The Decline of American Postmodernism

Abstract

Postmodernism as a literary movement in the United States is now in its final phase of decadence. Ironically, the authenticity of its birth is still a hotly debated issue. A strong contingent of critics insists that ours is a late-modernist phase filled with minor talents. Anything that is not easily placed in this tradition is dismissed as worthless pop art. However, an increasingly vocal group of critics maintains that postmodernism does exist and make their cases by wielding Heidegger, Nietzsche, Derrida, Barthes, and Lacan' (among others) as their supporters. So deep, in fact, is the contempt of academics for contemporary culture that they have canonized theorists and philosophers rather than the actual literary progenitors of the movement. Postmodernism is being redefined as a nonmovement whose literature consists mostly of translated theory, or else reactionary contemporary writers are being forced into the critical mold with often absurd assertions about their writing. Beyond this arena of contention, American culture moves into an era of postliterature. The term postmodern has found its way into general usage among writers and critics to describe a tendency in writing that follows the modernist impulse toward nonlinear form but abandons the modernist ideology in other social, political, and cultural areas. In their preface to The Postmoderns: The New American Poetry Revised,2 George Butterick and Donald Allen name Charles Olson as the first American to use the term