Anachronisms of Renaissance Postmodernism: On the Textuality Hypothesis in Jonathan Goldberg's Voice Terminal Echo

Abstract

Voice Terminal Echo: Postmodernism and English Renaissance Texts' is not, as its subtitle might suggest on a first glance, a comparative study of postmodernist and Renaissance texts or cultural artifacts. Jonathan Goldberg's project is both more and less radical than such an essay would have been. It's more radical because seriously to compare the formal features of Ragtime with those of The Unfortunate Traveler, or to weigh Bacon's essays against Barthes's, would tend to require that the analyst write from a position of historical objectivity;' and more especially with a distance on postmodernism, which Goldberg is far too convinced a postmodern, by his own definition, to assume. It's less radical because such a comparative study as the one hoped for is in fact rather rare, whereas Goldberg's essay, for all its apparent novelty, falls all too readily into a received academic genre, the essentially modernist category of critical books that apply a particular -ism to selected works from the literary canon. The -ism in question is not postmodernism but the aspect thereof called poststructuralism, and it is Goldberg's accomplishment in Voice Terminal Echo to have processed this complicated movement into a simple and compatible set of axioms, all rotating about a core assertion as to the irreducibility or non referentiality of textuality, which constitutes the main message