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Postmodernism and After
Postmodernism and After:
Visions and Revisions
Edited by
Regina Rudaitytė
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Postmodernism and After: Visions and Revisions, Edited by Regina Rudaitytė
This book first published 2008 by
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2008 by Regina Rudaitytė and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-84718-410-3, ISBN (13): 9781847184108
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
A Nostalgia for Tradition
Regina Rudaitytė
From the Postmodern to the Pre-Modern: More Recent Changes
in Literature, Art, and Theory.................................................................... 11
Herbert Grabes
Performing Cultural Alterity: Non-Conformist American Drama
since the 1990s .......................................................................................... 28
Herbert Grabes
“What Am I Doing Here”: Contemporary British Travel Writing:
From Revival to Renewal .......................................................................... 42
Jan Borm
National Past / Personal Past: Recent Examples of the Historical Novel
by Umberto Eco and Antanas Sileika ........................................................ 54
Milda Danytė
Towards a Polythetic Definition of the Bildungsroman:
The Example of Paul Auster’s Moon Palace............................................. 65
Anniken Telnes Iversen
Subjectivity in A.L. Kennedy’s Writing.................................................... 79
Eglė Kačkutė
Literary Culture in the Age of the Internet ................................................ 89
Jens Kirk
A Self-Reflexive Renewal of Realism: Aesthetic Developments
in 21st Century Novel............................................................................... 103
Windy Counsell Petrie
vi
Table of Contents
(De)Construction of the Postmodern in A.S. Byatt’s Novel Possession . 111
Regina Rudaitytė
The Old and the New: British Concepts of Writing the History
of English Literature after Postmodernism.............................................. 121
Margit Sichert
Intertextuality in Theory and Practice ..................................................... 136
Adolphe Haberer
Reading Postmodern Narrative: An Intertextual Dialogue Between
J. Banville’s The Book of Evidence and V. Nabokov’s Lolita................. 156
Jūratė Butkutė
The Ecocritical and the Postmodern: Re-Visions in “Johnny Panic
and the Bible of Dreams” by Sylvia Plath and “The Quagmire Woman”
by Jolita Skablauskaitė ............................................................................ 169
Irena Ragaišienė
Comparing Mythologies: The Postmodern Voices of Margaret
Atwood’s The Penelopiad ....................................................................... 182
Rūta Šlapkauskaitė
Transtextual Bridge Between the Postmodern and the Modern:
The Theme of the “Otherness” in Monique Truong’s Novel
The Book of Salt (2003) and Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography
of Alice B. Toklas (1932) ......................................................................... 198
Ingrida Žindžiuvienė
Contributors............................................................................................. 212
INTRODUCTION
A NOSTALGIA FOR TRADITION
REGINA RUDAITYTĖ
The present publication is a collection of academic articles, most of
which are modified versions of papers given at the International Literary
Conference “Beyond Postmodernism: Literature, Theory, Culture”, which
was held on 16-17 November, 2006 at the Faculty of Philology, Vilnius
University, Lithuania. It is an attempt to reflect on new openings and
recent developments in literature, literary theory and culture which seem
to point beyond postmodernism and raise a question whether what appears
as newness is not rather a return to traditional concepts, theoretical
premises and authorial practices.
Interestingly enough, forty years after the publication of John Barth’s
seminal essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967), one is tempted to
diagnose the exhaustion of postmodernism. It is becoming increasingly
obvious that there are signs in contemporary British literature indicating
that postmodernism is past its heyday, that it is losing or has lost its shine,
fascination and attraction and that writers have been turning to the “old”
or pre-modern forms, practices and strategies. It seems to me that novels
with metahistorical dimension, the ethical component, the revival of realist
storytelling in the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Kate Atkinson,
Julian Barnes’s novel Arthur and George (2005) attest to the new mode
which reaches beyond postmodernism. Metafiction, postmodernist
experiment with narrative technique, attacks on mimetic referentiality,
delight in popular culture became mainstream, they lost their subversive
power and shock effect and no longer produce the effect of novelty; thus
to reach alterity the postmodernist and modernist novel are deconstructed:
old, pre-modern forms are used to achieve defamiliarization. David Lodge
predicted it already two decades ago: “Experiment can become so familiar
that it ceases to stimulate our powers of perception, and then more simple
2
Introduction
and straightforward modes of writing may seem wonderfully fresh and
daring”.1 At some later date, in the 1990’s, writing about the British novel
Malcolm Bradbury made a similar observation: “There was a general
feeling that Eighties experiments had become Nineties conventions, and
that serious young writers were becoming imitative clones of their
elders”.2
It was Ihab Hassan, a distinguished American professor and scholar,
who started the critique of postmodernism; in his thought-provoking
article “Beyond Postmodernism: Toward an Aesthetic of Trust” he is
advocating for what he calls “a fiduciary realism”, “a postmodern realism”
based on believing there is truth and we have to be committed to it. It is
not, Hassan argues, “an absolute, transcendent, or foundational Truth”, it
is Truth which “rests on trust, personal, social, cognitive trust”, trust as
“the premise to realism” which “is no light matter” and which “refers us to
the enigma of representation, the conundrum of signs, the riddle of
language, the chimera of consciousness itself”.3 We have to believe there
is truth, because “if truth is dead, then everything is permitted”, asserts
Hassan, paraphrasing Dostoyevsky and challenging postmodern
relativism.4
The current processes in literary culture undoubtedly invite
reconsideration and reconceptualization of such key notions as “truth”,
meaning production, textuality and literary interpretation. Some attempts
at reassessment have already been undertaken.5 Andrzej Gasiorek disputes
the clear-cut realism/experimentalism divide in contemporary British
fiction, arguing that some writers incorporate modernist and postmodernist
insights into their works, fuse technical innovations with strong social
concerns, this way extending realism in new directions. Acknowledging
the role played by linguistic codes and narrative forms in the construction
of meaning, the scholar does not dismiss the external world that literature
engages with, claiming that “out of this tension between the word and the
world emerges a wide range of new realisms.” 6 At the recent ESSE
1
Lodge, Working with Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth- and
Twentieth-Century Literature, 10.
2
Bradbury, The Modern British Novel, 455.
3
Hassan, “Beyond Postmodernism: Toward an Aesthetic of Trust”, 204-207.
4
Ibid., 204.
5
On this point, see Jose Lopez and Garry Potter, eds. After Postmodernism.
London & New York, 2001. Also an impressive collection of essays Beyond
Postmodernism. Reassessments in Literature, Theory, and Culture, edited by Klaus
Stierstorfer. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2003.
6
Gasiorek, Post-War British Fiction. Realism and After, 183.
Postmodernism and After: Visions and Revisions
3
(European Society for the Study of English) conference in London in
2006, attempts to reinstate realism were obvious at some seminars and
particularly at Christophe den Tandt’s lecture “On Virtual Grounds:
Reclaiming Realism at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century”.
It seems to me that the point is made particularly well by Herbert
Grabes’comprehensive and illuminating article “From the Postmodern to
the Pre-Modern: More Recent Changes in Literature, Art, and Theory”
which opens and sets the tone for this collection of essays; it is a major
assessment of new developments in literary culture, focusing on the
evolution of the postmodern to the premodern mode, as well as
highlighting the role and current popularity of cultural studies and cultural
history – theoretical movements which have been prevailing for some time
now after the end of deconstruction. Likewise, reflecting on the
implications of the notion of conformity and non-conformity, and its
changing nature in his essay “Performing Cultural Alterity: NonConformist American Drama Since the 1990s”, Herbert Grabes gives a
splendidly clear account of more recent non-conformist American plays
linking them to the changes in culture and moral climate prevailing in
society, as well as to the complex and adverse historical and political
situation of our turbulent times. In being non-conformist, Grabes claims,
aesthetically they also, however, fulfill an important function of theater
and art in general: “to make us laugh, or admonish us, or even shock us
out of our complacency, our conformity, by confronting us with what had
better not be, or must not be.”
In his essay “‘What Am I Doing Here‘: Contemporary British Travel
Writing: From Revival to Renewal” Jan Borm concentrates on the renewal
of the long-established genre of travel writing in Great Britain, reflecting
on the situation today, some fifty years after Claude Lévi-Strauss’ famous
declaration about travelling, and highlighting the pronounced literary
dimension of some seminal contemporary travel books which in their own
particular ways raise the issues of representation and reflexivity. The
article rightly claims that “travel writing does continue to aim at partly
reflecting the real, even if the writing involves various processes of
fictionalisation.” Not only intertextuality as one of the chief postmodern
features of contemporary works but various forms of reflexive observation
also characterize a number of the narratives explored in Borm’s essay.
Such texts, according to the scholar, bear witness to the dynamic potential
of the genre and make it possible to affirm that travel writing represents
one of the most dynamic or poetically subversive domains of British
literature in the past thirty or forty years.
4
Introduction
Claiming the historical novel to be one of postmodernism’s favourite
genres, Milda Danytė looks at two works of historical fiction published in
2004, the Italian writer Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen
Loana, and the Lithuanian-Canadian writer Antanas Sileika’s Woman in
Bronze, to explore the notion of a “post postmodern historical novel”, one
that has some features in common with both traditional and postmodern
historical novels, yet which also differs in significant ways from both of
these. Danyte’s readings of these two recent historical novels suggest that
instead of parodying the past in postmodern fashion, these post
postmodern historical novels seem to prioritize unofficial memory and
celebrate popular culture in the broad sense. In this revisionist form of
history, the author’s personal past has real significance. Thus the new kind
of historical fiction has ties to new versions of history and autobiography
which also bring together the national past and the personal past.
In her essay which almost bears on “literary sociology”, Anniken
Telnes Iversen presents a multi-factorial and polythetic approach to the
definition of the bildungsroman with the aim of using this definition to
read Paul Auster’s novel Moon Palace as a bildungsroman postulating
links with tradition. The picture of the bildungsroman that emerges from
this approach is one of marked continuity from its late eighteenth-century
beginnings up to our own times. Differently from the critics who often see
Moon Palace as a postmodern novel with strong resemblances to the
picaresque, the researcher thinks it is closer to the classical tradition and
has a much stronger bond to the bildungsroman, more specifically the
nineteenth-century British bildungsroman. For the definition of the
bildungsroman Iversen tried to create what she called “the Bildungsroman
Index” which is developed for the English-language bildungsroman
tradition and thus based on four works that are seen as foundational to that
genre: Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and
Dickens’s David Copperfield and Great Expectations.
Eglė Kačkutė’s essay is another attempt to conceptualize the
construction of identity and subjectivity in A.L. Kennedy’s Novel So I am
Glad and Short Story Original Bliss. The two texts by one of the most
prominent contemporary British authors are seen as a good example of
both post- postmodernist and post-feminist writing as she belongs to the
generation of writers who started their careers in the late 1980s and early
1990s, at the time when both postmodernism and feminism were losing
their currency and fiction started to develop in all sorts of liberating and
refreshing ways. It is maybe for this reason that subjectivity and/or
identity in Kennedy’s work comes across as evasive and intangible. The
analysis of the two texts is based on the premise that although Kennedy’s
Postmodernism and After: Visions and Revisions
5
fiction defies all of the above mentioned theoretical and/or ideological
clichés, it still seems to indirectly engage with and challenge them, which
finally leads to the conclusion that Kennedy’s fiction is aware of the
doings of the postmodernist and feminist idioms, but is careful to stay
away from both of them. Kačkutė seems to be bent on showing that its
interests lie elsewhere. According to her, Kennedy is interested in a
complicated, multiple, flexible and indefinable subject that nevertheless
retains his or her integrity and coherence. The structure of identity
proposed in the novel So I am Glad and the short story Original Bliss is
non-singular and yet non-binary. It is deliberately evasive and embedded
in language thus residing between the text and the reader. Kennedy’s
fiction embraces moral and ethical issues with extreme unorthodoxy as
well as constructs textual, fictional and non-fictional subjectivity which is
simultaneously deliberately impalpable and indefinable thus highlighting
the complexity and controversy of the human condition.
J.Hillis Miller referring to a prophetically striking and frightening
passage from Jacques Derrida’s La Carte postale, sees the print culture
swamped by the digital culture, by the “new regime of
telecommunications” which is bringing an end to literature, philosophy,
psychoanalysis, and love letters.7 It does sound most threatening.
However, Jens Kirk in his article “Literary Culture in the Age of the
Internet” argues that the literary culture on the Internet relates to the
literary culture outside the Internet. The work done on the Internet
produces value and significance in the literary culture of the printed book.
Kirk looks into the reasons of why writers, publishers and bookshops go
electronic. In his essay, the literary culture on the Internet is outlined with
special reference to Jeanette Winterson’s website, and, ultimately, it is
maintained that the website and its uses are firmly inscribed within the
literary culture of the printed book. Print is not only the main source of the
site – it draws upon and makes available already published material – it is
also its destination. Eventually, the different kinds of work on the site lead
to printed books, to their production, distribution and consumption. There
is no distinct literary culture on the Internet, then. Rather, electronic
literary culture is furthering the literary culture of the printed book.
Windy Counsell Petrie looks into the signs of renewal of realism in
contemporary Jewish-American writing which is generally marked by its
concern with the historical, the moral, and the human anxieties of the
7
For more on this point, see J. Hillis Miller’s thought-provoking essay “Will
Literary Study Survive the Globalisation of the University and the New Regime of
Telecommunications?” In REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American
Literature, 373-85.
6
Introduction
modern self, and therefore has sometimes been described as displaying a
return to realism. The novels which form the focus of her article, Michael
Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize winning bestseller, The Adventures of Kavalier
and Clay, published in 2000, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2002 novel,
Everything is Illuminated, also a bestseller and the winner of the National
Jewish Book Award in America, and the Guardian First Book Award in
the UK, were written by relatively young Jewish-American novelists. Both
writers, it is argued, try to regenerate a faith in fiction which does not
privilege historical fact, modifying literary realism for the 21st century.
Both novels are read through the lens of realism-defining Hassanian
concept of “Trust” which presupposes faith in the representable reality.
Both Chabon and Foer reflect this kind faith, as their works seek to regain
the trust that Hassan observes is so central to literary realism, but in a less
naïve, more self-reflexive way. Both novels, it is claimed, profess a belief
in the regenerative and illuminating powers of Art. But both books,
whatever confidence they place in art, refuse to be naive. Neither claims to
really represent history or reality, but simply to escape it or illuminate it.
Petrie’s article concludes that this is not mere realism, but a new offspring
of it; this is a realism that cannot promise Truth, but does offer readers the
Trust Hassan claims is “indispensable”, a new mode that promises to keep
faith with the reader, not with the “real world.”
Regina Rudaitytė’s essay “(De)Construction of the Postmodern in A.S.
Byatt’s Novel Possession” examines Byatt’s Booker-prize winning novel
Possession (1990) which is generally regarded as an emblematic
postmodern novel in which texts, authors, literary movements of the past
are transformed and reflected in the form of metafictional narrative, of
rewriting, of parody and pastiche, giving them a reinterpretation and
recoding in a totally different cultural and literary context. However, this
essay attempts to detect the writer’s ambivalence towards and unease
about the postmodern mode, inscribed in the novel’s text. It is argued that
although Byatt’s play with conventions of metafiction, the use of parody
and pastiche which is one of the most important exponents of postmodern
art, are instrumental in the construction of the postmodern, on the other
hand, this postmodern move eventually results in the critique and
deconstruction of postmodernism itself. Byatt’s parody is also very
explicitly directed at the postmodern critical theories, particularly
poststructuralism and feminist criticism.
Even in the heyday of postmodernism when history was declared dead
and when the concept of a canon was a controversial point, and the writing
of literary histories became doubtful, not only large literary histories were
projected, but also new literary histories of just one volume for a broader
Postmodernism and After: Visions and Revisions
7
readership continued to be written. This is the core of Margit Sichert’s
argument in her article on the concepts of writing literary histories today,
after postmodernism. It turns out that even the famous British writer and
critic Malcolm Bradbury, the author of the immensely readable and
enjoyable The Modern World. Ten Great Writers (1989) and other
splendid books on modernism, became a promoter of the writing of
literary histories: as Sichert points out, in 2000, the year he died, Bradbury
wrote his fascinating foreword to the second edition of the Routledge
History of Literatures in English– “and it sounds like a testament, like a
last wish of an author who wants his kind of writing to be read, honoured
and treasured as a part of collective memory.” Margit Sichert traces and
analyzes the processes of writing literary history, drawing parallels
between past and present literary histories and concentrating on three
recent literary histories that, on the one hand, continue the tradition of the
literary histories of the nineteenth century and, on the other, break away
from it – go further or beyond, try to find a way which leads straight to the
readers of the twentieth or twenty-first century. They all avoid the
academic jargon still so cherished these days, which would repulse the
general reader. It seems very clear that they are designed to be readable,
understandable, interesting and meaningful for a broader public. The
authors seem to feel very deeply that the cultural and literary knowledge
they present is a cultural heritage of the nation and belongs to all people.
The legacy of postmodernism cannot be easily ignored either.
Postmodernism still seems to mesmerize our minds; some postmodernist
strategies turn out to be quite productive and feeding into the new mode of
“revamped” realism. A few of the essays in this collection, naturally, still
engage with postmodern practices. Symptomatic in this respect is the
impressive scholarly essay “Intertextuality in Theory and Practice” by
Adolphe Haberer who places a firm trust in the concept of intertextuality
even in a new age “beyond postmodernism”. Adolphe Haberer focuses on
the theory and practice of intertextuality, extensively discussing its farreaching consequences and implications for literary interpretation.
Viewing postmodernism as a development of modernism, the scholar
attemps to show that the workings of intertextuality were already being
explored by such modernists as T.S. Eliot and David Jones. In that respect
also, there is an undeniable continuity between modernism and
postmodernism. It is claimed that intertextuality, this prime exponent of
postmodernism, is still very much valid and continues to provide a solid
basis for interpretation : according to Haberer, even if we have truly
entered a new age “beyond postmodernism” we cannot do without the
8
Introduction
key-concept of intertextuality to account for that all-important dimension
of our experience as readers of literary texts.
Jūratė Butkutė’s essay on the intertextual dialogue between
J.Banville’s and V.Nabokov’s novels raises a question about the ways the
Irish author John Banville addresses the issue of the possibility of writing
in the postmodern age which actually challenges the very notion of
representation. Banville’s intertextually rich body of work, numerous
references to Nabokov, Beckett, Joyce and Proust among many other
authors present in his writing, suggest an intertextual method of reading.
This leads Butkutė to explore the nature of a dialogic discourse between
his novel The Book of Evidence (1989) which belongs to his art trilogy
Frames (2001) and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), a text that has been
widely examined as an example of postmodernism. The objective of the
present essay, therefore, is to establish whether both of these texts operate
in the same dimension of postmodern aesthetics by discerning the
structural strategies of their narratives and discussing semantic
implications that the reading of the texts may lend. The analysis is based
on a question, whether the semantic structure of Banville’s text goes
beyond the notions of postmodern ontology and if it does, in what
direction of discursive practices it tends to develop.
In her discussion of Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams by Sylvia
Plath and The Quagmire Woman by Jolita Skablauskaitė, a contemporary
Lithuanian writer, Irena Ragaišienė aims at establishing links between
postmodernism and ecocriticism and in this theoretical framework
provides a gender sensitive/ecocritical comparative reading of Plath’s and
Skablauskaitė’s texts, highlighting the manner in which each text reveals
environmental, gender, and social sensitivity by exposing and criticizing
tropes that reflect the multifarious aspects of interaction between nature
and culture. In light of ecocriticism which tends to move beyond the
postmodern emphasis on indeterminacy and fragmentation, and which
destabilizes the human/nature dualism, in which the human subject has
always been regarded as superior and separate from the natural world, the
two texts are read shifting the focus from the individual self to nature and
human relationships to it, dissolving the hierarchical oppositions between
self and the natural/human. This approach, especially to Sylvia Plath’s
text, seems to bring fresh hues of reflection and may be regarded as
contradicting the prevailing critical views on Plath’s writing.
Rūta Šlapkauskaitė focuses on Canada’s literary icon Margaret
Atwood and her latest novel The Penelopiad, aiming to define Atwood’s
place in the landscape of literary postmodernism which, as she, hopefully,
tongue in cheek, claims, is as Canadian as the maple leaf. It is a
Postmodernism and After: Visions and Revisions
9
commonplace of literary criticism to say that many writers after reaching
the high point in their literary careers tend to show signs of exhaustion and
a lack of imagination; their writing is often diagnosed with a failure to
open up fresh insights and phenomenological wonder. It looks like
Atwood’s The Penelopiad might be receiving controversial criticism. The
Independent was not very gracious defining the novel as “half Dorothy
Parker, half Desperate Housewives”; on the other hand, the world
premiere of this “wry, witty and wise” novel’s adaptation for the stage was
widely advertised by The Times Literary Supplement and The London
Review of Books in the summer of 2007. In her discussion of The
Penelopiad, Šlapkauskaitė gives due credit to “the literary legend” and her
recent novel, whatever its slips. Wondering where Atwood’s recent
rewriting of a Grecian myth stands in relation to narrative conventions and
the literary system at large and if we might read The Penelopiad as a
barometer of new trends in Western literature, the researcher ambitiously
attempts at looking into the very heart of postmodernism, activating a
broad and rich contextual web of theoretical and literary references and
parallels. The article provides some very interesting observations and
insights not only into Atwood’ writing but also into the nature of narrative,
of the real and the imaginary, and, finally, encourages our reflections on
the creative process itself.
Ingrida Žindžiuvienė’s article explores the transtextual framework of
the novel The Book of Salt by a Vietnamese-born American author,
Monigue Truong. The text of this novel has two broad contexts – textual
and social. The textual, postmodern, realm implies strong relationship to
the modernist one–Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
However, it is argued that the social context is based on the theme of the
“otherness” which is similarly discussed in both texts. This becomes a
particularly self-conscious form of transtextuality: it credits the readers
with the necessary experience to make sense of the allusions and offers
them the pleasure of recognition. These contexts constitute a frame which
the reader cannot avoid drawing upon in interpreting the text. The
interpretative practice reminds the reader of the mediated reality and
appeals to the pleasures of critical detachment rather than of emotional
involvement. The notion of transtextuality leads to the understanding of
the boundaries of the text and may question the dichotomy of “inside” and
“outside”, the beginning and the end of the text and the relationship
between the text and the context. Literary, historical and social
determinants that have been chosen for this analysis provide strong
evidence for the return of the postmodern age to the realities of the past,
10
Introduction
and the reconstruction and reproduction of the past experience, all of
which can be understood as the popular notion of “returning to the roots.”
The articles assembled in this collection are on diverse thematics and
written from diverse theoretical perspectives; they differ in scope and
methodology, and their focus ranges from the postmodern, intertextual
aspect to the open questioning of it and to more recent developments in the
literary culture. Whatever its virtues or flaws, this book is aiming to open
fresh discussion, debate and reflection on the new age reaching beyond
postmodernism, and the budding literary mode, whatever labels we might
stick to it.
Works Cited
Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern British Novel. Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1994.
Gasiorek, Andrzej. The Post-War British Fiction. Realism And After.
London:Edward Arnold, 1995.
Hassan, Ihab. “Beyond Postmodernism: Toward an Aesthetic of Trust.” In
Beyond Postmodernism. Reassessments in Literature, Theory, and
Culture, edited by Klaus Stierstorfer, 199-212. Berlin & New York:
Walter de Gruyter, 2003.
Lodge, David. Working with Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on
Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983.
Lopez, Jose and Potter, Garry, eds. After Postmodernism. London and
New York, 2001.
Miller, J.Hillis. “Will Literary Study Survive the Globalization of the
University and the New Regime of Telecommunications?” In REAL.
Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, edited by
Herbert Grabes, 373-85. Volume 17. Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag,
2001.
FROM THE POSTMODERN
TO THE PRE-MODERN:
MORE RECENT CHANGES IN LITERATURE,
ART, AND THEORY
HERBERT GRABES
That literature, art, and theory have changed considerably since the
early and more spectacular phase of postmodernity in the nineteen-sixties
and seventies is too obvious to be overlooked. These changes raise
questions regarding their actual extent and quality, their presumable
causes and their already discernible consequences – three aspects to which
I will be directing your attention in the following remarks.
First, then, the extent and quality of the changes that can be observed
in the domains of literature, art, and theory: in order to let you share my
observations, I will have to draw at least a rough sketch of the situation
then and now: that is, of the state of play in the nineteen-sixties and
seventies as against the situation obtaining from the nineteen-eighties
onwards.
In retrospect, the difference between the new works of art and
literature from the nineteen-sixties and those of the nineteen-fifties seems
so great that it is no wonder observers soon began speaking of a
‘postmodernism’, in the sense that ‘modernism’ seemed to be over. I
would like to begin with the advent of postmodernism in the domain of the
visual arts because it was especially here that the phenomenon was so
unmistakably visible – no accident, then, I might add, that the very term
‘postmodernism’ should have entered awareness via Charles Jencks’s
lucubrations on contemporary architecture, an essentially visual domain.
Too great was the contrast between the stylish late modernist Colour Field
paintings of American Abstract Expressionism and the new presentation of
banal objects of everyday use, such as Jasper Johns’s “Two Beer Cans”
(1960) or Andy Warhol’s “Brillo Box” (1964) as well as the
foregrounding of the nature of such objects as mass products of consumer
culture in Warhol’s famously iconic “200 Campbell Soup Cans” (1962).
12
More Recent Changes in Literature, Art, and Theory
What soon came to be called “Pop Art” further included the integration of
the sexy images of advertising, as in the paintings of Tom Wesselman, the
large-scale stylized imitations of comic-book or cartoon-strip figures and
objects and speech- or thought-balloons as represented by Roy
Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg’s magnified plastic reproductions of
icons of everyday consumable or utilitarian culture (just think of his “Two
Cheeseburgers with Everything” from 1962).
At the same time, the techniques of representation were largely
influenced by the use and imitation of mechanical reproduction. Warhol,
for instance, used acrylic paint and oil paint to create the impression of
silkscreen prints or newspaper reproductions of photographs,
Rauschenberg imitated the look of TV images, Lichtenstein the raster
screen appearance of comic-book frames as quotations from mass culture,
but they all emphasized the distance between that culture and their art by
an alienation effect that was achieved via the extreme magnification
involved in their very large canvases. What nevertheless was surprising
was how well the ubiquitous and banal images of mass culture were suited
as sujets for works of art.
The literary equivalent to Pop Art was the integration and refinement
of the structural patterns of popular genre literature and the wide use of the
clichés of everyday speech. Much of the latter can be found, for instance,
in works like Donald Barthelme’s Snow White (1967), Richard
Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America (1967), or Stanley Elkin’s The Dick
Gibson Show (1971), while the preferred genres ranged from science
fiction (as in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963) and fantasy (as in
Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar, 1968) to the detective novel
[eher: conspiracy thriller] (as in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49,
1966) and crime fiction or ‘faction’ (Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, 1966)
as well as the western and the horror story (Richard Brautigan, The
Hawkline Monster, 1974). And I should not forget to mention that the
popular pattern of the horror story was used in feminist works like
Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle (1976), Angela Carter’s The Passion of
New Eve (1977), and in combination with science fiction in, for instance,
Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1975) and Marge Piercy’s
Woman on the Edge of Time (1976).
While in the domain of postmodern art and literature Pop Art seemed
so spectacular in its move beyond the previous limits of aesthetic taste that
it appeared as another avant-garde movement, in the domain of theory the
replacement of structuralism by poststructuralist ideas and deconstruction
meant a similarly radical break with the previously dominant trend. After
1977, when Jacques Derrida’s De la Grammatologie (1967) appeared in
Postmodernism and After: Visions and Revisions
13
English translation, deconstruction became the new orthodoxy. Yet even if
poststructuralist thought looked like the theoretical base of postmodern
literature and art, it has to be said that artists and writers had become
postmodern even earlier, or at least at the same time as the theorists.
This is borne out by works from the nineteen-sixties like Joseph
Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), and
Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying Lot of 49 (1966), novels with a clearly
anti-foundationalist stance. And as to the free play of signifiers, where
could one study it better than in Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in
America from 1967, a novel in which arbitrariness reigns supreme? The
exhibition of arbitrariness was quite obviously also one of the objectives
of the artists of the time, as can be gathered from the ‘combines’ of Robert
Rauschenberg (for instance, his “Monogram” from 1959), the
‘environments’ of Claes Oldenburg (“Four Environments”, 1963) or the
‘assemblages” of James Rosenquist (“Mixed Media”, 1963), from
‘Earthworks’ and ‘Land Art’ like Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” or
Walter de Maria’s “Lightning Field”, and, above all, from most of the
works belonging to ‘Concept Art’ – for instance, the series of random
photographs by Vito Acconci or John Dribbet.
The radical relativization of validity stressed in poststructuralist theory
is also a strong feature of earlier postmodern literature and art, where it
takes the shape of irony and self-irony, parody, or travesty. I would just
like to recall John Barth’s parody of Ebenezer Cooke’s verse satire The
Sot-Weed Factor (1708) in his novel with the same title from 1960, or
Donald Barthelme’s satirical travesty Snow White (1967).
That a relativizing ironical stance was also shared by postmodern
artists is shown by the provocative celebration of the banal and the
corresponding trivialization of the lofty and dignified, as in many of the
paintings of Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi, and Francesco Clemente, or the
treatment of important German historical myths by Anselm Kiefer.
As is well known, the integration of a self-ironical critical discourse in
narrative became such a typical feature of some postmodern fiction that
one soon spoke of ‘metafiction’ as a new subgenre. Typical specimens are
John Barth’s novel Lost in the Funhouse and many of the postmodern
short stories and tales of Donald Barthelme, Gilbert Sorrentino and Robert
Coover.
Metafiction was, however, only one particular kind of the mixing of
discourses, styles and genre patterns that stood in absolute contrast to late
modernist purism. Other examples include Kurt Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) with its combination of historical war novel
14
More Recent Changes in Literature, Art, and Theory
and science fiction and Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night (1968)
with its blending of documentary prose and novelistic narration.
*
All these reminders of earlier postmodern art and literature are meant only
to help us see more clearly how much different was most of what came
after.
One of the most astounding events in the domain of art was the
appearance of the various “Neo”-movements from the late nineteenseventies onwards. Starting with the neo-expressionist painting of the
“Neue Wilde”, there soon reappeared an abstract geometrical art under the
name of “Neo-Geo,” which in turn was soon followed by “NeoConceptualism.” Such an open declaration of ‘new’ work as a variation
and renovation of something already existing had been utterly impossible
during modernism and actually been barred since absolute novelty became
a decisive criterion of aesthetic quality with the eighteenth-century
conception of the original genius. Suddenly the minimal difference of
mere variation became not only acceptable, but – with its obvious déja-vu
effect – even desirable. It is, for instance, hard, when contemplating Roni
Horn’s presentation of two parts of a severed beam (“Parted Mass”) from
1985 to tell it apart from the works of Carl Andre in the nineteen-sixties,
and frequently we also find ‘quotations’ of earlier styles, as when Gerhard
Richter’s “Strich (auf Rot)” from 1980 alludes to the art informel of the
1950s, or even of particular works, for instance of Edvard Munch’s “The
Scream” (1893) in Enzo Cucchi’s “Paesaggio Barbaro” (1983).
What became visible in the nineteen-nineties was already the
bewildering diversity of styles that still prevails to this day. There were
some spectacular events like the covering of the Reichstag in Berlin by
Christo and Jeanne-Claude in 1995, and a predilection for spatial
arrangements showed also in the great variety of ‘installations’. Regarding
painting, new abstract art (to which even someone like Georg Baselitz
contributed) competed with ‘naive’ realism and the various other kinds of
‘realism’ that could be found, for instance, in the exhibition “Radical
Realism After Picabia” that was in 2002 first shown in the Centre
Pompidou and then in the Kunsthalle in Vienna.
In the domain of literature, the changes that occurred in the late
nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties were just as significant. The most
remarkable new development was the return of more or less ‘realistic’
storytelling, something observable on an international scale, although I
will take my examples from British and American literature. In the United
Postmodernism and After: Visions and Revisions
15
States, ‘mainstream American realism’ never stopped flowing even during
the heyday of postmodernism (as, for instance, the successful series of
John Updike’s “Rabbit”-novels that began in 1960 testifies). Yet with the
‘minimalist’, ‘dirty’ or ‘new’ realism of Raymond Carver (What We Talk
About When We Talk About Love, 1981) and Frederick Barthelme (Moon
Deluxe, 1983), comparatively ‘straight’ storytelling became more
widespread again.
In quite a few cases the postmodern ‘crisis of representation’ still left
its traces insofar as the rendering of reality is made to appear doubtful by
various means. In novels like Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy (198586) or E.L. Doctorow’s World’s Fair (1986), the account of the past is
made to appear ostensibly imperfect. As Gerhard Hoffmann has pointed
out in his recent study From Modernism to Postmodernism (2005), in
many American novels from the eighties and nineties the reality presented
is marked by sudden disruptions of continuity that take the form of a
mystery. While this may seem understandable in the works of an AfricanAmerican writer like Toni Morrison (for instance, in Beloved, 1987, and in
Paradise, 1997) and those of a native American writer like Louise Erdrich
(for instance, in The Beet Queen, 1986, or in Gardens in the Dunes, 1999),
it surprises in novels like Infinite Jest (1996) by David Foster Wallace,
Middlesex (2002) by Jeffrey Eugenides, or The Corrections (2001) by
Jonathan Franzen.
The novels of Morrison and Erdrich are specimens of the so-called
“hyphenated literatures” to which belong, besides African-American and
Native-American, also Hispano-American literature (for instance, the
successful novel Hunger of Memory (1982) by Richard Rodriguez), or
Asian-American literature (for instance, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The
Woman Warrior, 1977) .
The revival of realistic narration in the United States meant also a
reintroduction of social problems and social criticism such as we find it in
Franzen’s The Corrections, Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000) and
Richard Powers’ The Time of Our Singing (2003).
The fact that in the nineties there was still room for what Hoffmann
has called “Strategies of Excess”, strategies at work in the 835 pages of
Harold Brodkey’s epic adventure in consciousness called Runaway Soul
(1991) and in the 1079 pages of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest
(1996) with their extreme multi-modality and excessive language games
proves, however, how wide the range of recent writing is.
In Britain, where the postmodern excesses were never as massive as in
American literature, the nineteen-eighties brought a revival of the
historical novel that included works with a metahistorical stance aptly
16
More Recent Changes in Literature, Art, and Theory
called historiographic metafiction. Among them were such successful
novels as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), and Graham
Swift’s Waterland (1983), as well as Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot
(1983) and Nigel Williams’ Witchcraft (1987). And it is important to see
that in the nineteen-eighties, feminist critique of society was also
expressed in historiographic metafiction like Maureen Duffy’s
Illuminations: A Fable (1991) and Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger (1987).
The revival of the historical novel comprised, however, also a
considerable amount of more traditional storytelling, which began already
with J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) and continued with J.G.
Ballard’s Empire of The Sun (1984), Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark
(1982) as well as Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger (1992) and Morality
Play (1995) and Louise de Bernière’s Birds Without Wings (2004).
More or less straight storytelling has also continued through this whole
period in the novels of Ian McEwan (from The Cement Garden, 1978, to
Atonement, 2001) and Martin Amis (from The Rachel Papers, 1974, to
Yellow Dog, 2003). And it has to be noted that the British equivalents to
the American novels belonging to the “hyphenated literatures”, the very
successful works of the so-called British ‘diaspora’ writers Kazuo Ishiguro
(The Remains of the Day, 1989) and Hanif Kureishi (The Buddha of
Suburbia, 1990), also rely above all on the persuasiveness of more or less
realistic storytelling.
What we find not only in recent art but also in recent literature is an
aesthetic of minimal and often subtle variation of well-known themes and
kinds of presentation1, and as such an aesthetic was the dominant one from
the Renaissance of the twelfth century to the end of Neo-Classicism in the
late eighteenth century – it may – of course with some reservations – be
called ‘pre-modern’.
In the domain of theory, the influence of Derrida remained strong, yet
with Gilles Deleuze another important figure and theoretical position
became very influential in the late seventies and eighties after the works he
had published together with Félix Guattari, L’Anti-Oedipe: capitalisme et
schizophrénie I (1972) and Mille Plateaux: capitalisme et schizophrénie II
(1980) appeared in English translations (Anti-Oedipus, 1977, and
Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1980). And in the late
nineteen-eighties it showed that after the heyday of a-historical
deconstruction the time was ripe for a return to history not only in the
novel but also in the field of theory. In Britain, with investigations of the
early modern construction of the subject and the legitimizing of power as
1
Cf. Grabes, “The Subtle Art of Variation: the New Aesthetic.”
Postmodernism and After: Visions and Revisions
17
in Catherine Belsey’s The Subject of Tragedy. Identity and Difference in
Renaissance Drama (1985) the turn became quite visible, and with
Jonathan Dollimore’s and Alan Sinfield’s critical anthology Political
Shakespeare. New Essays in Cultural Materialism (1985) the new
movement – which was ‘néo-marxisant’ - also was named. In the United
States, Stephen Greenblatt with his influential study Renaissance SelfFashioning. From More to Shakespeare (1980) had already a few years
earlier initiated a new critical movement with similar aims, yet an even
wider inclusion of cultural history, a movement that in the introduction to
the periodical Genre form 1980 he called “New Historicism” and that
showed its appeal to a great number of critics when H. Aram Veeser by
the end of the decade brought out some of their essays under the same
title. And though this historical turn was new regarding its particular aims
and methodology, it was pre-modern in the sense that a similar tendency
can neither be found in the period of modernism nor in earlier
postmodernism with its slogan (adopted from Henry Ford) ‘history is
bunk’.
The nineteen-eighties were also the time when the earlier feminist
Women’s Studies were completed and replaced by Gender Studies with its
basic differentiation between biological sex and cultural gender. The
increased interest in the cultural construction of gender difference fitted
well into the wider frame of the most comprehensive and influential
theoretical movements after the end of deconstruction: cultural studies and
cultural history.
For with respect to the situation generally obtaining in the humanities,
there seems to be no question that the ‘cultural turn’ has prevailed for
some time now. Already in 1994 the sociologist David Charney stated:
In the second half of the 20th century the theme of ‘culture’ has dominated
the human sciences. Concepts of culture have generated perspectives and
methodologies that have challenged orthodoxies and attracted the energetic
enthusiasm of young scholars.2
With the increasing sophistication of the theoretical base and the
growth of practical experience, this trend has become even stronger in the
meantime. English philology has turned into a kind of super-discipline by
taking over, at least in part, the work of sociology, history, psychology and
philosophy, not to mention media and gender studies. The range of
possible objects of investigation under the label of ‘culture’ has become
almost unlimited. For that reason it seems advisable to limit the
2
Charney, The Cultural Turn, i.
18
More Recent Changes in Literature, Art, and Theory
perspective under which the various features and aspects of culture are
approached. And because English Studies as an academic discipline is
language-based, and language is the most elaborate sign-system we have,
the expertise gained in dealing with language, language texts and literature
appears to be an excellent qualification especially for a semiotic approach
to culture. Such an approach, the treatment of culture as an “ensemble of
texts,”3 an entanglement of sign-systems was widely disseminated in the
1970s by Clifford Geertz and the new American anthropology. Suddenly
those who were experts in textual interpretation saw themselves as being
particularly qualified to interpret not only literature but also culture.
As I endeavoured to show in the 2001 volume of REAL on Literary
History/ Cultural History: Force-Fields and Tensions,4 the notions of
’culture’ in recent and current research are nevertheless anything but
uniform, and this is also demonstrated, for instance, by the many relevant
entries in the Metzler Lexikon Kultur der Gegenwart5 and in the quite
recent monograph by Doris Bachmann-Medick called Cultural Turns:
Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften. There is, however, a
substantial ensemble of conceptions that are widely shared despite
considerable differences. Culture by now is seen as an historical formation
that, despite the hegemonic power structures already pointed out by
Gramsci,6 encompasses multiple forces and positions,7 as a site of forms of
ideological and political contestation in which – to use the terms
introduced by Raymond Williams - dominant, residual and emergent
forces coexist.8 This view has led to a closer investigation of how cultural
formations are stabilized – and I refer to the relevant studies of Pierre
Bourdieu9, Michel de Certeau10, Louis Althusser11, Alan Sinfield12, and
Catherine Belsey13 – as well as to an intensive search for possible and
effective counter-measures.
Culture – though materially manifested and linked to institutions –
comes to be investigated in a signifying approach primarily as an
3
Cf. Geertz, “Deep Play.”
Cf. Grabes, “Literary History and Cultural History: Relations and Difference.”
5
Ralf Schnell, ed.
6
Cf. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks.
7
Cf. Greenblatt, Shakespearian Negotiations.
8
Williams, Culture and Society.
9
Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice.
10
de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.
11
Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.”
12
Sinfield, Faultlines.
13
Belsey, “Reading Cultural History.”
4
Postmodernism and After: Visions and Revisions
19
immaterial construct, a web of meanings. In this sense it had already been
made the subject of the histoire de mentalités14 with its inquiry into
collective sense-making, and it is also found in Pierre Bourdieu’s
sociological focus on “habitus”15 and symbolic exchange16 as well as in
Catherine Belsey’s observation that “cultural history records meanings and
values.”17
This is very close to my own view that culture is above all an ensemble
of values18 which, as Bourdieu has observed,19 form hierarchies and in this
way make cultures special and differ from one another. Such hierarchies of
values only become culturally significant by having been collectively
accepted. It is therefore necessary to investigate a great number of
documents from various fields of discourse in order to discern the
recurrent validations. In this respect, the study of culture differs
significantly from the study of literature, for what finally counts in the
latter is the singularity of a particular work, a singularity which even
allows for a distancing from the prevailing hierarchy of values.
There are several fields within the domain of the study of culture that
in the past two decades have received more attention than others. That one
of them is cultural memory is not surprising after Benedict Anderson in
his Imagined Communities from 1983 and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence
Ranger in their The Invention of Tradition from the same year not only
pointed out the importance of this part of culture but also its being largely
a construction. Cultural memory then became a favourite field of research
in Germany, beginning with some groundbreaking works such as the
critical anthology Kultur und Gedächtnis (1988), edited by Jan Assmann
and Tonio Hölscher, Mnemosyne: Formen und Funktionen der kulturellen
Erinnerung (1991), edited by Aleida Assmann and Dietrich Harth, and Jan
Assmann’s Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische
Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (1992). Further investigations such as
those undertaken on a large scale at my own university made evident,
however, that even regarding the same country at one and the same
historical moment it is more appropriate to speak of cultures of memory
than of a single homogeneous culture of memory. Some of the results of
the pertinent research have been published in the critical anthologies
Literatur, Erinnerung, Identität (2003), edited by Astrid Erll, Marion
14
Le Goff, Histoire et mémoire.
Boudieu, The Logic of Practice.
16
Bourdieu, “The Market of Symbolic Goods.”
17
Belsey, “Reading Cultural History”, 107
18
Grabes, “Culture – Semiotic System and Myth
19
Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice.
15
20
More Recent Changes in Literature, Art, and Theory
Gymnich, and Ansgar Nünning, Erinnerung, Gedächtnis, Wissen. Studien
zur kulturwissenschaftlichen Gedächtnisforschung (2005), edited by
Günter Oesterle, and Literature, Literary History, and Cultural Memory
which I myself brought out in 2005.
The strong historical interest that motivates such recent work is
definitely pre-modernist, even if not pre-modern in respect to late
eighteenth century modernization. The same can be said for the ethical
turn that began when Hillis Miller published his deconstructionist Ethics
of Reading (1987) and such humanist critics as Wayne C. Booth with The
Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (1988), David Parker with Ethics,
Theory and the Novel (1994) and Leona Toker with Commitment in
Reflection: Essays in Literature and Moral Philosophy, edited in 1994,
began doing what philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre had started with
his widely acclaimed study After Virtue (1981) and what Charles Taylor
with his Sources of the Self (1989), Richard Rorty with Contingency,
Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Martha Nussbaum with Love’s Knowledge
(1990) and Zygmunt Baumann with his Postmodern Ethics (1993)
continued. That in the nineteen-nineties the ethical turn had definitely also
taken place in the domain of literary criticism and theory can be derived
from the appearance of such critical anthologies as Ethics and Aesthetics:
The Moral Turn of Postmodernism (1996) or The Ethics of Literature
(1999) as well as Andrew Gibson’s Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel
(1999). Since then there have been various attempts to prove that even
postmodern metafiction has an ethical dimension, and as the contributions
to a conference in May 2006 at Giessen on “Ethics in Culture: The
Dissemination of Values through Literature and Other Media” showed,20
the more general discussion of the topic has by no means come to an end.
A further field not much explored during modernism, neglected in the
period of earlier postmodernism, and revived in the nineteen-nineties in
view of the threatening hegemony of the study of culture, is the theory of
literature. In surveying theoretical endeavours to distinguish ‘literature’ in
a narrower sense from other texts, one will find that some have focused on
textual features or markers and others on the professed or assumed relation
between text and the life-world. With regard to the latter, the most
persuasive recent plea for what has traditionally been called fictionality
has, in my view, been presented by Jacques Derrida. In an interview from
1989 that was published in 1992 in English translation under the title
“This Strange Institution Called Literature,” he argued that it is the
20
They will soon be published under the same title with de Gruyter in Berlin.
Postmodernism and After: Visions and Revisions
21
“suspended relation to meaning and reference” that gives to literature “in
principle the power to say everything, to break free of the rules, to displace
them, and thereby to institute, to invent and even suspect the traditional
difference between nature and institution, nature and conventional law,
nature and history.”21 Literary discourse thus opens up, inhabits and
circumscribes a free space within culture, a space for that “free play”
within the interaction between the fictive and the imaginary that Wolfgang
Iser has shown to be one of the specific effects of literary texts.22
In 1992 Pierre Bourdieu in Les Règles de l’art: genèse et structure du
champ littéraire had sought to delimit what he called “the literary field in
the field of power,” a field that is a “real challenge to all forms of
economism” because it “presents itself as an inverted economic world:
those who enter it have an interest in disinterestedness.”23 And Timothy J.
Reiss, being convinced that “literature alters its role, its action, its forms of
practice as the environment of which it is a part evolves,” in his study The
Meaning of Literature from the same year attempted to delineate the
genesis and further development of “what we have called ‘literature’”24
from the Renaissance to the late nineteenth century.
Subsequently, the increasing dominance of the cultural paradigm
seems to have called forth further appeals in favour of literature. In 1999
there appeared Peter Widdowson’s Literature in the New Critical Idiom
series, a work in which the author, though still using the term ‘literature’
in the title, replaces it with the label “the literary,” a “working term for the
kind of written discourse I believe has some irreplaceable uses in our
society.”25 As the distinguishing features of literary discourse he regards
“its own sense of being ‘of the literary’,”26 its “’making’ [...] ‘poetic
realities’,”27 and – quoting Althusser – its capacity to achieve “a retreat,
an internal distancing”28 from the ideology within which it is held.
To demonstrate the value of what he considers as an endangered
species, J. Hillis Miller in 2002 published his On Literature. He holds that,
owing to “the creation or discovery of a new, supplementary world, a
metaworld, a hyper-reality,” “all literary works can be usefully thought of
21
Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature” 48.
Iser, “Interplay Between the Fictive and the Imaginary.”
23
Quoted from the English translation The Rules of Art, 215-16.
24
Reiss, The Meaning of Literature, 2-3.
25
Widdowson, Literature, 92.
26
Ibid., 96.
27
Ibid., 100.
28
Althusser, “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre” 204, quoted by
Widdowson, Literature, 118.
22
22
More Recent Changes in Literature, Art, and Theory
as a species of magic”29 – a species by which the beliefs and behaviour of
readers can be changed.
Not too far away from this view is Derek Attridge’s definition of “the
literary” as an event in The Singularity of Literature, which appeared in
2004. What he considers as the distinstive feature of literary texts is a
“reformulation of norms,” yet it “is only when the event of this
reformulation is experienced by the reader [...] as an event, an event which
opens up new possibilities of meaning and feeling (understood as verbs),
or, more accurately, the event of such opening, that we can speak of the
literary.”30
In contrast to such focussing on the individual impact of literary texts,
Catherine Belsey in her essay on “The Possibility of Literary History”
highlights their specific cultural function:
literature confronts the outer edges of language, and thereby the limits of
the culture inscribed in language. It thus marks the finitude of all culture,
and the relativity of all cultures, and in the process the finitude and
relativity of the subject that is their effect, as well as pointing to a relation
of difference between language and the real that resides beyond the
purview of culture.31
What I have not found in any of these more recent attempts to
differentiate literature from other discourses is the very important fact that
what we encounter in literature – in contrast to philosophy and other kinds
of theoretical discourse – is overwhelmingly particular and even wholly
individual: specific places, moments in time, characters with personal
names, idiosyncratic ways of speaking and acting, thinking and feeling.
Literary discourse renders possible and motivates an imaginary experience
of the particular in its outer physicality or inner concreteness rather than
offering general notions to the reasoning mind. The consequence of this
presentation of the particular is a confinement of the claim to validity of its
statements, a validational modesty which theoretical discourse, due to the
general nature of conceptual language, hardly ever possesses. And it is an
even greater degree of validational modesty that differentiates literature
from all narratives with a genuine truth claim, especially the otherwise
similar narratives of historical discourse or the more empirical kind of
sociological and psychological discourse. In this respect, literature is ’only
literature’, but as the “suspension of reference” renders the affirmative or
29
Miller, On Literature, 20-21.
Attridge, The Singularity of Literature, 59.
31
Belsey, “The Possibility of Literary History,” 47.
30
Postmodernism and After: Visions and Revisions
23
negating statements in literary texts merely quasi-statements from the
point of view of epistemology, literature is also far less bound by the
cogency of religious, moral, juridical and other collective norms. And this
is, of course, an important precondition for the ability of literature to make
us aware of the limits of the culture of its origin and indirectly of the
boundaries of every culture. One could also say that the cultural value of
literature resides in the function of the seemingly functionless.
Instead of operating with the dichotomy “Culture or Literature,” to me
it makes much more sense to investigate and historically trace the
interaction between the wider and the narrower sphere.32 As I see it, the
study of the one cannot adequately be pursued without taking due
cognizance of the other. We cannot rightfully claim for a literary work any
excellence deriving from its transcendence of the limits of culture within it
was produced without having obtained a wider knowledge of that culture
through the study of a variety of other discourses. Nor can we fully
understand the way in which a culture, despite the many control
mechanisms operating to keep it stable, may yet be changed from within
without giving due attention to its literature.
Yet in spite of this important function literature possesses for the
development of culture I think that Hillis Miller is right when he says that
the current trend is towards the study of culture and away from the study
of literature.33 This has not least to do with the fact that literature has been
studied in detail for quite a while and that it takes some ingenuity to come
up with something really attractive and novel, while it looks as if in the
field of the study of culture there are plenty of new research opportunities
that do not demand so much intellectual effort. And precisely because of
this situation I would implore you to take good care of literature. There
are, after all, also other disciplines such as sociology and history in which
culture is studied, while literature in the academy is entirely at our mercy:
it is our spirit, resolve, solidarity and bare-knuckled criticism and analysis
(not to forget, however, the persistent energy of the writers themselves and
the manipulative genius of the marketplace) that help keep its singular
quality and function in collective memory.
While the topic of the relationship between culture and literature can
be considered as being also pre-modern if one brackets the differences in
vocabulary, what has to be admitted is that there are also quite important
fields of more recent theory that are definitely not pre-modern. What I am
referring to are especially the theory of gender and the theoretical
32
33
Cf. Grabes, “Literary History and Cultural History: Relations and Difference.”
Cf. Miller, On Literature, 10.
24
More Recent Changes in Literature, Art, and Theory
reflection implied in such fast-growing research areas as Translation
Studies, Media Studies and Intermediality. Yet though one is easily drawn
into one of these areas, they do not fall into the frame of my present topic.
It will have been noticed, I assume, that as in the domains of art and
literature, there is to be found in our time no hegemony of a particular
school, method or aspect of attention in the domain of theory. We have
largely given up what Lyotard has called grands récits,34 overarching
stories that comprise all and everything. Instead, one operates with
theories of a medium level of abstraction which are closer to the area of
the phenomena to be explained and therefore probably more helpful. There
is, however, one general assumption to be found in almost all current
theories of culture or domains of culture, and that is that culture is a
construct. For epistemological reasons I would even go one step further
and say that we can consider this as a good operative principle and leave
open the question whether this is ‘really’ so. As research practice shows,
this assumption encourages the search not only for the specificity of a
particular culture but also for the political and historical reasons why it is
as it is.
This means that our basic stance in the domain of theory has remained
postmodern – or even become more sceptical and pragmatist than the
strong belief in poststructuralist ideas to be found in the earlier phase of
postmodernism really implied. As in the domains of art and literature, this
allows also in the domain of theory for a multitude of competing views
and models, and if our age is therefore perhaps plagued by a “Neue
Unübersichtlichkeit”35, a lack of clear orientation, as a healing grace it is
certainly not boring and also less compulsive than earlier ages – at least in
the West. Let us try to make use of the chances offered by this situation
and defend it if and wherever necessary.
Works Cited
Secondary Sources
Althusser, Louis. “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre.” In Lenin
and Philosophy and Other Essays. Transl. Ben Brewster. London: New
Left Books, 1971.
34
Cf. Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne, section 10.
Under this title Jürgen Habermas in 1985 published his attack on the postmodern
abandonment of the “project of modernity.”
35