[lit-ideas] The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond
- From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 4 May 2013 07:51:08 -0700 (PDT)
Most of the undergraduates who will take ‘Postmodern Fictions’ this year will
have been born in 1985 or after, and all but one of the module’s primary texts
were written before their lifetime. Far from being ‘contemporary’, these texts
were published in another world, before the students were born: The French
Lieutenant’s Woman, Nights at the Circus, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller,
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and Blade Runner), White Noise: this is
Mum and Dad’s culture. Some of the texts (‘The Library of Babel’) were written
even before their parents were born. Replace this cache with other postmodern
stalwarts – Beloved, Flaubert’s Parrot, Waterland, The Crying of Lot 49, Pale
Fire, Slaughterhouse 5, Lanark, Neuromancer, anything by B.S. Johnson – and the
same applies. It’s all about as contemporary as The Smiths, as hip as shoulder
pads, as happening as Betamax video recorders. These are texts which are just
coming to grips with the existence of rock music and television; they mostly
do not dream even of the possibility of the technology and communications media
– mobile phones, email, the internet, computers in every house powerful enough
to put a man on the moon – which today’s undergraduates take for granted.
http://philosophynow.org/issues/58/The_Death_of_Postmodernism_And_Beyond
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