Irony, postmodernism, and the "modern"

Abstract

In conclusion, it seems to me that those postmodernist writers who could be called ironic have played a crucial role in defining the era. For while most other postmodernist writers persistently claim to be essentially late modernist, the ironic writers are able - because of their self-reflexivity - to place their own works within a larger historical context. If modernist avant-gardism attempted to create the simultaneity of the unsimultaneous, the parodic slant of the ironic postmodemist writer affirms the historicity of even that attitude. In other words: the ironic postmodemist writer defines a new epoch within the philosophical context of modernity. And yet, just as any parody remains dependent on the literaty model it reflects, postrnodemism is not a new political assessment of modem aesthetics. It can lay no claim to having ushered in an aesthetic revolution and it remains to be seen, if-given the more or less unconventional attitude in most Western thinking today - such a new aesthetic revolution is already under way.