Practicing Postmodernism/Reading Modernism

by Waugh, Patricia

• ISBN13: 9780340550502
• ISBN10: 0340550503
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1992-09-03
• Publisher: Hodder Education Publishers

Summary

Instead of accepting postmodernism on its own terms as a radical break with previous Western modes of knowledge and representation, it is more fruitful, Patricia Waugh argues, to view it as a late phase in a tradition of aestheticist thought inaugurated by philosophers such as Kant and embodied in Romantic and modernist art.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
A Note on Organization
Reading Postmodernism: Modernity and its Discontents	p. 1
Introducing Postmodernism: The Romance of the Aesthetic and Post-Romantic Aesthetics	p. 3
Apocalyse Now
From Autonomy to Aestheticism: Tradition and Innovation
Romanticism to Postmodernism: Radical Fictionality and Being There
The Poetics of the Sublime: Presenting the Unpresentable	p. 25
New Contexts for Lyotard's Postmodernism
Enlightenment: Exhausted or Incomplete?
Terror and the Sublime: The Art of the Unpresentable
The Concept Versus the Luminous Detail: Against Totality
Periodising the Postmodern: Ism as Fiery Particle	p. 37
Introduction: Constructing the Dominant
The Cultural Logic of Jameson's Postmodernism
Postmodernism as Aesthetic Technique: A View from Theory	p. 49
The Question of Value: Salman Rushdie's Shame
Representation and Postmodern Anti-Foundationalism
History and Subjectivity in the Aesthetic Mode of the Postmodern: Reading Alice Walker's The Color Purple
Raising the Dead: Bringing back The Author
The Violence of Being Modern: Postmodernism as Critique of Enlightenment	p. 66
Introduction: Kant and Enlightenment
Is Deconstruction a Postmodernism?
Modernity and the Critique of Instrumental Reason
Postmodernity in Modernity: Wasteland
The Fictional Critique of Enlightenment: Reading Doris Lessing's Memoirs of a Survivor
Postmodernism Reading Modernism: Challenging Autonomy	p. 87
Modernism and Enlightenment: Reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness	p. 89
Reconstructing Modernism: Life as Art	p. 99
Aesthetic Autonomy: From Kant to New Criticism
The Core of Darkness: Autonomy Theory and Virginia Woolf
Life as Art: Postmodernism reading To the Lighthouse
Modernism, Postmodernism, Gender: The View From Feminism	p. 119
Founding Assumptions: Feminism and Postmodernism
Alternative Histories
Rethinking Subjectivity and Aesthetics: Alternative Feminist Positions
Psychoanalysis, Gender and Aesthetics
From Impersonality to Situatedness: Reading T. S. Eliot on Tradition	p. 138
Ethics and the Postmodernity of Parody: Reading James Joyce's Ulysses	p. 148
Select Bibliography	p. 165
Index	p. 174
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