The Passing Of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary (original) (raw)
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This material has been published in American Literature in Transition, 1990-2000 edited by Stephen J. Burn. This version is free to view and download for personal use only. Not for redistribution , resale or use in derivative works.
The death of postmodernism? Post-postmodernism and Contemporary Film
The death of postmodernism? Post-postmodernism and Contemporary Film, 2023
As more and more researchers remark that a wave of recent films does not seem to fit Jameson’s definition of postmodernism, many new terms have been introduced: the post-cinematic (Steven Shaviro), the post-filmic (Garret Stewart), the supercinema (Wiliam Brown), the new new Hollywood (Thomas Elsaesser) and finally, the post- postmodern (Linda Hutcheon). As Marcia Tiemy Morita Kawamoto summarises, what this new cinema is, is still hard to define, yet a common influence is that of the digital as post-postmodern film often incorporates “digitalization, media, internet and video-games into their narratives” (20). Additionally, this essay discusses the influence of a ‘New Sincerity’ in this new cinema aesthetic, as literature professor Adam Kelly describes as displacing “metaphysics while retaining a love of truth, a truth now associated with the possibility of a reconceived, and renewed, sincerity” (146).
This preface, initially published in 2003, sketches out the evolution of literary and cultural studies at the turn of the twenty-first century. In particular, the argument examines the issue of the exhaustion and the supersession of postmodernism.
THE SUBLIME TROUBLES OF POSTMODERNISM
This essay interweaves Stefan Morawski's critique of postmodernism and Jean-François Lyotard's expression of the postmodern sublime as "the presentation of the unpresentable" in a wide-ranging appraisal of the culmination of the postmodern age. This juxtaposition finds expression in the concept of the two modes of a negative sublime: the negative dynamical sublime exemplified in the stockpiles of nuclear warheads scattered widely across the globe, and the negative mathematical sublime represented by the omniscient electronic informational web that increasingly entangles individuals and societies. KEY WORDS Lyotard, Morawski, negative sublime, popular culture, postmodern culture, postmodern episteme, postmodern sublime I Postmodernism refers to a phase in Western intellectual culture that became prominent during the final decades of the twentieth century. As a complex period with distinctive cognitive traits, it could be called, to use Foucault's language, an episteme. 2 A number of influential though disparate writers contributed to identifying a cultural trend they called postmodernism. They differed from one another so much that commentators named them as a group by their temporal period in intellectual history-after modernism-rather than by a shared principle or style. What seemed common to all was a skepticism toward the basic tenets of high modernism and a critique of its articles of faith. Postmodernist writers questioned, in particular, the social stabilities and values, primarily identified with rational order in material and cultural progress through science that had governed the post-World War II period. This was a time that saw the