The Politics of Postmodernism (New Accents)

207 Pages·1989·2.4 MB·English

by  Linda Hutcheon

NEW ACCENTS
General Editor: TERENCE HAWKES
The Politics of Postmodernism
IN THE SAME SERIES
The Empire Writes Back: Theory and practice in post-colonial literatures
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin
Translation Studies Susan Bassnett
Critical Practice Catherine Belsey
Formalism and Marxism Tony Bennett
Dialogue and Difference: English for the nineties ed. Peter Brooker and
Peter Humm
Telling Stories: A theoretical analysis of narrative fiction Steven Cohan
and Linda M. Shires
Alternative Shakespeares ed. John Drakakis
The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama Keir Elam
Reading Television John Fiske and John Hartley
Making a Difference: Feminist literary criticism ed. Gayle Greene and
Coppélia Kahn
Superstructuralism: The philosophy of structuralism and
poststructuralism Richard Harland
Structuralism and Semiotics Terence Hawkes
Subculture: The meaning of style Dick Hebdige
Dialogism: Bakhtin and his world Michael Holquist
Fantasy: the literature of subversion Rosemary Jackson
Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist literary theory Toril Moi
Deconstruction: Theory and practice Christopher Norris
Orality and Literacy Walter J. Ong
Narrative Fiction: Contemporary poetics Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan
Adult Comics: An introduction Roger Sabin
Criticism in Society Imre Salusinszky
Metafiction Patricia Waugh
Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in practice Elizabeth Wright
The Politics of
Postmodernism
LINDA HUTCHEON
London and New York
First published 1989
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001.
© 1989 Linda Hutcheon
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or, reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Hutcheon, Linda
The politics of postmodernism. – (New accents)
1. Culture. Postmodernism
I. Title II. Series
306
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Hutcheon, Linda
The politics of postmodernism
(New accents)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Fiction – 20th century – History and criticism. 2. Postmodernism.
3. Photography and literature.
I. Title II. Series: New accents (Routledge (Firm))
PN3503.H84 1989 809.3'04 89-5904
ISBN 0 415 03992 4 (Print Edition)
ISBN 0-203-12987-3 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-17740-1 (Glassbook Format)
Contents
General editor’s preface vii
Acknowledgements ix
1 Representing the postmodern 1
What is postmodernism? 1
Representation and its politics 2
Whose postmodernism? 11
Postmodernity, postmodernism, and modernism 23
2 Postmodernist representation 31
De-naturalizing the natural 31
Photographic discourse 43
Telling stories: fiction and history 47
3 Re-presenting the past 62
‘Total history’ de-totalized 62
vi The Politics of Postmodernism
Knowing the past in the present 70
The archive as text 79
4 The politics of parody 93
Parodic postmodern representation 93
Double-coded politics 101
Postmodern film? 107
5 Text/image border tensions 118
The paradoxes of photography 118
The ideological arena of photo-graphy 124
The politics of address 134
6 Postmodernism and feminisms 141
Politicizing desire 142
Feminist postmodernist parody 151
The private and the public 160
Concluding note: some directed reading 169
Bibliography 171
Index 189
General editor’s preface
How can we recognise or deal with the new? Any equipment we bring to the
task will have been designed to engage with the old: it will look for and
identify extensions and developments of what we already know. To some
degree the unprecedented will always be unthinkable.
The New Accents series has made its own wary negotiation around that
paradox, turning it, over the years, into the central concern of a continuing
project. We are obliged, of course, to be bold. Change is our proclaimed
business, innovation our announced quarry, the accents of the future the
language in which we deal. So we have sought, and still seek, to confront and
respond to those developments in literary studies that seem crucial aspects
of the tidal waves of transformation that continue to sweep across our
culture. Areas such as structuralism, post-structuralism, feminism, marxism,
semiotics, subculture, deconstruction, dialogism, postmodernism, and the
new attention to the nature and modes of language, politics and way of life
that these bring, have already been the primary concern of a large number of
our volumes. Their ‘nuts and bolts’ exposition of the issues at stake in new
ways of writing texts and new ways of reading them has proved an effective
stratagem against perplexity.
But the question of what ‘texts’ are or may be has also become more and
more complex. It is not just the impact of the electronic modes of commu-
viii The Politics of Postmodernism
nication, such as computer networks and data banks, that has forced us to
revise our sense of the sort of material to which the process called ‘reading’
may apply. Satellite television and supersonic travel have eroded the tradi-
tional capacities of time and space to confirm prejudice, reinforce ignorance,
and conceal significant difference. Ways of life and cultural practices of
which we had barely heard can now be set compellingly beside – can even
confront – our own. The effect is to make us ponder the culture we have
inherited; to see it, perhaps for the first time, as an intricate, continuing
construction. And that means that we can also begin to see, and to question,
those arrangements of foregrounding and backgrounding, of stressing and
repressing, of placing at the centre and of restricting to the periphery, that
give our own way of life its distinctive character.
Small wonder if, nowadays, we frequently find ourselves at the bound-
aries of the precedented and at the limit of the thinkable: peering into an
abyss out of which there begin to lurch awkwardly-formed monsters with
unaccountable – yet unavoidable – demands on our attention. These may
involve unnerving styles of narrative, unsettling notions of ‘history’,
unphilosophical ideas about ‘philosophy’, even un-childish views of ‘com-
ics’, to say nothing of a host of barely respectable activities for which we
have no reassuring names.
In this situation, straightforward elucidation, careful unpicking, informa-
tive bibliographies, can offer positive help, and each New Accents volume
will continue to include these. But if the project of closely scrutinising the
new remains nonetheless a disconcerting one, there are still overwhelming
reasons for giving it all the consideration we can muster. The unthinkable,
after all, is that which covertly shapes our thoughts.
TERENCE HAWKES
Acknowledgements
This book should probably be entitled Re-presenting Postmodernism, for it
literally presents once again certain core notions about the postmodern that
I first developed in different contexts and with a different focus in two
earlier studies – A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988)
and The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English–Cana-
dian Fiction (1988). But what was missing from both these books is the
subject of this one: that is, a general introductory overview of both
postmodernism and its politics and an investigation of their challenges to
the notion of representation in the verbal and visual arts.
In the other books, I always thanked my spouse, Michael Hutcheon,
last, but this time my debt to him must be acknowledged from the start, for
he is in a very real sense responsible for this work: his talent as a photogra-
pher and his abiding interest in photography as an art form and a semiotic
practice provide the background for this entire book. In addition, his contin-
ued support and enthusiasm, his critical acumen and his fine sense of humor
and his aequinimitas have never been more welcome. To him therefore go
my deepest gratitude and affection.
Because of the cumulative nature of this study, I feel I ought also to thank
once again all those I have already mentioned by name in the first two books
– all those colleagues, students, and friends, all those artists, critics, and