NP - If postmodernism is over, where's that leave TP?

[matthew cissell]

    Way back in 1990 a young scholar named John Frow had the apparent
audacity to ask in essay form: "What was postmodernism?" You notice
the past tense. Now I don't know if that stirred up much of a dust
storm, but in 1990 you would have been hard pressed to convince people
that the concept was done and gone. Wasn't that time rather high-tide
for the culture wars of the period, especially in Humanities
departments around the world? (Just think of all those debates in the
'80's: Derrida vs. Searle, Habermas vs. Lyotard and more, etc.)

   Then in 1999 Andreas Huyssen told us that "The high/ low debate is
history." And that "...the world changed in 1989-90, and
postmodernism, like the concern over high and low culture, was
swallowed up by a new set of social, political, and economic
configurations....To revive this debate would be futile."

  A short time later, in 2002, Linda Hutcheon weighed in by starting
off her essay refering to Frow's piece and then finished by informing
readers, "The postmodern moment has passed."

   In 2008 Katrin Amian's book "Rethinking Postmodernism" reiterated
the case on the first page: "Postmodernism, it seems, is history. Born
as a short hand for the new contemporary in the 1960's and 1970's,
grown to maturity as a lively disputed critical concept in the 1980's,
and mainstreamed to the popular appeal of Dummies guides and
Pepsi-cola ads in 1990's the term appears to have exhausted its
potential as a means of describing and understanding the shifting
alliances of literary and cultural production in thenew millenium."
She then informs us that Ihab Hassan has also joined this "chorus of
elegies sung to its demise" and this launches her into her book.

   I am forced to ask: What is the value of a term if it appears and
disappears in fleeting fashion like some quantum particle? Are we sure
this conceptual wrathe was ever even real? More importantly for the
P-list where does that leave the last few books of our much admired
author? Are his books no longer postmodern? Is Pynchon no longer a
postmodern writer? Or has he gone from avante-gard to rear guard,
occupying an out of date position?

Long post sorry
ciao
mc
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