A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction

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The most radical boundaries crossed, however, have been those between fiction and non-fiction and—by extension—between art and life. Regarding catharsis as the defining function of tragedy (1449b 28), Aristotle expects highly of the educative function of poetic literature and claims the response of one who is drawn into the experience of a tragedy is first of all to feel fear and pity (1452a 2; 1452b 1; 1452b 34). It has certainly meant a rethinking and putting into question of the bases of our western modes of thinking that we usually label, perhaps rather too generally, as liberal humanism. In the postmodern photos of Heribert Berkert or Ger Dekkers, they still represent (for they cannot avoid reference) but what they represent is self-consciously shown to be highly filtered by the discursive and aesthetic assumptions of the cameraholder (D. One might almost say that the move from modernism to postmodernism involves a move from poetry to fiction.

But in as pluralist and fragmented a culture as that of the western world today, such designations are not terribly useful if they intend to generalize about all the vagaries of our culture. This was the title given to the 1980 Venice Biennale which marked the institutional recognition of postmodernism in architecture. Along with this ironic reworking of the history of film comes a temporal historical warp: the movie is set, we are told, at 8:49 am, sometime in the twentieth century. One of the functions of art in mass culture, argued Susan Sontag, would be to “modify consciousness” (1967, 304). Given all the confusion and vagueness associated with the term itself (see Paterson 1986), I would like to begin by arguing that, for me, postmodernism is a contradictory phenomenon, one that uses and abuses, installs and then subverts, the very concepts it challenges—be it in architecture, literature, painting, sculpture, film, video, dance, TV, music, philosophy, aesthetic theory, psychoanalysis, linguistics, or historiography.Yet far from becoming nihilistic, it generates hope, affection, and most importantly an ethical challenge of responsibility out of its discoveries. Thomas Pynchon allegorizes otherness in Gravity’s Rainbow through the single, if anarchic, “we-system” that exists as the counterforce of the totalizing “They-system” (though also implicated in it). S. Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, among others) would also be an example of classical theopoetics. Many of the central postmodernist theorists are French and include Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Jean-François Lyotard.

It asks theologians to accept reality as a legitimate source of divine revelation and suggests that both the divine and the real are mysterious — that is, irreducible to literalist dogmas or scientific proofs. With the postmodern incredulity to the legitimacy of metanarrative, how should we construct a totalizing, “better” theory about postmodernism?Faber, Roland (2003), Gott als Poet der Welt: Anliegen und Perspektiven der Prozesstheologie[ God as Poet of the World: Concerns and Perspectives in Process Theology] (in German), Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, ISBN 3-534-15864-4 .

This was his “work of art,” one that collapsed together the “work” and the gallery so as to reveal at once their collusion and the strong but usually unacknowledged power of the gallery’s invisibility as a dominant (and dominating) cultural institution (see Kibbins 1983). The poetics of postmodernism offered here is drawn from these contradictions, as seen in the intersecting concerns of both contemporary theory and cultural practice.Focusing on this paradoxical concern, this article scrutinizes Brian McHale’s and Linda Hutcheon’s different constructions of postmodern poetics with a comparative perspective to expose their respective strong points and drawbacks. As Gerald Prince has noted, the novel, as a genre, harbors a range of possible narrative strategies that include metanarrative constructions such as self-reflexivity, and this accounts for why novels with metafictional elements appear at different historical moments, well before the second half of the twentieth century. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. According to Aristotle, the imitation of an action in a tragedy, by producing the fear and pity we feel, ends in a ritual purification of our feelings from some polluting impiety, thus to temper and reduce them to a moderate measure, and finally to be helpful for the social life. And many cultural commentators since have argued that the energies of the 1960s have changed the framework and structure of how we consider art (e.

Postmodern culture, then, has a contradictory relationship to what we usually label our dominant, liberal humanist culture. It continues the project of Hutcheon's Narcissistic Narrative and A Theory of Parody in studying formal self-consciousness in art, but adds to this both a historical and ideological dimension.

The other school of thought values the philosophical transcendentals as informed by classical theology. Whereas those who utilize a strict, historical-grammatical approach believe scripture and theology possess inerrant factual meaning and pay attention to historicity, a theopoetic approach takes an allegorical position on faith statements that can be continuously reinterpreted. Of all the terms bandied about in both current cultural theory and contemporary writing on the arts, postmodernism must be the most overand under-defined. Defined variously as a reaction to modernism or merely the movement that followed it, postmodernism remains a controversial concept.