Cultural Identity and Postmodern Writing

272 Pages·2006·2.949 MB·English

by  Theo D’haen, Pieter Vermeulen

Cultural Identity
and Postmodern Writing
Postmodern Studies 39
Series
edited by
Theo D’haen
and
Hans Bertens
Cultural Identity
and Postmodern Writing
Edited by
Theo D’haen and Pieter Vermeulen
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006
Cover photo: Mirjam Truwant, photograph of 2005 installation ‘David
Lachapelle in Palermo’
Cover design: Pier Post
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN-10: 90-420-2118-7
ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2118-1
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2006
Printed in The Netherlands
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Cultural Identity and Postmodern Writing
Theo D’haen 1

Postmodern Poetry Meets Modernist Discourse: Contemporary
Poetry in the Low Countries
Jos Joosten and Thomas Vaessens 15

Cultural Identity and Postmodern Writing in the
Federal Republic of Germany, 1945-1989
Robert Haak 55

Cultural Identity and Postmodern Writing in Austrian Literature
Andrea Kunne 87

A Confluence of Narratives: Cultural Perspectives in
Postmodernist Scottish Fiction
Roel Daamen 119

Myth and Revolution in the Caribbean Postmodern
Patricia Krüs 149

Enchantment or Fright? Identity and Postmodern Writing in
Contemporary Puerto Rico
Kristian van Haesendonck 169

Dreams that Dreams Remain: Three Cuban Novels of the 90s
Nanne Timmer 185

A Race of Sleepless People Breaks into History
Adriana Churampi 207

Tampering with the Nation: America, Postmodernism,
Globalization - To the Beginning and Back Again
Markha G. Valenta 229
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Acknowledgements

The present volume results from a research program developed by the
Netherlands Graduate Research School for Literary Studies, OSL
(Onderzoekschool Literatuurwetenschap). It was financed in part by the
Dutch Research Organization NWO (Nederlands Wetenschappelijk
Onderzoek), in the form of three post-doc appointments at, respectively,
the Universities of Utrecht, in the person of Thomas Vaessens, Leiden,
for Markha G. Valenta, and the Free University of Amsterdam, with
Andrea Kunne. Matching funds, in the form of PhD research
appointments, were made available by the Free University of Amsterdam
for Roel Daamen, Leiden University for Adriana Churampi and Nanne
Timmer, and Utrecht University for Robert Haak. Two recent PhD
graduates from Leiden, working in adjacent fields of research, decided to
also make available their results: Patricia Krüs and Kristian van
Haesendonck.

The editors and authors of the present volume wish to gratefully
acknowledge the financial support of NWO, Leiden University, Utrecht
University, and the Free University of Amsterdam.
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Introduction: Cultural Identity and Postmodern Writing

Theo D’haen (Universities of Leuven and Leiden)

Postmodern Historiography

The terms “postmodern” and “postmodernism” date from before World
War II, and during the 40s and 50s they are used, covering various
contents, by such luminaries as the English historian Arnold Toynbee and
the American literary citic and historian Irving Howe (Bertens 1986). The
term only gains its present meaning as of 1970 approximately, first with
reference to American literature - primarily through the critical and literary-
historical work of Ihab Hassan and Leslie Fiedler (Bertens 1995), and
subsequently - and this primarily through the publications of Charles Jencks
(1977, 1986, 1992) - with regard to architecture. After that it spreads to the
other arts, and finally also to non-American literatures (Bertens and
Fokkema 1997). Though Fiedler initially tried to deal with postmodernism
from a broad social perspective, and though Hassan certainly did not shun
wider philosophical issues, in practice it was the more literary-technical part
of Hassan’s approach (1971, 1975, 1980a, 1980b, 1987), and after him that
of David Lodge (1977), that carried the day in the early phase of the study
of literary postmodernism. One of the clearest examples of such an
approach is Douwe Fokkema’s essay “The Semantic and Syntactic
Organization of Postmodernist Texts” from Approaching Postmodernism, a
volume Fokkema co-edited with Hans Bertens in 1986. Fokkema himself
sees his work as fitting the mould of what Brian McHale, in a 1982 Poetics
Today review of (then) recent work of Christine Brooke-Rose (1981),
Christopher Butler (1980), Ann Jefferson (1980), and Alan Wilde (1981),
had called “essays in descriptive poetics, a new kind of writing about what I
would call postmodern fiction” (McHale 1982: 212; qtd. Fokkema 1986:
81). On the basis of the work of the authors cited, as well as that of
Alazraki (1968, 1977), Hassan (1975, 1980b, 1987), Hoffmann (1982), Le
Vot (1976), Lodge (1977), Perloff (1981), Stevick (1981), and others,
Fokkema arrives at his own strictly descriptive poetics of
“postmodernism.” On the one hand, the “technicalization” of the debate
over postmodernism that shows from Fokkema’s essay went rather well
with the structuralist study of literature that had gained a firm foothold in
circles of general and comparative literature in the course of the 70s. On
the other hand, and just as importantly if not more so, it also offered a