The Death of Postmodernism

[Ghetta Life]

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0127/p11s01-legn.html

"An old joke used to ask, Where are the last bastions of Marxism? Answer: 
the Kremlin and the Duke University English department. But now that the 
Soviet Union has dissolved, the last defenders of Karl Marx's ideas may 
indeed reside on a pretty, Gothic-style campus in the pinewoods of North 
Carolina.

For literary traditionalists, the riddle is apropos. They have long bemoaned 
the effete nature of postmodern literary theory, calling it as hopelessly 
out of touch with both reality and literature as was Lenin with real-life 
economics.

But theory's impact on the study of literature in the US has been pervasive 
if nothing else. Large numbers of the last two generations of English majors 
have been instructed not to experience novels and poems directly, but rather 
to view them through the lens of some kind of theory - Marxism being one of 
the most popular.

The idea was to move away from viewing literature as having any innate 
"truth" of its own, and rather to study it in relationship to larger schools 
of thought. But the approach left many students complaining they spent more 
class time with dry theoreticians than with the great authors they had hoped 
to encounter.

Today, however, such complaints may be on their way out.

Postmodern literary theory is now transforming itself so rapidly that 
Marxist, feminist, deconstructionist, and psychoanalytic critics (and 
others) are flocking back to the drawing board in droves as they search for 
new approaches to writing and teaching.

Indeed, some academics say that postmodern theory is on the way out 
altogether and that the heady ideas that once changed the way literature is 
taught and read will soon be as extinct as the dodo and the buggy whip.

According to some, theory has been losing its grip on academia for years 
now. "For me, theory reached its apogee in the early 1980's and has since 
been declining," says Roger Lathbury, professor of American fiction at 
George Mason University. Today, he says, it's a matter of "the pendulum 
swinging toward the center."

Some of the biggest names in the field would seem to agree. In Chicago last 
spring at a discussion sponsored by the journal "Critical Inquiry" 
cutting-edge thinkers such as Stanley Fish, Frederic Jameson, Homi Bhabha, 
and Henry Louis Gates Jr. spent two hours saying that postmodern theory was 
ineffective and no longer mattered in the world outside academe, if it ever 
did.

And in his new book "After Theory," Terry Eagleton of Manchester University 
argues that postmodern literary theory (which he defines as "the 
contemporary movement of thought which rejects . . . the possibility of 
objective knowledge" and is therefore "skeptical of truth, unity, and 
progress") was relevant in its heyday, but no more.

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BTW,  Postmodernism has been dead or dying in the world of architecture for 
at LEAST 10 years now.  Postmodernism in architecture quickly devolved into 
cheap one-liners, boring clichés, and unconvincing stage-sets, 
"construction" suffering as a result.  Very few architects could pull off 
"serious" postmodern work.  A hunger for something more authentic. if not 
original, has followed postmodernism's wake.

A modernist revival has been hot afoot for years...  I guess one might call 
the prevalent mood in architecture right now "Neo-Modern," which term of 
course drips with a leftover post-modern irony...

IMHO, there is a parallel between Postmodernism and Mannerism, and one can 
get a glimpse of where we're heading now by looking at the "movements" which 
followed Mannerism, especially with Gothic Revival's emphasis on "authentic" 
and "pure" aesthetics.  The culmination of these movements was the 
full-blown modernism of the early 30's in France and Germany...

Ghetta
Fire the Liar!

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