Gibbons, A. (2015) ‘ “Take that you intellectuals” and “KaPOW!”: Adam Thirlwell and the Metamodernist Future of Style’, Studia Neophilologica 87(Supp 1): 29-43. (original) (raw)
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The Passing Of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary
The Passing Of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary, 2010
The Passing of Postmodernism addresses the increasingly prevalent assumption that a period marked by poststructuralism and metafiction has passed and that literature and film are once again engaging sincerely with issues of ethics and politics. In discussions of various twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers, directors, and theorists—from Michel Foucault and Slavoj Žižek to Thomas Pynchon and David Lynch—Josh Toth demonstrates that a certain utopian spirit persisted within, and actually defined, the postmodern project. Just as modernism was animated by an idealistic belief that it could finally realize the utopia beckoning on the horizon, postmodernism was compelled by an equally utopian belief that it could finally reject the possibility of all such illusory ideals. Toth argues that this specter of an impossible future is and must remain both possible and impossible, a ghostly promise of what is always still to come.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION Postmodernism and the Explosive Style of the Twenty-First Century
Russian Postmodernism
N ow we can hardly doubt that the last third of the twentieth century will enter cultural history under the name of postmodernism. The beginning of the twenty first century reacted ambivalently to this heritage. Many concepts that postmodernism introduced into global culture are now undergoing revision in attempt to reappropriate what was lost or rejected during the previous thirty years. The practices of quotation, allusion, intertextuality, and the traits of irony and eclecticism are still current, as well as skepticism toward the universality of canons and hierarchies of all kinds. However, postmodernism, as it is perceived now, got stuck at the level of language games: it was obsessed with overcoding, subtexts, and metatextuality, and did not recognize anything outside this domain. By the early twenty-first century, this game continued by inertia alongside the new realities that challenged it: the Iraqi War, Chechnya, the dismemberment of Yugoslavia. … All these events took place far away from the United States, however, and major theoreticians such as Jean Baudrillard still were inclined to interpret them as postmodernist phenomena, including the mass media's control over the world scene and the information industry's games. The limits of the game suddenly became starkly defined on September 11, 2001. The entire postmodernist era ended with deadly Preface to the Second Edition | xv Preface to the Second Edition | xvii Preface to the Second Edition | xxi Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover's introduction "'New Sectarianism' and the Pleasure Principle in Postmodern Russian Culture." The selected bibliography has been expanded and updated.
'The real but greatly exaggerated death of Postmodernism' in JCEPS 17 (2). ISSN 1740-2743
Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies (JCEPS), 2019
This paper tracks the managing-out of Postmodernism in UK universities, before casting doubt on the tendency to declare its death. Firstly, Postmodernism's current status as 'geist' is defined and the question is put as to whether Postmodernity is dead in the university. I use Google Ngrams and data from the main three academic libraries I am affiliated to in order to broadly answer in the positive. That the collapse of Postmodernism maps out on the crash of 2008 suggests that Postmodernism's 'geist bubble' may have been enabled by access to credit, by a finance bubble. However, the paper then describes the emergent academic terms 'post-postmodern', 'after-modern', 'neomodernism', 'Metamodernism' and the 'New Sincerity'-suggested new paradigms coming after Postmodernism-critically, as they are all rooted in Postmodern theory or postmodern culture, for instance the writing of Fredric Jameson and David Foster Wallace. I argue that we need to attempt a new reorientation rather than over-arching terms for a new era which has barely shown its shape yet. We are not in a position to fully diagnose what comes after Postmodernism is managed out of academia, although clearly there are ramifications for the study of culture broadly. Playing advocatus diaboli I suggest that it would be better to reconsider terms such as False Consciousness than to float new signifiers over the current
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.
Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, 2018
The turn of the millennium garnered a series of approaches that sought to redefine both the methodology used in cultural studies and literary theory and the new sensibility proposed by young authors and performers in the fields of art, music, film, literature, and new media. These approaches were also stimulated by the various shortcomings of the more historicised fields, such as traditional comparative studies, hermeneutics, deconstructivism or postmodernism, which were, since the eighties, subject to different attempts of methodological renewal and adjustment to the needs of the age of globalisation (World Literature studies is a good example of this methodological turn).
The Theory and Politics of Postmodernism: By Way of an Introduction
Postmodernism and Society, 1990
Many sociologists, cultural commentators, literary theorists and philosophers have been intrigued by the idea of postmodernity for some time now, and this interest is reflected in the considerable outpouring of writing on the topic which has appeared over the last year or two. There seems, however, to be scant agreement on how the crucial terms in these discussions are to be understood. 'Modernity' and 'postmodernity', 'modernism' and 'postmodernism' appear and reappear in philosophical, literary and other texts in what is at first sight a bewildering array of guises. Combined, especially in Britain, with a scepticism towards fashionableespecially French-debates as well as resistance to what are seen as trendy neologisms, particularly in the realm of culture and aesthetics, there is a danger that much of the debate about postmodernism will remain on the academic and cultural margins, the property of an avant-garde but held generally in deep suspicion and even derision by the rest. This collection is offered in the belief that the debate about postmodernism addresses issues that are actually of crucial significance to the humanities and the social sciences and, more