Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity:
Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham: Duke
University Press, 1987. 395p.
On Postmodernism
The Silence of the Avant-Garde {275}
Avant-garde's task: to destroy and invent
Postmodernism questions destructuve aspect
Postmodenrism opts for renovation
Postmodernism as reaction to "silence" and sterility of avamt-garde
Umberto Eco
Sees link between exhaustion of furiously antitraditional avant-garde
and emerhence of postmodern willingness to revisit past
"The historic avamt-garde tries to settle scores with the past ("Down
woth moonlight")
defaces the past
destroys the figure
arrives at abstract, informal, whire canvas, slashed canvas
Architecture: curtain wall, minimal art, destruction of flow of discourse
Music: absolute silence (Cage(
Postmodern reply - recognition of past [277]
John Barth, "The Literature of Exhaustion" (1967)
Postmodern rediscovery of the "alreadu said" cannot be innocent
use irony, playfulness,parodic nostalgia
Postmodernism's Loss of innocence trlated to darker, savage
side of modernity -
monstrous consequences of modern utopianism (in USSR)
Stalin
Hitler
Postmodern artists
Broch, Beckett, Kundera
come to terms with debacle of modernity and its tragic legacy
Scarpetta, _L'Impurete_ - impurity of postmodern aesthetics
post-apocalyptic
The notion of a culture resuscitated after Auschwitz is absurd
Therefore only possible culture would be post-apocalyptic
All naivete, all innocence is totally anchronistic
Postmodernism can be usefully employed
not a new reality
Aperspective from which one can ask certain questions about modernity
self-skeptical, searching, ironic [279]
On Postmodernism
A New Face of Modernity
Epistemology and Hermeneutics: From
Modernity to Postmodernity
The Silence of the Avant-Garde
The Novelty of the Past: The View from
Architecture
Critiques of Postmodernism
Literary Postmodernism: The Shaping of
a Corpus
Postmodernist Devices and Their
Significance
Conclusion
Links and Abbreviations (links are abbreviated by using the
initials)