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Postmodernityvs postmodernism • The former she understands to mean "the designation of a social and philosophical period or 'condition'" (Politics 23), specifically the period or "condition" in which we now live. The latter she associates with culturalexpressions of various sorts, including "architecture, literature, photography, film, painting, video, dance, music" (Politics 1)
highlights the importance of crossing borders between disciplines, media, and nations, as well as of positioning oneself as a reader and critic. Other topics included her own intellectual background in comparative literature, in Canadian Studies, and in her more recent interdisciplinary projects on opera; recent developments in and since postmodernism; and the interconnections within her work on various practices of repetition with a difference, whether seen as postmodern, as parody, or as adaptation.
Postmodern Fiction • Postmodernist representation • Re-presenting the past What we tend to call postmodernism in literature today is usuallycharacterized by intense self-reflexivity and overtly parodic intertextuality.(Hutcheon)
For linda Hutcheon the postmodern is much more an artistic style, recognisable by its self reflectivity and irony especially in its relations to the practices and objects of the surrounding culture and the cultural past. Postmodern work often takes the form of parody or pastiche , which has a highly divided and ambivalent(doubtful) relation to its objects of imitation.
Specifically, Hutcheon suggests that postmodernism works through parody to "both legitimize and subvert that which it parodies" (Politics, 101). "Through a double process of installing and ironizing, parody signals how present representations come from past ones and what ideological consequences derive from both continuity and difference" (Politics, 93). Thus, far from dehistoricizing the present or organizing history into an incoherent and detached pastiche, postmodernism can rethink history and shed light on new critical capacities.
Hutcheon coined the term historiographic metafiction to describe those literary texts that assert an interpretation of the past but are also intensely self-reflexive (critical of their own version of the truth as being partial, biased, incomplete, etc.) (Poetics, 122-123). Historiographic metafiction, therefore, allows us to speak constructively about the past in a way that acknowledges the falsity and violence of the "objective" historian's past without leaving us in a totally bewildered and isolated present.
Her approach to transtextuality… Transtextuality can be seen as a “first degree of metafictional devices(Perez Bovie,, Hornby). “Second Degree”: Diegetic narcissism” and “linguistic narcissm” (Linda Hutchinson, breaking the “realistic contract” in the realm of the diegesis or the discourse)
Though conscious of the many terms used to describe metafictional narratives, some with pejorative bias, Hutcheon suggests a figurative adjective, ‘narcissistic’, to name this kind of fiction, mainly for its descriptive and suggestive character. Indeed, it is an “ironic allegorical reading of the Ovidian Narcissus myth” (p.1), elaborated as an answer to the ‘Ovidian’ mourners of the novel’s death.
Hutcheon says that The Narcissus myth was first used by Freud to refer to the “universal original condition” of man. When transposed to the metafictional context, narcissistic narrative “is process made visible” (p. 6); in other words, a process-oriented mode of self-reflexive and autorepresentational narrative.
It is the sort of narrative that contains its own critical commentary in itself, what determines, according to Hutcheon, the theoretical framework of reference for its investigation. Hutcheon argues that metafiction moves the focus from the reader and the author as individual historical agents to the processes of reception and production of language (1984, p. xiv).
parody • “Bad” by Michael Jackson >> “Fat” by Weird Al • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-oQBBLT9E4 • “I’m Elmo and I Know It” • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWF86D_UNxc
Postmodernist Representation • Anti-realism • “ . . . Many postmodern strategies are openly premised on a challenge to the realist notion of representation that presumes the transparency of the medium and thus the direct and natural link between sign and referent or between words and world” (Hutcheon, Politics, 34).
Postmodernist Representation • Metafiction Fiction about fiction; Narcissistic narrative • “Fiction that includes within itself a commentary a commentary on its own narrative and/or linguistic identity” (Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative, 1)
Re-presenting the past • Intertextuality Nostalgia or Transgression? Pastiche or parody?
Parody (Linda Hutcheon) • Postmodern fiction = historiographic metafiction = narratives of double-coded politics
Parody (Linda Hutcheon) • “The prevailing interpretation is that postmodernism offers a value-free, decorative, de-historicized quotation of past forms and that this is a most apt mode for a culture like our own that is oversaturated with images. Instead, I would want to argue that postmodernist parody is a value-problematizing, denaturalizing form of acknowledging the history (and through irony, the politics) of representations.”(Hutcheon, Politics, 94)
Parody (Linda Hutcheon) • “What I mean by ‘parody’ . . . is not the ridiculing imitation of the standard theories and definitions . . . . The collective weight of parodic practice suggests a redefinition of parody as repetition with critical distance that allows ironic signalling of difference at the heart of similarity. In historiographic metafiction . . . This parody paradoxically enacts both change and cultural continuity” (Hutcheon, Poetics, 26)
Linda Hutcheon, cites “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” as an example of postmodern historiographic metafiction, that it is an “example of doubled narrative” (Hutcheon, 1995, p. 84). She writes about the novel” “…the specificity of Victorian social and literary theory is evoked (in tandem with both the fictional narrative and the metafictional commentary).
Through footnotes which explain details of Victorian habits, vocabulary, politics, or social practices. Sometimes a note is used to offer a translation for modern readers, who just might not be able to translate Latin quite as easily as their Victorian forebears could.
Obviously, part of the function of these postmodern notes is extra-textual, referring us to a world outside the novel, but there is something else going on too: most of the notes refer explicitly to other texts, other representations first, and to the external world only indirectly through them” (Hutcheon, 1993, p. 84).
Hutcheon also speaks about another role of footnotes: they function “as self-reflexive signals to assure the reader as to the historical credibility of the particular witness or authority cited, while at the same time they also disrupt our reading – that is, our creating – of a coherent, totalizing fictive narrative” (Hutcheon, 1993, p. 85).
