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: The authors explored my experience of undertaking a PhD in Creative Writing using as a starting point my own family history, with its inevitable gaps and unreliable memories, and outlined my reasons for adopting a hybrid structure that includes both fiction and nonfiction and situates the book that I subsequently published in the context of recent writing about the lives of so-called ordinary people by historians, biographers and autobiographers.
Abstract: ABSTRACT This article explores my experience of undertaking a PhD in Creative Writing using as a starting point my own family history, with its inevitable gaps and unreliable memories. It outlines my reasons for adopting a hybrid structure that includes both fiction and nonfiction and situates the book that I subsequently published in the context of recent writing about the lives of so-called ordinary people by historians, biographers and autobiographers. I reflect on the feedback that I received on my work-in-progress from both historians and the writing community and suggest that their apparently contradictory recommendations to be either more emotional or more factual had the same underlying aim, to transform my writing into a recognisable genre that was not ‘just’ family history. The article describes briefly how self-publishing has democratised the publishing process and allowed me to remain true to my vision for my book. The recognition I have received as a writer about history leads me to hope that, similarly, collaboration between family historians and the academy can democratise the ways in which historical knowledge is acquired and disseminated.
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors discuss the cultural paradigm of metamodernism as conceived by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker (2010), which is perceived as oscillating between the modern and the postmodern, whereby the tools of postmodernism (such as irony, sarcasm, parataxis, deconstruction, scepticism and nihilism) are employed to counter modernist naivety, aspiration and enthusiasm.
Abstract: Abstract The paper addresses the cultural paradigm of metamodernism as conceived by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker (2010). Ontologically, metamodernism is perceived as oscillating between the modern and the postmodern, whereby the tools of postmodernism (such as irony, sarcasm, parataxis, deconstruction, scepticism and nihilism) are employed to counter (but not obliterate) modernist naivety, aspiration and enthusiasm. This oscillation results in what the above authors have termed “informed naivety,” a phrase denoting a state of wilful pragmatic idealism that allows for the imagining of impossible possibilities. Vermeulen and van den Akker’s two key observations about the shift from postmodernism to metamodernism in contemporary art are discussed in this paper, namely the (re)appearance of sensibilities corresponding to those of Romanticism and the (re)emergence of utopian desires, in an attempt at a metamodernist analysis of the Netflix adaptation of the Bridgerton book series, aimed primarily at elucidating its popularity as one of the most watched programmes of the global Covid-19 pandemic.
01 Jan 2014
TL;DR: Wong Kar-wai is a premier avant-garde auteur of Hong Kong cinema as discussed by the authors and is considered as a leading figure for his post-modernist style of visually unique and emotional resonant film works.
Abstract: Wong Kar-wai is a premier avant-garde auteur of Hong Kong cinema. In the existing research, postmodernism is considered as a predominant approach to shed light on Wong’s aesthetics, poetics and politics. Being the iconoclastic ‘poet of time,’ Wong Kar-wai is extolled as a leading figure for his postmodernist style of visually unique and emotional resonant film works. Recurring motifs, such as alienation and rejection, time and memory, pursuit and loss, are regarded as representations of cultural and political anxieties of Hong Kong people in the context of 1980s and 1990s. Wong’s characteristic exoticism and cosmopolitism in his films also distinguishes him from other Chinese-language directors. However, when we expand the scope of the postmodern terrain, we find modernism and its attendant aesthetics are just as relevant and important as postmodernism to the understanding of Wong’s oeuvre. This thesis evokes a comparative perspective of modernism proposed by Eugene Lunn as an aesthetic approach, with an illustrative analysis by using David Bordwell’s and Kristin Thompson’s work on non-Hollywood cinema. This approach emphasizes four major directions of the social and cultural aspects influenced by modernism in art. Using this approach requires researchers to find cinematic representations of modernism in terms of aesthetic self-consciousness, juxtaposition of time, ambiguity and dehumanization within the film. This research takes Wong Kar-wai’sAshes of Time Redux (2008) as a case study to explore the alternative interpretations beyond postmodernism. The investigation of Wong’s uses of modernist approach involves the analysis of his experiments of conventional film techniques and strategic employment of the mise-en-scene, camera
01 Dec 2015
TL;DR: In this paper, a sociological approach and adopting a content analysis method, the authors concluded that the problems facing the country have their springboard in bad governance and corruption, even as they established that Adichie's Americanah succinctly links poor educational system, joblessness, economic stagnation, bad governance, and corruption in Nigeria to migration, even though migration has not completely exonerated Nigerians from the nation's woes.
Abstract: The discourse of the wobbly state of the Nigerian nation is aptly captured in literary works. Previous studies on literary texts about the Nigerian state have largely identified bad leadership and the roles played by the masses in aggravating the nation’s problems. However, not much attention, in the magnitude intended in this paper, has been paid to Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah using discursive strategies of postmodernism in exploring the myriads of challenges facing the Nigerian state. This paper, therefore, attempts an examination of Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah, highlighting features of Postmodernism the novel embodies, even as it explores numerous problems plaguing the nation and how they have forced many Nigerians to embrace migration as an escape route. Using the sociological approach and adopting a content analysis method, the paper ascertains that the problems facing the country have their springboard in bad governance and corruption, even as it establishes that Adichie’s Americanah succinctly links poor educational system, joblessness, economic stagnation, bad governance and corruption, among others, in Nigeria to migration. It, nevertheless, highlights how migration has not completely exonerated Nigerians from the nation’s woes. It concludes that although Adichie fails to arrive at any sort of coherent theory of salvation for the postcolonial impasse in the country, the author demonstrates that factors causing underdevelopment and stagnancy are still part of the nation’s historical trajectory and that migration is not panacea for the country’s socio-political and economic quagmire.