Word: postmodernism
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Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture By Philip Brian Harper Oxford University Press $15.95, 195pp...
Interpretations and definitions of what "postmodern culture" actually is never fail to fascinate. Yet this fascination is always partially spoiled by the fact that success-a definitive 'take' on postmodernity-is a logical impossibility. How, to put it simply, it is possible to reach a final interpretation of a cultural phenomenon which has itself prompted a questioning of the validity of all authorities-which has devalued all final interpretations...
Framing the Margins is a refreshing addition to a potentially frustrating debate in that Harper's analysis prompts more questions than it offers solutions. Writers linked by their identification as "marginal" (of which more will be discussed later) are compared with the canonically "postmodern" novelists Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover. The result of this comparison is to redefine the origins of the fragmentation of the subject that is generally seen as characteristic of literary postmodernity. The "marginal" writers chosen Nathaniel Hawthorne, Anaïs Nin, Djuna Barnes, Gwendolyn Brooks and Ralph Ellison-present a rather motley collection. When...
...dynamic established in this way, between questions of literary style and questions relating to the wider political culture, makes Harper's both a brave and a very relevant work. He himself insists that, far from being a futile exercise, postmodern theory still has useful work to do: "Despite what we can discern in a lot of postmodern theory as the assertion of a lack of grounding... it seems to me that we willy-nilly constitute such authorities and authenticities every day-necessary." But although theory can alert us to "the constituted and contingent nature of those touchstones...it is less...
...that the subject of this somber book is the postmodern 'condition' would imply that the condition is now universal, perhaps even ingrained in human nature and society. This is empirically a falsehood, since, for the most part, Zulus and Czech window-washers do not fret over, let alone care, about postmodernism...