A Poetics of Postmodernism:
History, Theory, Fiction.
Neither a defense nor a denunciation of the postmodern, this study directly addresses the use and abuse of the label in a variety of disciplines—literature, visual arts, film, architecture, literary theory, history, and philosophy. Modelled on postmodern architecture, postmodernism is here the name given to those cultural practices of the late twentieth century characterized by major paradoxes of form and ideology. The title's “poetics” of postmodernism is drawn from these contradictions, as seen in the intersecting concerns of contemporary theory and artistic practice.
Part I maps out the history and consequences of the simultaneous inscribing and subverting of conventions in both art and theory, with a special emphasis on the impact of both feminism and theories of the writing of history. Part II concentrates on what is called “historiographic metafiction” as the paradigm of the postmodern contesting of the boundaries between art and theory as well as between fiction and history. Analyses of issues such as narrative, reference, subjectivity, and intertextuality bring the combined discourses on history, theory, and fiction to bear on novels from the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Latin America and Europe, in order to show how the “problematizing” of the entire notion of historical knowledge reveals the conflicting political and ideological implications of postmodernism's willful contradictions.
Table of Contents
Part I
Chapter One: Theorizing the Postmodern: Toward a Poetics
Chapter Two: Modelling the Postmodern: Parody and Politics
Chapter Three: Limiting the Postmodern: The Paradoxical Aftermath of Modernism
Chapter Four: Decentering the Postmodern: The Ex-centric
Chapter Five: Contextualizing the Postmodern: Enunciation and the Revenge of “Parole”
Chapter Six: Historicizing the Postmodern: The Problematizing of History
Part II
Chapter Seven: Historiographic Metafiction: “The Pastime of Past Time”
Chapter Eight: Intertextuality, Parody, and the Discourses of History
Chapter Nine: The Problem of Reference
Chapter Ten: Subject in/of/to History and His Story
Chapter Eleven: Discourse, Power, Ideology: Humanism and Postmodernism
Chapter Twelve: Political Double-talk
Chapter Thirteen: Conclusion: A Poetics or a Problematics?
Bibliography
