Beyond Postmodernism

Reassessment in Literature, Theory, and Culture

Klaus Stierstorfer

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9783110177220
• eBook ISBN: 9783110906813
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

After the veritable hype concerning postmodernism in the 1980s and early 1990s, when questions about when it began, what it means and which texts it comprises were apt to trigger heated discussions, the excitement has notably cooled down at the turn of the century. Voices are now beginning to be heard which seem to suggest a new episteme in the making which points beyond postmodernism, while it remains at the same time very uncertain whether what appears as newness is not rather a return to traditional concepts, theoretical premises, and authorial practices. Contributors to this volume propose to explore new openings and recent developments in anglophone literatures and cultural theories which engage with issues seen to be central in the construction of a postmodern paradigm, but deal with them in ways that promise new openings or a new Zeitgeist.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction: Beyond Postmodernism – Contingent Referentiality?
• The Persistence of the Modernist Heritage
• Why the Postmodern Age Will Last
• A New Sense of Reality? A New Sense of the Text? Exploring Meta-Realism and the Literary-Critical Field
• Hear the Voice of the Artist: Postmodernism as Faustian Bargain
• The Threefold Way: About the Heuristics and Paradigmatics of (Post)Modernist Culture and Literature
• Modernist at Best: Poeticity and Tradition in Hyperpoetry
• Beyond Postmodernist Thirdspace? – The Internet in a Post-Postmodern World
• Re-Reading Postmodernism
• Pragmatic Commitments: Postmodern Realism in Don DeLillo, Maxine Hong Kingston and James Ellroy
• Why Derrida Is Not a Postmodernist
• Paradox vs. Analogy: De Man and Foucault
• ‘Civilization’s Fear of Nature’: Postmodernity, Culture, and Environment in The God of Small Things
• Beyond Postmodernism
• Beyond Postmodernism: Toward an Aesthetic of Trust
• Wobbly Grounds: Postmodernism’s Precarious Footholds in Novels by Malcolm Bradbury, David Parker, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift
• Beyond Indifference: New Departures in British Fiction at the Turn of the 21st Century
• Shades of Gray: The Peculiar Postmodernism of Alasdair Gray
• American Postmodernist Literature at the Turn of the Millennium: the Death and Return of the Subject
• The Anglo-Irish Playwright Martin McDonagh: Postmodernist Zeitgeist as Cliché and a (Re)turn to the Voice of Common Sense
• Extension of the Battle Zone: Ian McEwan’s Cult Novel The Cement Garden
• Contributors
• Index