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 article, the attributive functions of noun phrases and subordinating clauses are investigated in Turkish in the context of dependency model (dependency tree) developed by Tesniere's Dependency Grammar Theory.
Abstract: In the general system of the natural tongues, attribution, which undertakes the function of cluster restriction and cluster equipment, can be categorized in two main groups, namely, noun phrases and subordinate clauses. The process of cluster restriction is realized by way of the reduction of the number of elements in the cluster, to which a concept has been attributed, based on a certain characteristic. In the function of cluster equipment, the dimensions of a given concept remain unchanged. However, this concept can be enriched through a number additional attribution to be equipped. Noun phrases are determinative phrases, which report no judgement and which are constructed from more than one word aggregated around a head noun. In the general sequence of Turkish language, the simplest attributive phrase is the adjective phrase made up of adjective and noun. An adjective ascribes some property, quality or status to the entity denoted by a noun. When adjectives attribute nouns, they become attributive adjectives, and when they attribute the action they become adverbs of manner. Relative clauses with adjectival function are complicated structures which attribute noun phrases, and they are generally constructed by taking participle suffixes like -(y)An, DIK (-DIgI), mIs, or -(y)AcAK (-EcEgI). Relative clauses precede the noun phrase they modify, in the same way that adjectives precede the noun they modify. In this study an argument has been made about how the attributive functions of noun phrases and subordinating clauses are realized, and the structural characteristics of attribution in Turkish in the context of dependency model (dependency tree) developed by Tesniere’s Dependency Grammar Theory have been investigated.
6 citations
DOI•
01 Jan 2009
TL;DR: For instance, silence has a vital role in the literary portrayal of historical trauma as mentioned in this paper, and the prevalence of silence in contemporary fiction related to the Holocaust shows how this event tested and continues to test literary exploration.
Abstract: Following World War II the novel faced a crisis in its mode of address. How could the human and humane function of language and artistic representation be lent to the depiction of historical terror or trauma? Who has the right to speak on behalf of – or to assume the voice of – victims of such real atrocity? And to what extent can a writer attend to another’s pain without aestheticising extreme vulnerability, or losing the reader to indifference or repulsion? The difficulties confronted by the writer of fictional works when addressing such issues as war, rape, domestic abuse, colonisation, slavery, even genocide are not rooted in an inadequacy of syntax; rather they are borne out of the disjunction between the idealistic assumptions that linked language to a sense of humanity, intelligence and the pursuit of goals beneficial to society as a whole, and the extremity of recent acts of human atrocity as conducted not by the savage Other but by modern societies with which the reader would otherwise identify. Since the mid-twentieth century a number of writers have responded to these challenges by forgoing the traditional dialogic form of the novel and electing characters that cannot or will not speak in order to convey, through their speechlessness and – at times – their damaged physicality, the extent of the violence and oppression to which they have been subjected, and the difficulty of assimilating such violence into the stories by which communities, indeed whole nations, define themselves. The unexpectedly large cast of mute characters suggests that silence has a vital role in the literary portrayal of historical trauma. The prevalence of silence in contemporary fiction related to the Holocaust, for example, shows how this group of writers recognises the extent to which this event tested and continues to test literary exploration. Writers the world over continue to refuse to ignore these subjects – indeed, the broken images and fragmented forms common to many of the novels studied in the following pages can be seen as an apt response to the chaos of war and human aggression – but, as is evident from the number of contemporary works of fiction incorporating a mute character, silence has become an accepted and effective tool for the portrayal of historical events of terror or trauma that continue to challenge the ethical boundaries of the imagination.
6 citations
TL;DR: Mantissa as discussed by the authors is one of the earliest works to deal with post-gendering of the female body, where the female protagonist Erato adopts the role as nubile nymph or heavenly goddess for that of a man-hating cyberpunk bent on revenge.
Abstract: Reading Mantissa is a bit like peeking into someone else's virtual reality, and in this instance, that reality is conjured up by the relatively low-tech imagination of a fictional male author, Miles Green. Rather than experience such extraterrestrial entanglements as those selected by the Arnold Schwarzenegger character in Total Recall, Miles prefers to tango with the many personae adopted by Erato, his creative muse. However, when Erato trades her role as nubile nymph or heavenly goddess for that of a man-hating cyberpunk bent on revenge, Miles ceases to find her amusing. In general, the novel's representation and conflation of feminism and postmodernist mutability is highly suspect, and this is particularly apparent in its distorted portrayal of an ostensibly postmodernist "de-gendering," or masculine appropriation of the specifically maternal body. Nevertheless, the empowering ease with which its phantasmagoric female protagonist dons and doffs her various personae does point to some of the potential of this uneasy partnership. It might suggest, for instance, that by adopting such a postmodern provisionality of identity, some of the attributes of a cyborg and a goddess need be neither antithetical, nor mutually exclusive.A cyborg is described by Donna Haraway as "a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction" (1990, 191), and "a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self" (205). This is in many respects a description that is strikingly applicable to the muse-figure in Mantissa, and yet, contrary to the traditional image of muse as nurturing of and responsive to the creative demands of the male artist, the cyborg is envisaged by Haraway as "the self feminists must code" (205). The cyborg's value to feminists resides in its blurring of the boundaries between the "natural" and technological or cultural. In doing so, it has great potential as a vehicle for challenging existing "dualisms," described by Haraway as "persistent in Western traditions," and as having been "systemic to the logics and practices of domination of . . . all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self" (219). This disruptive power of the cyborg, like that of the polyvalent muse in Mantissa, is very much the product of the provisionality and indeterminacy of its embodiment.Feminism is only one of a number of discursive modes that is defined in relation to postmodernism within the largely gender-specific binary structure of Mantissa. Another is that of the Cartesian concept of subjectivity which, in Mantissa, is aligned with realism, liberal humanism, and the masculinist mind of Miles Green, and set in opposition to postmodernism, poststructuralism, and the feminine body of Erato. Interestingly, just as Erato refuses to be contained by strictly Cartesian division of mind and body, or indeed by the traditional author/muse dichotomy, Haraway's cyborg does not make it clear "who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine . . . [or] what is mind and what is body in machines that resolve into coding practices" (1990, 219). The introductory epigraph to Mantissa comprises a quotation from Descartes: "I knew that I was a being whose whole essence or nature is confined to thinking, and which has no need of a place, nor depends on any material thing, in order to exist" (Fowles 1982, 5). The mind within which the action of Mantissa takes place is that of its male protagonist and ostensible author Miles Green, who imagines himself lying in a hospital bed awaiting treatment for his sudden bout of amnesia. Within the confines of this implicitly Cartesian intellectual oeuvre, Miles Green and Erato engage in a highly energized sexual and textual power struggle. Despite the thus explicitly "embodied" nature of the discourses with which they wrestle, each is seen to eschew his or her own body, preferring the freedoms of "pure thought" and the possibilities of provisionality and endless self-recreation. …
6 citations
27 Jul 2017
TL;DR: In this article, an analysis of two feminist works incorporating "found" aprons of sorts, one by Kim Siebert and the other by Penny Siopis, is revealed that parody proved a particularly useful strategy for enabling these commentaries and critiques.
Abstract: Although feminism tended to be dismissed by liberation movements as a Western import with limited relevance to those oppressed by the apartheid state, a number of white women artists in South Africa began to find in it a framework for exploring links between sexism and racism, and for expressing their opposition to both. It is suggested in this article that an important factor for this developing interest was the growing impact of a postmodernist critique of representation and the recognition of its compatibility with feminism.Through an analysis of two feminist works incorporating “found” aprons of sorts, one by Kim Siebert and the other by Penny Siopis, it is revealed that parody proved a particularly useful strategy for enabling these commentaries and critiques. Siebert creates an analogy between Op Art paintings and the beadwork apron she includes in Reinforced Apron (1982–1984), a conjunction that suggests how the relative value accorded different categories of representation is informed by g...
6 citations