Beginning with Postmodernism

Abstract

In epilogue to 2002 reprint of her influential study The Politics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon remarks that the postmodern may well be a twentieth-century phenomenon, that is, a thing of past. Now fully institutionalized, it has its canonized texts, its anthologies, primers and readers, its dictionaries and its histories (165). Hutcheon's claim about pastness of has gained support years since she made it, as a body of criticism has emerged which takes a determinedly revisionist and historicist perspective on many of canonical postmodernist texts to which she alludes. Novels such as Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985), monuments postmodern landscape, have produced a spate of recent readings this vein. Aspects of these texts that can seem peripheral on a first reading--such as role of Mexico Pynchon's novel, or impact of Vietnamese and Iranian conflicts DeLillo's--have been alighted upon as offering an underappreciated historical situatedness to poetics of postmodernism. (1) In addition, previously submerged role played by various institutions and class interests historical formation of postmodernist styles and forms has become focus of important interventions field. (2) Much of this critical work retains analytic and taxonomic category of postmodern, even as accepted dominance texts being read of traditionally postmodern themes and aesthetics is often questioned (whether from a descriptive or political viewpoint). (3) In other itself is undermined as a useful critical designation, favor of terms such as long modernism or technomodernism. (4) In her short essay On Period Formerly Known as Contemporary, something of a manifesto for recently-formed Post-45 group of literary critics who are carrying out much of work cited above, Amy Hungerford remarks on the solid dominance of historicism that informs contemporary critical practice, a dominance that now scents less a critical movement than a simple assumption about literary-critical work, best figured as not a wave but a tide, or even just water we all swim (416). And it seems that what we can term new postmodernist studies has been firmly constituted by this historicist turn, which reacts against disabling commitment to theory that marked work of scholars of a previous generation. (5) At same time as this revisionist work on has begun to emerge, another prominent critical trend has seen a burgeoning interest of a younger generation of literary writers, those who are taken to follow in wake of postmodernism's waning influence (Hoberek, Introduction 233). Whether, classifying that began to sui face 1980s and 1990s and has continued into new millennium, critics favor hybrid fiction (Grassian), American literary globalism (Adams), cosmodernism (Moraru), late postmodernism (Green) or post-postmodernism (Burn), it is clear that narrative of postmodernism, then is already under construction critical stories told about recent literature. In this scholarship there is understandably little questioning of validity of as a useful historical and aesthetic category: story being told requires, main, that there be a relatively clear postmodern model which later writers can internalize and react to. Depending on which younger writers each critic is most concerned with, canon of their postmodern forerunners will shift slightly, but only within certain bounds. The primary interest is identifying predominant styles and concerns of new generation, naming what it is these new writers are doing their fiction, and articulating how they build upon and depart from their canonical postmodern forebears. …