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Linda Hutcheon - A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988)

PART I
Preface
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does not want to glorify postmodernism but wants to provide a study of a current cultural phenomenon that
deserves a critical attention
focuses on architecture and by analogy on fiction by Fowles, Marquez, Doctorow, Grass, Rushdie
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Theorizing the postmodern: toward a poetics
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definitions of PM are usually negative → they describe what it destroys or avoids (decentering, disruption,
POST-modernism …)
acc to LH, PM lives off contradictions – it uses and abuses the very concepts it abuses
there are temporal definitions (after 1945, 1960
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acc to LH, PM is „fundamentally contradictory, resolutely historical, and inescapably political)
– → „the presence of the past“
in her work, LH privileges the novel genre, particularly HISTORIOGRAPHIC METAFICTION
– → PM is typical for its theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs, and
opens the grounds for its rethinking
uniformization of mass culture is what PM challenges
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Parody seems to offer a perspective on the present and the past
which allows an artist to speak TO a discourse from WITHIN it
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Limiting the PM: the paradoxical aftermath of modernism
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PM´s relationship with contemporary mass culture is not just one of implication, it is also of critique
PM is ex-centric, off-centered
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Decentering the PM: the ex-centric
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PM puts into question all the concepts associated with liberal humanism: autonomy, transcendence, certainty,
unity, hierarchy
the notion of center is questioned, and with it the notion of oneness, origin
– → the center starts to give way, the totalizing universalization begins to self-deconstruct
– → the traditional narrative forms (with their typical closures of death, marriage, etc
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Contextualizing the PM: enunciation and the revenge of ´parole´
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PM sees both the inscribing and subverting of the notions of objectivity and linguistic transparency that deny
the „enunciating subject“
may PM works support the importance of the act of reading
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Historicizing the PM: the problematizing of history
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in PM, history is „provisional, indeterminable“
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Historiographic metafiction: ´the pastime of past time´
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the historical and the literary used to be considered branches of the same tree of learning (19th cen), then came
the SEPARATION (fact X fiction)
– PM challenged this separation, it sees both as linguistic constructs, and also as intertextual
both HISTORY and FICTION have always been notoriously porous → they may be easily expanded by other
genres (travel tale etc
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), not a single TRUTH (sg
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Intertextuality, parody and the discourse of history
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intertextuality replaces the challenged author-text relationship with one between reader and text, one that
situates the locus of textual meaning within the history of discourse itself
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It is only as part of prior discourses
that any text derives its meaning
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when linked with satire (like in the work of Vonnegut), parody can certainly také on more precisely ideological
dimensions
in PM, there are, for instance, parodic references to the earlier, 19th cen or classic American literature
Skvorecky, in Dvorak in Love, is aware that Dvorak´s work foreshadows the PM practice in the mixing of
popular and high art forms
– → similarly, historiographic metafiction draws upon any signifying practices it can find operative in a
society and it milks them for all they are worth → mixture of genres, discourses
– PARADOX: PM works are terrified of totalizing plotting, but they manifest their agenda in a way that
is defined by over-plotting and overdetermined intertextual self-reference

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LH states that interestingly, White had more impact in literary
than in historical circles
in PM literature, referential fallacy is often used, i
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the references are clearly fictive and intertextual
PM believes that reality does exist, but it is unavoidably ordered by the concepts of human understanding
Jean-Francois Lytoard – an important analyst of PM who has consistently addressed the question of reference
– → for Lyotard, „language does not articulate the meaning of the world; it constantly excludes what it
tries to grasp“
goes through a lot of theorists´ approaches to the problem of reference

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– → PM novels (like the French L
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Talks about the plot
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Discourse, power, ideology: humanism and postmodernism
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in PM historiographic metafiction, the ideological and the aesthetic have turned out to be inseparable
moreover, PM understands that ideology both constructs and is constructed by the way in which we live our
role in the social totality and by the way we represent that process in art
current critical discourse has moved to a notion of ideology as a general process of production of meaning
the question of power-structure, power-relations and the society we live in
– → much of this goes against the liberal humanist idea of art as eternal and universal
PM novels usually install the power and then contest it – in Midnights Children, a center is created at first
(India) and then it is contested
art and ideology have a long history of mutual interaction that UNDERCUTS THE HUMANIST
SEPARATION OF THE TWO
this is, of course, not new
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PM raises the uncomfortable question of the ideological power behind basic aesthetic issues such as that
of representation: whose reality is being represented?
What PM has done, in its focus on its own context, is to foreground the way we talk and write within certain
social, historical and institutional frameworks – it has made us aware of DISCOURSE
discourse is both an instrument and an effect of power – our very notion of knowledge goes through the
discourse that is created by someone else than us
Foucault: „Power is omnipresent, not because it embracess all human action, but because it is constantly being
produced
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Political double-talk
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paradox and contradictions are the leading features of PM
PM re-negotiates the borders between the public and the personal, but aims to replace individualistic idealism
with institutional analysis → „cultural politics“ cannot be separated from „real“ politics or practical life
questioning of authority is typical of PM - „PM thinkers and artists today grew up (…) increasingly suspicious
of heroes, crusades, and easy idealism“
with the help of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and others, the PM argues that what we so valued is a
construct, not a given, and, in addition, a construct that occupies a relation of power in our culture
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Typically paradoxical, the PM practice challenges AND exploits the
commodification of art by consumer culture
PM challenges received ideas, but it also acknowledges the power of those ideas and is willing to exploit that
power i order to effect its own critique
what PM and Marxism share is that they are both engaged in contextualized, institutional critique
due to its affiliation with the 60s, PM was often sees and closely related to leftist ideals, but LH examines this
issue and finds that there are some similarities but there are also differences

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The PM paradoxes
both reveal and question prevailing norms, and they can do so because they incarnate both processes they teach
that for example, representation cannot be avoided, but it can be studied to show how it legitimates certain
kinds of knowledge and, therefore, certain kinds of power
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In other words, it is
not that representations possess an inherently ideological content but that they carry out an ideological function
in determining the production of meaning
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