Book•
The Politics of Postmodernism
01 Jan 1989-
TL;DR: In this article, the postmodernist representation is de-naturalized the natural, Photographic discourse, Telling Stories: fiction and history, Re-presenting the past: 'total history' de-totalized, Knowing the past in the present, The archive as text.
Abstract: General editor's preface. Acknowledgements. 1. Representing the postmodern: What is postmodernism? Representation and its politics, Whose postmodernism? Postmodernity, postmodernism, and modernism. 2. Postmodernist representation: De-naturalizing the natural, Photographic discourse, Telling Stories: fiction and history. 3. Re-presenting the past: 'Total history' de-totalized, Knowing the past in the present, The archive as text. 4. The politics of parody: Parodic postmodern representation, Double-coded politics, Postmodern film? 5. Text/image border tensions: The paradoxes of photography, The ideological arena of photo-graphy, The politics of address 6. Postmodernism and feminisms: Politicizing desire, Feminist postmodernist parody, The private and the public. Concluding note: some directed reading. Bibliography. Index.
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TL;DR: In this paper, the narrator, Tom, a CUNY creative writing lecturer now in his forties, recounts his performance in a school play called Impromptu, and before he even delivers his first line, “Who are you? What do you want of me?”, a fellow pupil in the audience starts to jeer: “Shut up, faggot.”
Abstract: In John Weir’s 2006 novel, What I Did Wrong, the narrator, Tom, a CUNY creative writing lecturer now in his forties, recounts his performance in a school play called Impromptu. Before he even delivers his first line—“Who are you? What do you want of me?”—a fellow pupil in the audience starts to jeer: “Shut up, faggot.”1 A chorus of invective follows, a cacophony of “queer bait” and “gay boy.” It is clearly a traumatic memory—he returns to it several times—but it is also a dramatized moment of selfawareness in which the narrator realizes that his queer subjectivity will invariably oscillate between stage fright and the safety of theatrical distance. Though the line is addressed to another character on stage, it comes across both as a fourth-wall-breaking provocation to the audience—an invitation for the other boys to do their worst—and a self-questioning, transposed into the second person; or, as Tom glosses it, “a real moment [. . .] taking place in somebody’s actual life in the guise of a performance about people searching for real moments in their actual lives” (96). It is an episode he will still be analyzing years later:
4 citations
TL;DR: This paper proposed a non-rationalist humanism which is able to account for social location and difference while avoiding some of the problems of postructuralist theory, and used Maurice Merleau-ponty's theory of situated subjectivity.
Abstract: Humanism has been all too readily dismissed by feminists for producing gendered theories and falsely essentializing women.The postructuralists have rightly drawn our attention to the inadequacies of humanist theories of subjectivity. Yet their fragmentary discursive subjects and their attendant celebration of the irrational provide only a limited account of subjectivity and are beleaguered by the issue of agency, and as such are problematic for a feminist political project. I propose to utilize Maurice Merleau-ponty's theory of situated subjectivity, a non-rationalist humanism which is able to account for social location and difference while avoiding some of the problems of postructuralist theory.
4 citations
DOI•
01 Jan 2010
TL;DR: Wang et al. as mentioned in this paper discuss the postmodernity of Chinese society and postmodernism in the local Academia and the local film industry, and present a theoretical framework and social background.
Abstract: I Acknowledgements II List of Figures IX Part I Postmodernism and Chinese Cinema Chapter One Introduction – Nostalgia and Its Postmodernity 1 Chapter Two Theoretical Framework and Social Background 22 2.1. Significance and Methodology 2.2. The Postmodern, Theory and Society 2.2.1. Philosophical Debates 2.2.2. Social-cultural Debates 2.2.3. Aesthetic Debates 2.3. Background 2.3.1. The Social Situation of China 2.3.2. The Postmodernity of Chinese Society 2.3.3. Postmodernism in the Local Academia 2.3.4. Feasibility Study on Postmodern Issues in China 2.3.5. The Local Film Industry
4 citations
TL;DR: The problem of imagining narrative fiction within the context of post-modern thought is a difficult task indeed as mentioned in this paper, and it is difficult to find the answer to the question "What is fiction, if not the collaboration of memory with imagination?" The question has been the mainstay of postmodernism's novelistic experiments and if those experiments have not necessarily proffered answers to their own inquiries, the energy of their failures has offered its own compensatory rewards.
Abstract: \"uch t? the chagrin of its detractors, the legacies of modernism continue to exert their powers in our period of the prolonged \"posts-.\" The butden of those legacies is perhaps felt nowhere more strongly than in the genre of the novel. For if the distinguishing features ofwhat is known as \"high modernism\" or \"utopian modernism\" are its preoccupation with the theme of temporality and its faith in the restorative powers of human memory, then the problem of imagining narrative fiction within the context of postmodern thought is a difficult task indeed.1 What is narrative, if not a representation of time? What is fiction, if not the collaboration of memory with imagination? Such questions have been the mainstay of postmodernism's novelistic experiments and if those experiments have not necessarily proffered answers to their own inquiries, the energy of their failures has offered its own compensatory rewards. Through the voices of Proust, Bergson and Freud, modernism told us that memory was recuperative in the double sense of that word: the past could be recovered and its recovery could cure its subject.2 The past could free us, could give meaning to our experiences in the world, if only we could get to it. Hence, all three of those \"utopian\" writers dedicated their lives to developing theories of memory and its recollection. Remembrance of Things Past, Matter and Memory and The Psychopathol-
4 citations