Bossaposbossa, or, Postmodernism as Semiperipheral Symptom

Abstract

WE HAVE EVERY REASON TO BE AGNOSTIC ABOUT THE FUTURE OF THE CURRENT configuration of the arts, about their relative importance as well as the constitution of the various art forms themselves. On one hand, the last thing we need in the current critical climate is another millenarian declaration of [End Page 117] the decisive end to this or that aesthetic possibility. On the other hand, it does not take a very strong historicism to note that art forms are born and die, that their constitution and social meaning change dramatically over the period of their existence, that an art form may continue to eke out a subsistence even while the social configuration that gave it force has passed into history. And it should not be a particularly radical stance to suggest that literature itself may already have entered this sort of afterlife. This is not to say that people have stopped reading or writing novels and poems, or that they will stop doing so any time soon. Rather, the point is one that those most invested in the value of the literary will be ready to admit: the forms of attention required by the literary object in particular (as opposed to those the novel shares with film or television, or that poetry shares with popular music) no longer come "naturally," even to the class for whom literature is still supposed to be the hegemonic art form. Nor is this to say—far from it—that there is no longer any value in these forms of attention. But very few professional teachers of literature will have failed to note that while the vast majority of their students are able easily to generate insights about film and music—right ones, wrong ones, ideological ones, but nonetheless insights of the appropriate kind—they often fail to follow even the most overt formal cues in a Wordsworth poem, or a novel by Machado de Assis.