Sontag sez a few things on the idea of postmodernism

[Otto]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Paul Mackin" <paul.mackin at verizon.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 30, 2004 7:54 PM
Subject: Sontag sez a few things on the idea of postmodernism
>
>
>
> (from    Against Postmodernism, etcetera--A Conversation
>     with Susan Sontag  by Evans Chan) 2001?
>
> . . . .
(...)
>
>  7. C: Yes, the way writers are being relabelled as postmodern is at
>     times baffling. For example, I was startled when Fredric
>     Jameson, whose work I greatly admire, cited Beckett--who for me
>     is a terminal product of high modernism--as a postmodern author.
>

The "terminal product of high modernism" logically is the first step to
postmodernism.

Postmodernism
or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
by Fredric Jameson (1991)
"Consider, for example, the powerful alternative position that postmodernism
is itself little more than one more stage of modernism proper (if not,
indeed, of the even older romanticism); it may indeed be conceded that all
the features of postmodernism I am about to enumerate can be detected,
full-blown, in this or that preceding modernism (including such astonishing
genealogical precursors as Gertrude Stein, Raymond Roussel, or Marcel
Duchamp, who may be considered outright postmodernists, avant la lettre).
What has not been taken into account by this view, however, is the social
position of the older modernism, or better still, its passionate repudiation
by an older Victorian and post-Victorian bourgeoisie for whom its forms and
ethos are received as being variously ugly, dissonant, obscure, scandalous,
immoral, subversive, and generally "antisocial." It will be argued here,
however, that a mutation in the sphere of culture has rendered such
attitudes archaic. Not only are Picasso and Joyce no longer ugly, they now
strike us, on the whole, as rather "realistic," and this is the result of a
canonisation and academic institutionalisation of the modern movement
generally that can be to the late 1950s. This is surety one of the most
plausible explanations for the emergence of postmodernism itself, since the
younger generation of the 1960s will now confront the formerly oppositional
modern movement as a set of dead classics, which "weigh like a nightmare on
the brains of the living," as Marx once said in a different context."
http://www.geocities.com/alaskaphilosophy1/quest/j2.htm

Otto

>
> http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.901/12.1chan.txt
>