism. These ideals of Enlightenment are carried on but not the assumptions of Enlightenment(such as about rationality, subject, Truth; p. 13)

5. Kinds--postmodernisms defined by • 1) formal properties • 2) content • 3) certain themes emerging out of certain formal procedures (Bertens p. 8)

6. 1. Formalist Approach (B 9) • David Lodge “Postmodern fiction suggests that the world resist interpretation . . . Through such techniques as contradiction, permutation, discontinuity, randomness, excess, and short circuit.” • C. Butler: huge over-organization vs. deliberate lack of it. Cf. [Robert Scholes: Fabulation (over-plotting) Patricia Waugh: over-plotting vs. under-plotting]

7. 1. Formalist Approach (B 9)--2 • Brian McHale e.g. short circuit confrontation of worlds  ontological confusion • Cf. “postmodern fiction negotiates the tension between self-reflexivity and representation by abandoning the modernist emphasis on epistemology . . . for an emphasis on ontology. Knowing loses its privileged position to pluriform, polyphonic being.” (B The Idea of the Postmodern 78)

8. 1. Formalist Approach (B 9) --3 Jameson “video process” (or experimental total flow)  no single element can occupy the position of ‘interpretant’ for any length of time but must be dislodged in turn in the following instant.

9. 2. Thematic Approach (B 10-11) • Call for authenticity after the artificiality of modernism e.g. a postmodern poetry that would ‘embody the presence of living speech.’ • A rejection of the transcendental truths that modernism supposedly was after in favor of provisional, socially constituted truths. e.g. Alan Wilde –midfiction and the postmodern ‘suspensive irony’ (vs. the modernist stable irony)  more

10. Alan Wilde • Unstable irony, corresponding to what Wilde characterizes as postmodernism’s "more radical . . . vision of randomness, multiplicity, and contingency" (Wilde 131), offers the reader no firm ground on which to stand.

11. 3. Theory  themes expressed through forms • Language constitutes reality, but not reflects reality • Identity is multiple or fragmentary •  e.g. Linda Hutcheon: ambiguity, inability to move into political agency.  Does this mean it is morally and politically ‘impotent’? (B 11)

12. History in Waterland: Views (1): History: Sense-making to avoid fears • "the Grand Narrative, the filler of vacuums, the dispeller of fears in the dark."(53) ; • "It's all a struggle to make things not seem meaningless. It's all a fight against fear. . . . What do you think all my stories are for. . . I don't care what you call it--explaining, evading the facts, making up meanings, taking a larger perspective, dodging the here and now, education, history, fairy-tales--it helps eliminate fear" • e.g. Price's fear -- fear of World War III

13. History in Waterland: Views (2) Resistance to History • Resistance to history, living in the now: • Price: "I want a future . . . And you--you can stuff your past!" (107); “Your thesis," says the narrator, "is that history, as such, is a red-herring; the past is irrelevant. The present alone is vital." (124) •  g.  anti-explanation: "You know what your trouble is, sir? You're hooked on explanation. Explain, explain. Everything's got to have an explanation. . . . Explaining's a way of avoiding facts while you pretend to get near to them" (126). •  f. against history teacher: "What is a history teacher? He's someone who teaches mistakes. While others say, Here's how to do it, he says, And here's what goes wrong" (177, 203).

14. History in Waterland: 1) Present 1980’s • The violence in Northern Ireland. • Hong Kong – • In 1982, England and the People's Republic of China begin talks to grant Hong Kong its independence. • In 1984, the two countries sign an agreement that will establish Hong Kong as a Special Administrative Region in 1997. • Falkland War --in 1982, England also clashes in a war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. The rights to this territory had been the source of dispute between the two nations since the eighteenth century. The 74 days of war claimed 256 British lives and 712 Argentinean lives. (Encyclopedia Americana Vol.10&14) http://www.postcolonialweb.org/uk/gswift/uktoday.html

15. History in Waterland: 2) Past • -- 1940’s • The World War II • 20 years after the Great War • French Revolution-- "that great watershed in history" (119) -- it embodies the ideals of a revolution. Crick sees a revolution as "the idea of a return. A redemption; a restoration. A reaffirmation of what is pure and fundamental against what is decadent and false. A return to a new beginning."(119)

16. History in Waterland: 3) Past • The Atkinson Brewery • begins with an impulse for the big business, money, and machinery characteristic of the Victorian era. • The New Atkinson Brewery, built in 1849 was on fire" (151). Once the brewery is gone it slips from the course of history. . . . For example, World War I ends and "because . . . there was no brewery" there is no ale to mark the Armistice.