RE: Reading the Postmodern

Robert David Stacey

• Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780776619231
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

It would be difficult to exaggerate the worldwide impact of postmodernism on the fields of cultural production and the social sciences over the last quarter century—even if the concept has been understood in various, even contradictory, ways. An interest in postmodernism and postmodernity has been especially strong in Canada, in part thanks to the country's non-monolithic approach to history and its multicultural understanding of nationalism, which seems to align with the decentralized, plural, and open-ended pursuit of truth as a multiple possibility as outlined by Jean-François Lyotard. In fact, long before Lyotard published his influential work The Postmodern Condition in 1979, Canadian writers and critics were employing the term to describe a new kind of writing.

RE: Reading the Postmodern marks a first cautious step toward a history of Canadian postmodernism, exploring the development of the idea of the postmodern and debates about its meaning and its applicability to various genres of Canadian writing, and charting its decline in recent years as a favoured critical trope.

INDEX

“n” refers to note; “f” to figure

A

ABC: The Aleph Beth (Nichol), 163, 179

About Looking (Berger), 233, 235, 247

Absurdists, 6

Acorn, Milton, 304, 319

Adorno, Theodor, 61

Minima Moralia, 60, 83

Negative Dialectics, 160, 176

Aesthetics (Hegel), 65–66, 83

Afterlife of George Cartwright (Steffler), 129, 149

Ahmad, Sara, 9

Alexis, André, 106, 119

Alibi (Kroetsch), 135, 144, 148

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll), 290

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (film) (Hepworth), 43

“The Allegorical Impulse” (Owens), xxxvii, 274, 291

allegory, 272–82, 284–88

Altieri, Charles, 139

American

avant-gardist, 158

critics, xxxiii, 161

journal boundary 2, xv

language, 138

l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poetry, xxiv

Language writers, 322

literature, 2

Pantheon and Fantagraphics, 45

poetry, 3, 138

postmodernism, xxix–xxx, 133, 139–40

postmodern theorist, 50

romanticists, 67

slave narrative, 49

theorists, xxx, 96, 156

traditions, 3

“American Alibis: A Search for Kroetsch’s Postmodernism” (Davey), 147

Americanization of Canadian literature, 116

“A Multiphasic Personality Inventory,” 108

Ana Historic (Marlatt), 187, 201

Anglo-American

critical communities, 123

modernism, 19

poetry, 25

Anglo-Saxon systematization, 205

Anil’s Ghost (Ondaatje), 114

Another Way of Telling (Berger and Mohr), 229, 231, 234, 247

anthropomorphized language, 72

“The Anti-Anaesthetic” (Mouré), 345–46, 357

anti-authoritarian postmodernism, 192

anti-mimetic

agenda, 87

a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Post–, Marked Canada
• Retrospections
• En garde! Traditions, Counter-traditions, Anti-traditions
• Historicities
• Publics
• Contributor Biographies
• Index
• Copyright