From: "WESLEY_MATHEW_WHITE" <WMW96A-AT-Stu.ChiHE.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 17:05:02 +0000
Subject: Re: Vs: a puddle of Irony - please delete for the benefit of culture at large.


I said to delete this for the benefit of culture, and here everyone is 
duplicating it...

My post is spawning hybrid versions of itself, bearing it's 
contraterms with it, in a rather Bakhtin manner I feel.

Smugly,

Wes

> > i despise myself for trying to say what post-modernism or post-
> > modern literature is. i'm not sure I believe in it. pm in no way
> > rejects modernism, it only ever builds on it. 
> This is, from my learning, a very severe misinterpretation. I think it
> is fairer and clearer to say it is both: it rejects and builds on
> modernism. It knows that to reject is to reflect, by opposing you
> include the opposite in your conception. It also uses
> self-consciousness, self-reflexiveness as a mode to undermine any
> "absolutisms" its expression may fall into because of its
> belief/understanding of the nature of language/communication. Its
> misleading to say what it is and isn't but yet there's a need to attempt
> to define it. Most of the conceptualizing about it qualifies previous
> conceptualizations in an intriguingly neverending sort of way. to an
> extent not met before in the process of defining a moment in history
> while still in it, probably because so often that conceptualization is
> rooted in a disbelief in the closure of any meaning or definition. There
> often seems to be a very quiet, implicit value that closure is a bad,
> maybe even dangerous thing...
> 
> what some p-mism
> > does reject from modernism (but simultaneously from all previous
> > forms of expression) is the idea that it is possible to accurately
> > represent "the real world" or any aspects of it through signs.
> 
> add to this that the "reality" or "real world" it tries to represent is
> what is constructed through the signs (i.e. language) and that system is
> full of gaps, deferalls of meaning and identity, and is a system based
> on differences not identity ("differance"-Derrida).
> > 
> > believe that if you believe that any person would sit down and try to
> > write a novel without feeling that it reflected anything.
> 
> this is rather more Beckett-like: _Watt_ or _Waiting for Godot_ which
> academics still classify as Modernist literature. Jeanette Winterson 
> writes notably PoMo novels which have a much more recognizable
> story-line than Beckett's work.
> > wes, lost in a stupor of contradictory half baked semi-critical
> > thought.
> > 
> > sorry
> > 
> >      --- from list avant-garde-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
> 
> -- 
> Carol L. Hamshaw
> Administrator
> Edgewise ElectroLit Centre
> http://www.edgewisecafe.org
> 
> 
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