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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Journal Article•
TL;DR: The metaphor of the glass coffin in Possession provides a key instance of the transformative reworking of beauty undertaken by much anglophone fiction since 1980 Many glass objects are blown using human breath, which often leaves tiny bubbles and swirling imprints In Victorian Glassworlds Isobel Armstrong describes these as "the congealed residues of somebody else's breath".
Abstract: Glass is a paradoxical substance Its transparency allows us to see all that lies behind it, but we cannot touch what we see On the molecular level glass is unusual in that when it solidifies, it retains the random molecular structure that it had when it was a liquid, instead of cooling into the crystalline structure of a conventional solid (Klein and Lloyd 9) This accounts for the fragility of glass, because it lacks the strength of a more systematic structure Hard and impermeable as it may seem, it can be shattered in an instant Its message is, "Look, but don't touch" In this paper 1 trace the metaphorical transposition of this concept onto human beauty and the ways in which A S Byatt, in her 1990 novel Possession, reimagines and partly redeems a glassy beauty who is fragile, cold, and untouchable The metaphor of the glass coffin in Possession provides a key instance of the transformative reworking of beauty undertaken by much anglophone fiction since 1980 Many glass objects are blown using human breath, which often leaves tiny bubbles and swirling imprints In Victorian Glassworlds Isobel Armstrong describes these as "the congealed residues of somebody else's breath" (4) Yet the image of a person behind glass does not convey humanity but rather a cold, preserved inhumanity Warm flesh can take on a ghostly, unnatural sheen when viewed through glass These properties have made glass the perfect material to represent a chaste, unattainable type of human beauty It appears with striking consistence as a fairy-tale motif, one of many fairy-tale elements rewritten by contemporary novels, such as Possession Even after centuries of Snow White and Cinderella tales, glass continues to exert influence as a fairy-tale and literary metaphor Whether it is a beautiful princess placed at the top of a glass mountain, the glass castles that proliferate in seventeenth-century French fairy tales as luxurious prisons, the glass slippers, distaffs, axes, and keys that represent sexual virtue and beauty, or perhaps most significantly the glass coffins that confound life and death in their exquisite display of a motionless body, glass remains a prominent image, and always a beautiful one It is particularly associated with transformation and the desire to transcend the ordinary This may be due to the transformative nature of glass itself: it is a material of sublimation, changing from commonplace sand and ash into delicate, crystalline objects As a metaphor, it can effect the same kind of transformation in people Fairy tales are full of transformations As Max LUthi writes, "The folktale [or fairy tale] transforms the world; it puts a spell on its elements and gives them a different form" (24) Cinderella, for instance, is transformed from a ragged slave into a lovely princess, wealthy and royal - all by becoming beautiful Significantly, Cinderella rises from the ashes to become this delicate beauty, exactly mirroring the production of her glass slipper, glass being made with ash When she flees at midnight, it is the glass slipper she loses that comes to represent her exquisite beauty, further transforming her into an object of pursuit Isobel Armstrong writes that glass is both "medium and barrier" (7), providing visual access to beauty but denying all other access Concentrating Cinderella's beauty in her glass slipper makes that beauty unattainable and sublimates it into the realm of art as a metaphor It is precisely this process of rendering human beauty abstract through the metaphor of glass that 1 examine in this paper In particular, 1 look at how the process has been negotiated or challenged by Byatt In Possession we see the beautiful princess figure, Maud, learning to renegotiate her position as an object of pursuit and achieving this by modifying the image and signification of her own beauty In more practical terms Maud does not try to destroy the untouchable remoteness of her glassy beauty but instead makes room inside it for color, movement, and human connection …
5 citations
01 Jan 2015
TL;DR: The authors argue that Inglourious Basterds's self-conscious Americanization of the Holocaust functions as a critique of American popular culture's tendency to adopt the Holocaust as a screen memory.
Abstract: This essay argues that Inglourious Basterds's self-conscious Americanization of the Holocaust functions as a critique of American popular culture's tendency to adopt the Holocaust as a screen memory. Rather than participating in this phenomenon, though, the film uses postmodern parody and what I term "historiographic meta- cinema" to lay bare the ways in which Hollywood representations of the Holocaust have shaped, and in some cases have distorted, public memory of the event. In its revision of history, I suggest, the film calls attention to the appropriation of Holocaust memory by American popular culture and consequently draws attention to America's reluctance to confront its own legacy of racial prejudice.
5 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a double-voiced version of the opening chapter of Graham Swift's Waterland, where the narrative voice announces a split allegiance to its many venerated humanist interests.
Abstract: Throughout the opening chapters of Graham Swift's Waterland, the narrative voice announces a split allegiance to its many venerated humanist interests. Indeed, the narrative is, in the Bakhtinian sense, pervasively double voiced.
5 citations
01 Jun 2011
TL;DR: The redefined encyclopedic novel can therefore be connected with more current forms of textuality, like hypertext and database, and answers to the continuously expanding boundaries of text, data, and knowledge.
Abstract: In 1976 Edward Mendelson introduced the terms encyclopedic narrative and encyclopedic novel in two articles on Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and offered a definition that seems to be primarily geared toward totality. The history of the encyclopedia, however, shows a transition from the idea that everything can be encompassed to an awareness that the encyclopedia necessarily needs to be an open form. During the Enlightenment, Denis Diderot posited that every delineation always implies an exclusion of information. Consequently, the Encyclopedists of the Enlightenment transformed the image of the encyclopedia as a hierarchic totalizing tree into the encyclopedia as a network (ideally a rhizome) that contains a constant tension between totality and open-endedness. With this tension as its core characteristic, the encyclopedic narrative becomes useful as a generic designation and answers to the continuously expanding boundaries of text, data, and knowledge. The redefined encyclopedic novel can therefore be connected with more current forms of textuality, like hypertext and database.
5 citations
TL;DR: In this article, Tariq Ali's metafictional strategies of rewriting the authoritative discourse of colonial history, including the rewriting of the document, the other, the subaltern, and the colonial language, are studied.
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to study some of Tariq Ali's metafictional strategies of rewriting the authoritative discourse of colonial history, including the rewriting of the document, the other, the subaltern, and the colonial language. The paper hypothesises that metafiction can function as an efficacious post-colonial act of rewriting and hence recuperating the history of the colonised. Post-colonial metafiction is hence defined as a narrative mode that accommodates the self-questioning ambiance of the postmodern and the politicised stance of the post-colonial. To demonstrate this I will focus on two particular historiographic narratives: Tariq Ali's Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (1992) and The Book of Saladin (1998).
5 citations