Abstract
In recent years, a number of critics have announced the demise of postmodernism. The death notices issue from all points of the critical compass. For some on the left, postmodernism has been primarily an academic ideology that grew out of the despair of the post-1968 generation, a failure of political nerve, and an immense evasion of the continued depredations of late capitalism. News of postmodernism’s expiration can therefore be taken in good spirits, since urgent political and intellectual problems might now be addressed without a detour through the latest neo-Nietzschean mills flown in from France. Everything that such a theoretical trend ruled out of court—history, capital, the subject—can now be brought back to the table, and not before time. “Postmodernism is now history,” Alex Callinicos has declared with evident satisfaction.1
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Notes
Alex Callinicos, An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto ( Cambridge: Polity, 2003 ), p. 13.
See Stanley Fish, “Truth But No Consequences: Why Philosophy Doesn’t Matter,” Critical Inquiry 29 (Summer 2003): 389.
Hal Foster, “Whatever Happened to Postmodernism?” The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 205–226; John Frow, Time and Commodity Culture, pp. 13–63.
Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present ( London: Verso, 2002 ), p. 1.
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism ( Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991 ), pp. 1–2.
See, for example, Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986 ).
Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture ( New York: Rizzoli, 1977 ), p. 9.
Consider, for example, the work of Richard Kostelanetz, who has long been dedicated to the recovery of avant-garde writing from the modernist period: see The Avant-Garde Tradition in Literature (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1982) and many other titles; or the interest of the poets associated with the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in Gertrude Stein: see, for example, Lyn Hejinian, “Two Stein Talks” (1986), The Language of Inquiry ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000 ), pp. 83–130.
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984 ).
Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde ( London: Verso, 1995 ), pp. 3–5.
Wendy Steiner, “Postmodern Fictions, 1970–1990,” The Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. 7: Prose Writing, 1940–1990, ed. by Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 425–538. Future references will be given in parentheses.
Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art ( New York: Free Press, 2001 ), pp. 191–215.
Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1971 );
Gerald Graff, Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979 );
Philip Stevick, Alternative Pleasures: Postrealist Fiction and the Tradition ( Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981 );
Jerome Klinkowitz, Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary American Fiction ( Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975 ).
William H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York: Knopf, 1977 ) and The World Within the Word: Essays ( New York: Knopf, 1978 );
Ishmael Reed, Shrovetide in Old New Orleans ( Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978 );
Ronald Sukenick, In Form: Digressions on the Act of Fiction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985);
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966) and Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969 );
John Barth, The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction ( New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 1984 ).
Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. by Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), pp. 111–125; “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (1984): 52–92.
For a discussion of the development and significance of Jameson’s work on the postmodern, see Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity ( London: Verso, 1998 ).
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. by Geoff Bennington and Brian Masumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), subsequent references will be given in parentheses.
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction ( New York: Routledge, 1988 );
Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987) and Constructing Postmodernism ( New York: Routledge, 1992 ).
Tom LeClair, The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction ( Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989 );
Joseph Tabbi, Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995) and Cognitive Fictions ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002 );
Ursula Heise, Chronoschisms: Time, Narrative, and Postmodernism ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 );
John Johnston, Information Multiplicity: American Fiction in an Age of Media Saturation ( Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998 );
N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990 ) and How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics ( Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999 );
Joseph Conte, Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction ( Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002 ).
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Image-Music-Text, trans. by Stephen Heath ( London: Fontana, 1977 ), pp. 142–148.
Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” trans. by Josué V. Harari in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism ( Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979 ), pp. 141–160.
Terry Eagleton, The Ideology ofthe Aesthetic ( Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990 ), pp. 374–375.
See especially David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989) and “Flexibility: Threat or Opportunity?” Socialist Review 21.1 (1991): 65–77;
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and the essays in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 1998), particularly “Culture and Finance Capital” (pp. 136–161) and “The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism and Land Speculation” (pp. 162–189);
Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society ( Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996 );
John Frow, Cultural Studies and Cultural Value ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995 );
Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. by Bruce Robbins ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993 ), pp. 269–295.
For a useful discussion of these debates see Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism ( Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999 ).
Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, trans. by Joris De Bres (London: NLB, 1975), esp. pp. 523–589.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000 ), p. 284.
Charles Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Artists ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972 ), p. 403.
Herbert Schiller, Culture Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1989 ), pp. 37–38.
André Schiffrin, The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read ( London: Verso, 2000 ), p. 73.
Bill Readings, The University in Ruins ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996 ).
John Frow, Cultural Studies and Cultural Value ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995 ), p. 3.
See, e.g., Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture ( New York: Routledge, 1989 ).
See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977 ), pp. 121–127.
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© 2005 Jeremy Green
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Green, J. (2005). Late Postmodernism and the Literary Field. In: Late Postmodernism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980403_2
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