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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Dissertation•
10 May 2012
TL;DR: In this article, Gallant: l'identita di una scrittrice 211 2. Identificare i linguaggi: modello teorico essenziale e casi studio esemplificativi 218 3. Parole silenziose e oggetti parlanti nei ‘romanzi’ di Mavis Gallant 225 Conclusioni 230 Selected Bibliography 231 1.4 Selected Works of Non-Fiction 233 1.5 Manuscript Collection 234 2.
Abstract: 209 1. Mavis Gallant: l’identita di una scrittrice 211 2. Identificare i linguaggi: modello teorico essenziale e casi studio esemplificativi 218 3. Parole silenziose e oggetti parlanti nei ‘romanzi’ di Mavis Gallant 225 Conclusioni 230 Selected Bibliography 231 1. Works by Mavis Gallant 231 1.1 Collections of Stories 231 1.2 Novels 233 1.3 Theatre 233 1.4 Selected Works of Non-Fiction 233 1.5 Manuscript Collection 234 2. Works on Mavis Gallant 235 3. Other Works 252
1 citations
TL;DR: Rain Clouds over Wushan (Wushan Yunyu 巫山云雨, also known as In Expectation ) was a key film in the Chinese avant-garde movement of the 1990s as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Rain Clouds over Wushan (Wushan Yunyu 巫山云雨, also known as In Expectation ) was a key film in the Chinese avant-garde movement of the 1990s. This paper contends that the film’s use of symbolism, naturalism, and super-realism to indicate the omnipotence of desire in contemporary China, which actually works through the seduction of the logic of commodity exchange at the historical moment of early market economy in post-socialist China. A postmodern film with a modernist and realist facade, Rain Clouds demonstrates that postmodern culture in China is premised upon a post-socialist political-economic regime and its sensory machine.
1 citations
01 Jan 2016
TL;DR: The authors argue that the postmodernist critique of modernism, far from being alien or outside the disciplines which make up American Studies, go to the heart of their disputes about whether a whole culture can be the object of their studies.
Abstract: The ground of intellectual argument shifts continually, in ways which are often only fully comprehended much later. The contemporary heated debate around 'postmodernism' is in some ways a puzzling matter - why these terms, why now? Why have aesthetic movements been made to bear the burden of metaphor for all of global society? The terms are only as useful as the things we can do with them. For many they provide a way of understanding what they like or don't like about the present, and a way of gaining a critical distance from the massive paradigms of modernism. In some ways the division over postmodernism represents a simplifying of debate - the central tenets of what is usually called 'postmodernism' are relatively uncomplicated. There has been an unfortunate tendency for a deep divide to develop between those interested in the various forms of what is now generally called 'representation', and those who see themselves as interested in the real - actually existing inequalities and injustices. I see this division as unfortunate and limiting for both sides. There are still those who describe postmodernism as a position without a politics - as though such a thing were possible. The politics of postmodernism is a politics of the recognition of difference - difference in many directions. In an intellectual environment in which some of the major preoccupations have been hierarchising disputes (is class always more important than gender, or gender than class?) postmodernism has been a useful medicine, 'a specific cure' as R. W. Connell puts it, 'for certain kinds of intellectual arrogance'.1 But, as always, the medicine can itself cause other problems. There is a potential problem in the easy absorption of postmodernism as merely another endorsement of liberal pluralism. 'Difference seen as benign variation (diversity)', argues Chandra Mohanry, '... rather than as conflict, struggle, or the threat of disruption, bypasses power as well as history to suggest a harmonious empty pluralism.'2 I want to argue here that the issues raised by the postmodernist critique of modernism, far from being alien or outside the disciplines which make up American Studies, go to the heart of their disputes about whether a whole culture can be the object of their studies. I argue here that the debate about postmodernism has though been limited by its constraint within several sets of oppositions - oppositions which serve only to perpetuate existing modes of thought. In the limited space available here I examine two of the most important of these oppositions. Open/closed The openness associated with postmodernism has often been welcomed for its association with the breaking down of established hierarchies of knowledge and breaking open of ethnoand andro-centric class-specific canons and criteria of significance. Postmodernism appears to mean an opening of the gates of the castle. Often, though,the left has seen postmodern inclusi veness as a deceptive kind of liberation. The Melbourne left journal Arena recently coined the phrase 'the enchantment of openness' to describe what it felt to be the false attractions of the position. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, writing in American Quarterly early in 1990, registered some of these doubts in her argument that the new scholarship on race
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TL;DR: This paper used a deus ex machina to end a story by lowering a god onto the stage by machine to resolve a seemingly inextricable narrative bind through a miraculous intervention.
Abstract: The ethical and aesthetic challenges of narrating recent, real world catastrophes have been taken up by a number of major literary figures today, including Don DeLillo, Haruki Murakami, Jonathan Safran Foer, Art Spiegelman, and Dave Eggers. Disaster fascinates and confounds the imagination, and thus contemporary fiction grapples with the overwhelming sense of unreality experienced by witnesses to catastrophe. Literature seems to offer the chance to return to the moments before a natural or man-made disaster and, with retrospective understanding, re-experience an event that spectators witnessed uncomprehendingly when it occurred. In other words, literature gives us the chance to reread the historical disaster in light of its outcome. But what can we make of fiction such as Paul Auster's novel The Brooklyn Follies (2006) or Jhumpa Lahiri's short story collection Unaccustomed Earth (2008), which are not about a disaster, but which use a disaster as an instrumental narrative device? Unlike the authors mentioned above, neither Auster nor Lahiri offers a sustained literary treatment of a catastrophic event, its aftermath, or the representational challenges it poses for the fiction writer. Rather, they each employ a catastrophe to terminate their plots. Auster's novel, the picaresque tale of Nathan Glass, a retired man re-embracing life after cancer, ends abruptly on the morning of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In the concluding story of Lahiri's collection, the potential marriage plot of characters Kaushik and Hema is aborted when Kaushik drowns in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami during his seaside vacation in Thailand. As their plots wind down, the logic of Auster's and Lahiri's fictional worlds self-destructs, seemingly without reason. In a sense, Auster and Lahiri employ disasters as deus ex machina to abruptly conclude, but not resolve, their plots. The deus ex machina, or "god from the machine," a device originally employed in Greek drama, resolves a seemingly inextricable narrative bind through a miraculous intervention: lowering a god onto the stage by machine. Auster's and Lahiri's catastrophes arrive like gods descending out of the clear blue sky. The concluding lines of The Brooklyn Follies, referencing the bright blue morning sky on September 11, 2001, invite readers to imagine the veering plane, whose hijackers conceived of themselves as instruments of god piloting the machine. Unaccustomed Earth is brought to a close by a stupendous tsunami wave, a natural disaster that some might call an "act of god." As in Greek tragedy, the spectacular disaster as deus ex machina in contemporary fiction abruptly punctures the logic of the plot, and invites disbelief. Aristotle's Poetics critiques the contrived, "irrational" (29) nature of the deus ex machina, and argues that narrative resolutions should develop organically from previous events: "the unravelling of the plot ... must arise out of the plot itself, it must not be brought about by the deus ex machina" (28). The author's recourse to the deus ex machina reveals his or her failure to achieve a logical and harmonious conclusion. Admittedly, Auster's and Lahiri's deployment of disaster do not constitute deus ex machina in the strictest sense because rather than solve a narrative problem, each disaster precipitates a total traumatic rupture. The uncanny invocation of the veering plane or the looming wave splits the narrative, situating everything preceding it as definitively "before." In Auster's and Lahiri's narratives, we do not know what comes "after" the disaster for the characters, and therefore narrative closure eludes us. What after-effects do such disastrous endings create? How does the surprising invocation of catastrophe in the concluding pages of a narrative impact our interpretation of the text as a whole? The unsettling and even frustrating conclusions of Auster's and Lahiri's fiction evoke the confusion and sense of unreality generated by mass disasters. …
1 citations