Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity:
Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham: Duke
University Press, 1987. 395p.
On Postmodernism
Literary Postmodernism: The Shaping of a Corpus {288}
Critics accept term postmodern to talk about the status of reality vs fiction in literary
discourses
first in literary use in US inlate 40s - to distance from symbolist
modernism of TS Eliot
aesthetic radicals
close to spirit of counterculture
Black Mountain poets (Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Robert
Creeley)
Beats (Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso)
San Francisco Renaissance (Gray Snyder)
New York School (John Ashberry, Kenneth Koch)
Fiction (John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Robert
Coover, Jphn Haekes, Donalf Barthelme, Robert Federman, Ronald
Sukenick
Larger meaning with international ramifications - search
for precursors extended term
Postmodernist poetics of indeterminacy or undecidability
of meaning
Rimbaud, Gertrude Stein, Pound, Williams, later Beckett
Undecidability - central questions
Can literature be other than self-referential
Can literature be a representation of reality if reality is full of ficttion?
Problems treated forcefully by Nabakov and Borges
mirrors and copies, reflections and duplications, paradoxes of resemblance
Joyce as precursor - Finnegan's Wake
punning, etymological verbal play
Borges
world as labyrinth of possibiliyies, of parallel times, alternative pasts and
futures
"The Garden of Forking Paths" (story)
Beckett
Others [301] , incl. Kundera
united by distinctive use of certain conventions, techniques, and
recurrent structural and stylistic devices
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)