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

[Mark Kohut]

what is the label applied to now--and the recent past?
what is the definition? One of the French definers has written that
part of postmodernism is a simple return to realism. Knausgaard?
Ferrante? Others?

On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 5:22 AM, matthew cissell <mccissell at gmail.com> wrote:
>     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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