Literary Postmodernisms

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Literary Postmodernisms

• History
• Main Concerns--
• Self-Reflexivity, Historicity, Double-Coding

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Outline

• The Postmodern Debate
• Literary Postmodernisms Three Approaches
• Waterland Different Views of History

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Bertens Views of the Postmodern Debate

• A. History
• 1. Postmodernism has itself . . .been protean
  rather than fixable and has again and again
  remade itself without, however, losing its most
  distinct quality.
• Against modernism (which is considered as
  pretentious and privileging timelessness,
  transcendent meaning and elitism)
• 1. avant garde critique of modernism (as
  institution)
• 2. distinguished from avant-garde
• 3. 1970s poststructualist postmodernism
• 4. language ? subject and discourse (Foucault) ?
  democratizing movement continued

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Bertens Views of the Postmodern Debate

• B. His Views of Postcolonialism vs. Postmodernism
• Different strategies/positions taken by pc. and
  pm writers
• A lot of postcolonial writers (e.g. Said,
  Spivak, Bhabha) are poststructuralist.
• C. His Response to the various attacks by
  feminism, minority discourses, etc.
• These attacks pursue the ideals of Enlightenment
  (democratization freedom, equity,
  brother/sisterhood) supported by postmodernism.
  These ideals of Enlightenment are carried on but
  not the assumptions of Enlightenment(such as
  about rationality, subject, Truth p. 13)

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Kinds--postmodernisms defined by

• 1) formal properties
• 2) content
• 3) certain themes emerging out of certain formal
  procedures (Bertens p. 8)

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1. Formalist Approach (B 9)

• David Lodge Postmodern fiction suggests that the
  world resist interpretation . . . Through such
  techniques as contradiction, permutation,
  discontinuity, randomness, excess, and short
  circuit.
• C. Butler huge over-organization vs. deliberate
  lack of it.
• Cf. Robert Scholes Fabulation (over-plotting)
• Patricia Waugh over-plotting vs. under-plotting

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1. Formalist Approach (B 9)--2

• Brian McHale e.g. short circuit confrontation of
  worlds ? ontological confusion
• Cf. postmodern fiction negotiates the tension
  between self-reflexivity and representation by
  abandoning the modernist emphasis on epistemology
  . . . for an emphasis on ontology. Knowing
  loses its privileged position to pluriform,
  polyphonic being. (B The Idea of the Postmodern
  78)

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1. Formalist Approach (B 9) --3

• Jameson
• video process (or experimental total flow) ?
  no single element can occupy the position of
  interpretant for any length of time but must be
  dislodged in turn in the following instant.

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2. Thematic Approach (B 10-11)

• Call for authenticity after the artificiality of
  modernism e.g. a postmodern poetry that would
  embody the presence of living speech.
• A rejection of the transcendental truths that
  modernism supposedly was after in favor of
  provisional, socially constituted truths.
• e.g. Alan Wilde midfiction and the postmodern
  suspensive irony (vs. the modernist stable
  irony) ? more

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Alan Wilde

• Unstable irony, corresponding to what Wilde
  characterizes as postmodernisms "more radical .
  . . vision of randomness, multiplicity, and
  contingency" (Wilde 131), offers the reader no
  firm ground on which to stand.

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3. Theory ? themes expressed through forms

• Language constitutes reality, but not reflects
  reality
• Identity is multiple or fragmentary
• ? e.g. Linda Hutcheon ambiguity, inability to
  move into political agency. ? Does this mean it
  is morally and politically impotent? (B 11)

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History in Waterland Views (1) History
Sense-making to avoid fears

• "the Grand Narrative, the filler of vacuums, the
  dispeller of fears in the dark."(53)
• "It's all a struggle to make things not seem
  meaningless. It's all a fight against fear. . . .
  What do you think all my stories are for. . . I
  don't care what you call it--explaining, evading
  the facts, making up meanings, taking a larger
  perspective, dodging the here and now, education,
  history, fairy-tales--it helps eliminate fear"
• e.g. Price's fear -- fear of World War III

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History in Waterland Views (2) Resistance to
History

• Resistance to history, living in the now
• Price "I want a future . . . And you--you can
  stuff your past!" (107) Your thesis," says the
  narrator, "is that history, as such, is a
  red-herring the past is irrelevant. The present
  alone is vital." (124)
•  g.  anti-explanation "You know what your
  trouble is, sir? You're hooked on explanation.
  Explain, explain. Everything's got to have an
  explanation. . . . Explaining's a way of avoiding
  facts while you pretend to get near to them"
  (126).
•  f. against history teacher "What is a history
  teacher? He's someone who teaches mistakes. While
  others say, Here's how to do it, he says, And
  here's what goes wrong" (177, 203).

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History in Waterland 1) Present 1980s

• The violence in Northern Ireland.
• Hong Kong
• In 1982, England and the People's Republic of
  China begin talks to grant Hong Kong its
  independence.
• In 1984, the two countries sign an agreement that
  will establish Hong Kong as a Special
  Administrative Region in 1997.
• Falkland War --in 1982, England also clashes in a
  war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. The
  rights to this territory had been the source of
  dispute between the two nations since the
  eighteenth century. The 74 days of war claimed
  256 British lives and 712 Argentinean lives.
  (Encyclopedia Americana Vol.1014)
  http//www.postcolonialweb.org/uk/gswift/uktoday.h
  tml

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History in Waterland 2) Past

• -- 1940s
• The World War II
• 20 years after the Great War
• French Revolution-- "that great watershed in
  history" (119) -- it embodies the ideals of a
  revolution. Crick sees a revolution as "the idea
  of a return. A redemption a restoration. A
  reaffirmation of what is pure and fundamental
  against what is decadent and false. A return to a
  new beginning."(119)

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History in Waterland 3) Past

• The Atkinson Brewery
• begins with an impulse for the big business,
  money, and machinery characteristic of the
  Victorian era.
• The New Atkinson Brewery, built in 1849 was on
  fire" (151).? Once the brewery is gone it slips
  from the course of history. . . . For example,
  World War I ends and "because . . . there was no
  brewery" there is no ale to mark the Armistice.