pomo

[Terrance]

Mark David Tristan Brenchley wrote:
> 
> I understand your hesitation in cutting someone else's essay to a few > brief email sentences. But surely there must be more to Barth's essay than > just saying that literture always repeats itself. If it's a case of
> nothing-new-under-the-sun, then big deal, literature has always had that
> problem. I'm not even sure how much I'd agree with that statement myself.
> Besides, even if its been said before, there will always be new ways in
> which the novel can be expressed....
> 
> MArk


A dozen years or so later, in an Atlantic piece titled "The
Literature of Replenishment," Barth sought to set the record
straight about his earlier "much-misread essay." He had not,
he insisted, meant to say "that literature, at least
fiction, is kaput." Instead, Barth declared, "The simple
burden of my essay was that the forms and modes of art live
in human history and are therefore subject to used-upness
... in other words, that artistic conventions are liable to
be ... deployed against themselves to generate new and
lively work." 

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/97dec/971277.htm


There is some good stuff on the internet, but a lot of it is
Bull Shit, propaganda, nonsense, lies, poor scholarship,
what I guess must be just people, even Professors at at
highly regarded universities, passing bad information
about.  Even some of the stuff that Professors put on the
internet for their students is not to be trusted. 

But there is still a lot that is very good. 

http://dave.edelman.home.att.net/barth/index.html

http://dave.edelman.home.att.net/barth/resources.html

http://www.georgetown.edu/bassr/heath/syllabuild/iguide/barth.html

I don't think Dr. Mary Klages' pomo page is worth reading,
it's not good work. 


http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/pomo.html

Dr. Mary Klages, Associate Professor, English Department,
University of Colorado, Boulder

I'm reposting it to make a point: This type page is so
common, here is an almost identical example, 

"Few terms have been subject to such intense debates as
"postmodernism." Though its indiscriminate use has all but
exhausted the word of any kind of precise meaning..."

When an author begins by stating that Postmodernism can not
be defined I get suspicious. While it is true that many of
the best, particularly the earliest and most important
essays begin by stating that Postmodernism  (inherently!)
resists all attempts to define it, most of the crap, the
Sophistic and Political crap, most of it recent, most of it
full of jargon and name dropping, is mere travesty.   


The ridiculous essays always make claims about Modernism
that are false, they often conflate, humanism, modernism
enlightenment, rationalism, protestantism, and racism and
homophobia, and colonialism, and high modernism , and all
the other nasty ISMs and gysms you can imagine, this is how
Modernism begins to  sound like cultural fascism: 

 modernism: The enlightenment-humanist rejection of
tradition and  authority in favour of reason and natural
science. This is founded upon the assumption of the
autonomous individual as the sole source of meaning and
truth--the Cartesian cogito. Progress and
novelty are valorized within a linear conception of
history--a history of a "real" world
that becomes increasingly real or objectified. One could
view this as a Protestant mode of consciousness. Thus modern
societies rely on continually establishing a binary
opposition between "order" and "disorder," so that they can
assert the superiority of "order." But to do this, they have
to have things that represent "disorder"--modern
societies thus continually have to create/construct
"disorder." In western culture, this disorder becomes "the
other"--defined in relation to other binary oppositions.
Thus anything non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual,
non-hygienic, non-rational, (etc.) becomes part of
"disorder," and has to be eliminated from the ordered,
rational modern society. 



http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0256.html