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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.
"Although there are many books on postmodernism, I don't know of any that theorize Jameson and Hutcheon this way or that bring history-fiction-architecture together so provocatively. I like the way these essays, all of them, put theory into practice." — Dawne McCance, author of Posts: Re Addressing the Ethical
"The text articulates well the shift from postmodernism as a de(con)structive fragmenting theory/act (as it is so often in both popular and academic contexts) to a productive fragmenting theory/act. The book contributes to the field of postmodern theory as well as to the literary, architectural, historical, and aesthetic fields tapped into through the individual essays." — Beth Martin Birky, Goshen College
List of Illustrations
Preface
1. Troping History: Modernist Residue in Jameson's Pastiche and Hutcheon's Parody
John N. Duvall
2. Postmodernism and History: Complicitous Critique and the Political Unconscious
Thomas Carmichael
Postmodernism, Fiction, History
3. A Mother (and a Son, and a Brother, and a Wife, et al.) in History: Stories Galore in Libra and the Warren Commission Report
Stacey Olster
4. Donald Barthelme and the President of the United States
Michael Zeitlin
5. "Postmodern Blackness": Toni Morrison's Beloved and the End of History
Kimberly Chabot Davis
6. Historiographic Metafiction and the Celebration of Differences: Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo
W. Lawrence Hogue
7. Troping the Renaissance: Postmodern Historiography and Early Modern History
Paul Budra
Postmodernism, Architecture, History
8. Los Angeles, 2019: Two Tales of a City
Kevin R. McNamara
9. Postmodern Casinos
Shelton Waldrep
10. Postmodernism and Holocaust Memory: Productive Tensions in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
Nancy J. Peterson
Afterword: "Acting from the Midst of Identities": Questions from Linda Hutcheon
Works Cited
Contributors
Index