Productive Postmodernism Consuming Histories and Cultural Studies

Investigates a broad range of contemporary fiction, film, and architecture to address the role of history in postmodern cultural productions.
Productive Postmodernism addresses the differing accounts of postmodernism found in the work of Fredric Jameson and Linda Hutcheon, a debate that centers around the two theorists' senses of pastiche and parody. For Jameson, postmodern texts are ahistorical, playing with pastiched images and aesthetic forms, and are therefore unable to provide a critical purchase on culture and capital. For Hutcheon, postmodern fiction and architecture remain political, opening spaces for social critique through a parody that deconstructs official history. Thinking in the space between these two sharply different positions, the essays in this collection investigate a broad range of contemporary fiction, film, and architecture-from such narratives as Don DeLillo's Libra, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, to the vastly different spaces of Las Vegas casinos and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum-in order to ask what the cultural work of a postmodern aesthetic might be.

About the author

John N. Duvall is Associate Professor of English at Purdue University and the author of The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness and Faulkner's Marginal Couple: Invisible, Outlaw, and Unspeakable Communities.

Product details

• Assisted by: John N. Duvall (Editor), John N Duvall (Editor), Duvall John N. (Editor), Linda Hutcheon (Afterword)
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Content: Book
• Product form: Hardback
• Publication date: 21.12.2001
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies
• EAN: 9780791451939
• ISBN: 978-0-7914-5193-9
• Pages: 238
• Dimensions (packing): 15.2 x 22.9 x 2.5 cm
• Weight (packing): 431 g
• Series: Suny Series in Postmodern Cult; Suny Postmodern Culture; SUNY series in Postmodern Culture
• Subjects: Literaturtheorie, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture, Cultural Studies, LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory, PHILOSOPHY / Aesthetics, Literature - Classics / Criticism, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, Philosophie Ästhetik