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: Waterland as discussed by the authors is one of the most important British novels of the last decade of the 20th century, and has been widely recognized as a seminal work in post-modernism.
Abstract: early 1983, England's William Heinemann and America's Poseidon Press, a hardback division of Simon and Schuster, introduced their readers to Graham Swift's Waterland, a novel reviewed so positively and read so enthusiastically that it quickly began to appear on reading lists, to become central to discussions of postmodernism, and to be recognized, along with D. M. Thomas's The White Hotel (1981) and Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), as one of the most important British novels of its decade.1 General discussions of contemporary fiction such as Allan Massie's The Novel Today and Malcolm Bradbury's The Modern British Novel have singled it out for considerable praise. Massie called it "a masterly and intricate narrative" that is "profoundly and unmistakably English" and concluded that Swift "is undoubtedly one of the writers . . . [who] it may be asserted with real confidence . . . will play a large part in the future of the English novel."2 Bradbury, discerning that Swift always writes about "an aftermath," praised Waterland's "fascination with fiction as history, history as fiction, that has been important in the novel certainly since the Sixties."3 Taking the novel as a crucial example of the new historiographic metafiction, Linda Hutcheon viewed its protagonist as "in some ways an allegorical representative of the postmodern historian who might well have read, not just [R. G.] Collingwood, with his view of the historian as storyteller and detective, but also Hayden White, Dominick LaCapra, Raymond Williams, Michel Foucault, and Jean-Francois Lyotard."4 Since 1992, however, discussions, interpretations, and generalizations about this novel's literary worth and its significance to literary movements have often
TL;DR: Toth as discussed by the authors argued that the impossibility of social justice, authentic experience, and decision-making should not prevent us from sincerely striving for such things, and that Beloved's narrative also moves beyond the postmodern imperative to deny the possibility of the specter's materiality.
Abstract: Beloved’s narrative tells us, according to Toth, that the impossibility of social justice, authentic experience, and decision-making should not prevent us from sincerely striving for such things. The narrative also moves, Toth adds, beyond the postmodern imperative to deny the possibility of the specter’s materiality; it “passes on” the specter of postmodernism.
Dissertation•
10 Dec 2019
TL;DR: The authors argue that post-modernism is an enduring cultural dominant that informs each of these individuals' processes of adaptation, and reveal a correlation between postmodernism and contemporary motivations for, and approaches to, classical adaptation.
Abstract: This thesis advocates for the utility of postmodernism as a critical lens when examining theatrical adaptations of Greek tragedies produced during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It has been prompted by a rise in the number of contemporary adaptations of Greek tragedies on Western stages and is comprised of three case studies, all of which premiered between 1990 - 2015. The featured works include select examples from New York based playwright Charles L. Mee, Parisian director Ariane Mnouchkine and her company Theâtre du Soleil, and performances and events at the Almeida Theatre, London, as curated by Artistic Director Rupert Goold. Referring to a term coined by Fredric Jameson, this thesis suggests that postmodernism is an enduring ‘cultural dominant’ that informs each of these individuals’ processes of adaptation. Via a consideration of wider postmodern cultural issues such as the destabilisation of notions of identity, an emerging nostalgic or revivalist culture, a weakening historicity and changing forms of knowledge and communication, this thesis reveals a correlation between postmodernism and contemporary motivations for, and approaches to, classical adaptation.