Post

I had to read an article (well really a chapter from her book) by Linda Hutcheon called Theorizing the Postmodern: Toward a Poetics and then write a one page response/summary to the article to present in class tomorrow. I thought I would just post my paper here;

Post-modernism:
-“A contradictory phenomenon, one the uses and abuses, installs and then subverts, the very concepts it challenges.” (3) We can see from the name alone that it is not something that seeks to break completely from the past but will incorporate and modify the ideas that proceeded.
-“Does not really describe an international cultural phenomenon, for it is primarily European and American (North and South)” (4)
Obviously this class deals with post-modern texts and authors from areas outside this generalization, but I believe that the non-European and non-American authors we have read all emigrated to a European or American country. For example Rushdie and Nabokov.
-“’the presence of the past’ is not a nostalgic return; it is a critical revisiting, an ironic dialogue with the past” (4)This idea can be seen in what Hutcheon calls “historiographic metafiction” There is no longing for an idealized time gone-by in these texts (at least the ones I’ve read, but I imagine this is the case for all of them) like in Elliot’s The Wasteland that Hutcheon calls, “a wishful call to continuity beneath the fragmented echoing” (11). These novels “work within conventions in order to subvert them” (5) For example, The French Lieutenants Woman reads like a 19th century Victorian novel but within that structure Fowles questions and critics the Victorian class structure and the role of women at that time (and our time?) Post-modernists use historiographic-metafiction not just to shed light on a time that perhaps was idealized (ex. The Victorian time) by showing that many hypocrisies and social injustices existed in that time, but also to compare it to our time to show how many things that we would look down at when studying that time period (ex. The treatment of women in the Victorian time) still exist today. (see example on page 19 also page 20)
-“the increasing uniformization of mass culture is one of the totalizing forces that post-modernism exists to challenge. Challenge, but not deny. But it does seek to assert difference, not homogeneous identity.” (6) Although globalization and the swelling of mass culture would indicate a growing homogeny, it in fact leads to a fragmentation that allows for questioning of the previously held meta-narratives. (see example on page 12)
-“no narrative can be a natural “master” narrative: there are no natural hierarchies; there are only those we construct. It is this kind of self-implicating questioning that should allow postmodernist theorizing to challenge narratives that do presume to “master” status, without necessarily assuming that status for itself” (13). Art>life but art and life (or any other meta-narratives) are both human constructs and therefore one cannot assume power over another. “History is not made obsolete; it is however, being rethought-as a human construct” (16)
--Post-modernism, according to Hutcheon, essentially works like an undercover detective or spy, it works from the inside to create change on the outside.