Postmodernism and after : visions and revisions

222 Pages·2008·1.16 MB·English

by  Regina Rudaityte & Vilniaus Universitetas. Filologijos Fakultetas

Postmodernism and After

Postmodernism and After:
Visions and Revisions

Edited by

Regina Rudaityt(cid:417)

Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Postmodernism and After: Visions and Revisions, Edited by Regina Rudaityt(cid:417)

This book first published 2008 by

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2008 by Regina Rudaityt(cid:417) and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-84718-410-3, ISBN (13): 9781847184108
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction.................................................................................................1
A Nostalgia for Tradition
Regina Rudaityt(cid:417)

From the Postmodern to the Pre-Modern: More Recent Changes
in Literature, Art, and Theory....................................................................11
Herbert Grabes

Performing Cultural Alterity: Non-Conformist American Drama
since the 1990s..........................................................................................28
Herbert Grabes

“What Am I Doing Here”: Contemporary British Travel Writing:
From Revival to Renewal..........................................................................42
Jan Borm

National Past / Personal Past: Recent Examples of the Historical Novel
by Umberto Eco and Antanas Sileika........................................................54
Milda Danyt(cid:417)

Towards a Polythetic Definition of the Bildungsroman:
The Example of Paul Auster’s Moon Palace.............................................65
Anniken Telnes Iversen

Subjectivity in A.L. Kennedy’s Writing....................................................79
Egl(cid:417) Ka(cid:254)kut(cid:417)

Literary Culture in the Age of the Internet................................................89
Jens Kirk

A Self-Reflexive Renewal of Realism: Aesthetic Developments
in 21st Century Novel...............................................................................103
Windy Counsell Petrie
vi Table of Contents

(De)Construction of the Postmodern in A.S. Byatt’s Novel Possession.111
Regina Rudaityt(cid:417)

The Old and the New: British Concepts of Writing the History
of English Literature after Postmodernism..............................................121
Margit Sichert

Intertextuality in Theory and Practice.....................................................136
Adolphe Haberer

Reading Postmodern Narrative: An Intertextual Dialogue Between
J. Banville’s The Book of Evidence and V. Nabokov’s Lolita.................156
J(cid:460)rat(cid:417) Butkut(cid:417)

The Ecocritical and the Postmodern: Re-Visions in “Johnny Panic
and the Bible of Dreams” by Sylvia Plath and “The Quagmire Woman”
by Jolita Skablauskait(cid:417)............................................................................169
Irena Ragaišien(cid:417)

Comparing Mythologies: The Postmodern Voices of Margaret
Atwood’s The Penelopiad.......................................................................182
R(cid:460)ta Šlapkauskait(cid:417)

Transtextual Bridge Between the Postmodern and the Modern:
The Theme of the “Otherness” in Monique Truong’s Novel
The Book of Salt (2003) and Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography
of Alice B. Toklas (1932).........................................................................198
Ingrida Žindžiuvien(cid:417)

Contributors.............................................................................................212
INTRODUCTION
A NOSTALGIA FOR TRADITION
REGINA RUDAITYT(cid:416)

The present publication is a collection of academic articles, most of
which are modified versions of papers given at the International Literary
Conference “Beyond Postmodernism: Literature, Theory, Culture”, which
was held on 16-17 November, 2006 at the Faculty of Philology, Vilnius
University, Lithuania. It is an attempt to reflect on new openings and
recent developments in literature, literary theory and culture which seem
to point beyond postmodernism and raise a question whether what appears
as newness is not rather a return to traditional concepts, theoretical
premises and authorial practices.
Interestingly enough, forty years after the publication of John Barth’s
seminal essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967), one is tempted to
diagnose the exhaustion of postmodernism. It is becoming increasingly
obvious that there are signs in contemporary British literature indicating
that postmodernism is past its heyday, that it is losing or has lost its shine,
fascination and attraction and that writers have been turning to the “old”
or pre-modern forms, practices and strategies. It seems to me that novels
with metahistorical dimension, the ethical component, the revival of realist
storytelling in the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Kate Atkinson,
Julian Barnes’s novel Arthur and George (2005) attest to the new mode
which reaches beyond postmodernism. Metafiction, postmodernist
experiment with narrative technique, attacks on mimetic referentiality,
delight in popular culture became mainstream, they lost their subversive
power and shock effect and no longer produce the effect of novelty; thus
to reach alterity the postmodernist and modernist novel are deconstructed:
old, pre-modern forms are used to achieve defamiliarization. David Lodge
predicted it already two decades ago: “Experiment can become so familiar
that it ceases to stimulate our powers of perception, and then more simple
2 Introduction

and straightforward modes of writing may seem wonderfully fresh and
daring”.1 At some later date, in the 1990’s, writing about the British novel
Malcolm Bradbury made a similar observation: “There was a general
feeling that Eighties experiments had become Nineties conventions, and
that serious young writers were becoming imitative clones of their
elders”.2
It was Ihab Hassan, a distinguished American professor and scholar,
who started the critique of postmodernism; in his thought-provoking
article “Beyond Postmodernism: Toward an Aesthetic of Trust” he is
advocating for what he calls “a fiduciary realism”, “a postmodern realism”
based on believing there is truth and we have to be committed to it. It is
not, Hassan argues, “an absolute, transcendent, or foundational Truth”, it
is Truth which “rests on trust, personal, social, cognitive trust”, trust as
“the premise to realism” which “is no light matter” and which “refers us to
the enigma of representation, the conundrum of signs, the riddle of
language, the chimera of consciousness itself”.3 We have to believe there
is truth, because “if truth is dead, then everything is permitted”, asserts
Hassan, paraphrasing Dostoyevsky and challenging postmodern
relativism.4
The current processes in literary culture undoubtedly invite
reconsideration and reconceptualization of such key notions as “truth”,
meaning production, textuality and literary interpretation. Some attempts
at reassessment have already been undertaken.5 Andrzej Gasiorek disputes
the clear-cut realism/experimentalism divide in contemporary British
fiction, arguing that some writers incorporate modernist and postmodernist
insights into their works, fuse technical innovations with strong social
concerns, this way extending realism in new directions. Acknowledging
the role played by linguistic codes and narrative forms in the construction
of meaning, the scholar does not dismiss the external world that literature
engages with, claiming that “out of this tension between the word and the
world emerges a wide range of new realisms.” 6 At the recent ESSE

1 Lodge, Working with Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth- and
Twentieth-Century Literature, 10.
2 Bradbury, The Modern British Novel, 455.
3 Hassan, “Beyond Postmodernism: Toward an Aesthetic of Trust”, 204-207.
4 Ibid., 204.
5 On this point, see Jose Lopez and Garry Potter, eds. After Postmodernism.
London & New York, 2001. Also an impressive collection of essays Beyond
Postmodernism. Reassessments in Literature, Theory, and Culture, edited by Klaus
Stierstorfer. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2003.
6 Gasiorek, Post-War British Fiction. Realism and After, 183.
Postmodernism and After: Visions and Revisions 3
(European Society for the Study of English) conference in London in
2006, attempts to reinstate realism were obvious at some seminars and
particularly at Christophe den Tandt’s lecture “On Virtual Grounds:
Reclaiming Realism at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century”.
It seems to me that the point is made particularly well by Herbert
Grabes’comprehensive and illuminating article “From the Postmodern to
the Pre-Modern: More Recent Changes in Literature, Art, and Theory”
which opens and sets the tone for this collection of essays; it is a major
assessment of new developments in literary culture, focusing on the
evolution of the postmodern to the premodern mode, as well as
highlighting the role and current popularity of cultural studies and cultural
history – theoretical movements which have been prevailing for some time
now after the end of deconstruction. Likewise, reflecting on the
implications of the notion of conformity and non-conformity, and its
changing nature in his essay “Performing Cultural Alterity: Non-
Conformist American Drama Since the 1990s”, Herbert Grabes gives a
splendidly clear account of more recent non-conformist American plays
linking them to the changes in culture and moral climate prevailing in
society, as well as to the complex and adverse historical and political
situation of our turbulent times. In being non-conformist, Grabes claims,
aesthetically they also, however, fulfill an important function of theater
and art in general: “to make us laugh, or admonish us, or even shock us
out of our complacency, our conformity, by confronting us with what had
better not be, or must not be.”
In his essay “‘What Am I Doing Here‘: Contemporary British Travel
Writing: From Revival to Renewal” Jan Borm concentrates on the renewal
of the long-established genre of travel writing in Great Britain, reflecting
on the situation today, some fifty years after Claude Lévi-Strauss’ famous
declaration about travelling, and highlighting the pronounced literary
dimension of some seminal contemporary travel books which in their own
particular ways raise the issues of representation and reflexivity. The
article rightly claims that “travel writing does continue to aim at partly
reflecting the real, even if the writing involves various processes of
fictionalisation.” Not only intertextuality as one of the chief postmodern
features of contemporary works but various forms of reflexive observation
also characterize a number of the narratives explored in Borm’s essay.
Such texts, according to the scholar, bear witness to the dynamic potential
of the genre and make it possible to affirm that travel writing represents
one of the most dynamic or poetically subversive domains of British
literature in the past thirty or forty years.
4 Introduction

Claiming the historical novel to be one of postmodernism’s favourite
genres, Milda Danyt(cid:417) looks at two works of historical fiction published in
2004, the Italian writer Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen
Loana, and the Lithuanian-Canadian writer Antanas Sileika’s Woman in
Bronze, to explore the notion of a “post postmodern historical novel”, one
that has some features in common with both traditional and postmodern
historical novels, yet which also differs in significant ways from both of
these. Danyte’s readings of these two recent historical novels suggest that
instead of parodying the past in postmodern fashion, these post
postmodern historical novels seem to prioritize unofficial memory and
celebrate popular culture in the broad sense. In this revisionist form of
history, the author’s personal past has real significance. Thus the new kind
of historical fiction has ties to new versions of history and autobiography
which also bring together the national past and the personal past.
In her essay which almost bears on “literary sociology”, Anniken
Telnes Iversen presents a multi-factorial and polythetic approach to the
definition of the bildungsroman with the aim of using this definition to
read Paul Auster’s novel Moon Palace as a bildungsroman postulating
links with tradition. The picture of the bildungsroman that emerges from
this approach is one of marked continuity from its late eighteenth-century
beginnings up to our own times. Differently from the critics who often see
Moon Palace as a postmodern novel with strong resemblances to the
picaresque, the researcher thinks it is closer to the classical tradition and
has a much stronger bond to the bildungsroman, more specifically the
nineteenth-century British bildungsroman. For the definition of the
bildungsroman Iversen tried to create what she called “the Bildungsroman
Index” which is developed for the English-language bildungsroman
tradition and thus based on four works that are seen as foundational to that
genre: Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and
Dickens’s David Copperfield and Great Expectations.
Egl(cid:417) Ka(cid:254)kut(cid:417)’s essay is another attempt to conceptualize the
construction of identity and subjectivity in A.L. Kennedy’s Novel So I am
Glad and Short Story Original Bliss. The two texts by one of the most
prominent contemporary British authors are seen as a good example of
both post- postmodernist and post-feminist writing as she belongs to the
generation of writers who started their careers in the late 1980s and early
1990s, at the time when both postmodernism and feminism were losing
their currency and fiction started to develop in all sorts of liberating and
refreshing ways. It is maybe for this reason that subjectivity and/or
identity in Kennedy’s work comes across as evasive and intangible. The
analysis of the two texts is based on the premise that although Kennedy’s