Why are names like Barthes, Derrida, Benjamin, Foucault, Lukacs, Kristeva, Althusser, Lacan, Habermas, Bloom, Jameson, invested with the kind of glamour that literary intellectuals used to accord only to the great imaginative writers of their own time.
Is it because the flag under which they campaign, Postmodernism, is a form of literary burlesque which cuts the ground under the feet of some particular mentor – a Tolstoy, a Goethe, a Paul Klee or a Hemingway. Is it because Post-Modernism (to the extent that it has a credo) stresses the unreliability of facts and the supremacy of fictions?
Yet Postmodernism or not, we all bag inheritances, decorative fragments from earlier cultures.
In Patrick Parrinder’s account of the major change from Theory (the old school) and Postmodernism the new kids on the block in contemporary culture, the theorist is seen as a presumptuous upstart who has forgotten his place.
Formerly, the traditional role of the critic was to act as middleman between author and reader – ‘making sense’ of difficult or elusive novels, poems and plays, explaining, evaluating, showing the significance of. You have witnessed I am sure, the teacher who stands up there and knows how to interpret the poem.
In this older dispensation, a firm pecking order is in place: the major author, the great work, are clearly more important than the critical commentator, and the subservient critic accepts this position with becoming modesty, a sense that it is not only inevitable but fitting.
In Parrinder’s words, ‘the critic or theorist plays a secondary or subordinate role, as expositor, advocate, and archivist of the poet’s thoughts. There is an understood hierarchy.’
It is precisely this traditional hierarchy that the new school of metatheorists have challenged. The critical commentator is no longer the servant of the imaginative writer. As Roland Barthes has put it, there is a need to free the critic from the role of ‘judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder’. The Author – in the sense of the ultimate authority on the works he has produced – is dead, and the reader is at last liberated from the unrewarding labour of construing the intended meaning of his texts
However the polemics of the metatheorists against theory, PM must find that they themselves are species of theory. They are in effect, polemicists against polemics. The new school, Postmodernism of metatheory rail against the old school of theorists and this war the the pretensions of intelligence and culture to Olympian authority are denounced by a cultivated intellectual in a tone of still more peremptory Olympian authority.
which Orwell (in his essay on Dickens) described as ‘a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls’. In return the old school theorists by way of a conservative mindset attack the hegemonic pretensions of metatheoretical discourse.
Rather than coming to terms with the nature of metatheory's appeal to a generation of readers.
Why does the meta fiction of Pynchon, Brautigan, Barth and Barthelme’ have such a winning way with reders? John Barth in the Seventies proclaimed that he welcomed the trend to what Borges had called ‘irrealism’ because ‘unlike those critics who regard realism as what literature has been aiming at all along, I tend to regard it as a kind of aberration in the history of literature.’
‘Metafiction’
There is a rich vein of contemporary fiction which can be classified as fantasy but simply cannot be judged by mimetic standards or ‘the Aristotelian processes of probability and necessity’. It is most often called ‘metafiction’, though none of the names used for it has really become generally accepted. It tends to deliberate imaginative excess; to extreme self-consciousness and parody in tone and technique; to randomness and absurdity in depicted action; to the subhumanising of character.
The god of its creation is not Joyce’s aloof and indifferent deity paring his fingernails but a more actively mocking, cynical, even cruel manipulator of man’s fate. Its literary precursors are Kafka and Beckett. The apparent nihilism and pervasive sense of futility of this vision is undercut by its comic style, as though Marx’s dictum about tragic history repeating itself as farce had been fully understood and accepted with a shrug of the shoulders. Such forms of fictional fantasy are disturbing because they seem to deny the possibility of dignified and significant action. They suggest an aleatory, post-humanist dispensation in which nothing that happens could conceivably matter
The spirit of revolt is frequently mocking, playful, anti-authoritarian yet paradoxically authoritative. It breathes the air of scepticism and imaginative freedom and treats all forms of writing as performance rather than expression. It claims the Author is dead yet gives the writer unprecedented licence. Such a way of looking at the world is new enough to demand to be understood and judged by new standards.
When the history of late 20th-century literary culture comes to be written, the extraordinary vogue of metatheoretical works will surely require explanation. What can account for the obsessive concern with theory in cultural commentary over the last twenty years?
Is it because the flag under which they campaign, Postmodernism, is a form of literary burlesque which cuts the ground under the feet of some particular mentor – a Tolstoy, a Goethe, a Paul Klee or a Hemingway. Is it because Post-Modernism (to the extent that it has a credo) stresses the unreliability of facts and the supremacy of fictions?
Yet Postmodernism or not, we all bag inheritances, decorative fragments from earlier cultures.
In Patrick Parrinder’s account of the major change from Theory (the old school) and Postmodernism the new kids on the block in contemporary culture, the theorist is seen as a presumptuous upstart who has forgotten his place.
Formerly, the traditional role of the critic was to act as middleman between author and reader – ‘making sense’ of difficult or elusive novels, poems and plays, explaining, evaluating, showing the significance of. You have witnessed I am sure, the teacher who stands up there and knows how to interpret the poem.
In this older dispensation, a firm pecking order is in place: the major author, the great work, are clearly more important than the critical commentator, and the subservient critic accepts this position with becoming modesty, a sense that it is not only inevitable but fitting.
In Parrinder’s words, ‘the critic or theorist plays a secondary or subordinate role, as expositor, advocate, and archivist of the poet’s thoughts. There is an understood hierarchy.’
It is precisely this traditional hierarchy that the new school of metatheorists have challenged. The critical commentator is no longer the servant of the imaginative writer. As Roland Barthes has put it, there is a need to free the critic from the role of ‘judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder’. The Author – in the sense of the ultimate authority on the works he has produced – is dead, and the reader is at last liberated from the unrewarding labour of construing the intended meaning of his texts
However the polemics of the metatheorists against theory, PM must find that they themselves are species of theory. They are in effect, polemicists against polemics. The new school, Postmodernism of metatheory rail against the old school of theorists and this war the the pretensions of intelligence and culture to Olympian authority are denounced by a cultivated intellectual in a tone of still more peremptory Olympian authority.
which Orwell (in his essay on Dickens) described as ‘a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls’. In return the old school theorists by way of a conservative mindset attack the hegemonic pretensions of metatheoretical discourse.
Rather than coming to terms with the nature of metatheory's appeal to a generation of readers.
Why does the meta fiction of Pynchon, Brautigan, Barth and Barthelme’ have such a winning way with reders? John Barth in the Seventies proclaimed that he welcomed the trend to what Borges had called ‘irrealism’ because ‘unlike those critics who regard realism as what literature has been aiming at all along, I tend to regard it as a kind of aberration in the history of literature.’
‘Metafiction’
There is a rich vein of contemporary fiction which can be classified as fantasy but simply cannot be judged by mimetic standards or ‘the Aristotelian processes of probability and necessity’. It is most often called ‘metafiction’, though none of the names used for it has really become generally accepted. It tends to deliberate imaginative excess; to extreme self-consciousness and parody in tone and technique; to randomness and absurdity in depicted action; to the subhumanising of character.
The god of its creation is not Joyce’s aloof and indifferent deity paring his fingernails but a more actively mocking, cynical, even cruel manipulator of man’s fate. Its literary precursors are Kafka and Beckett. The apparent nihilism and pervasive sense of futility of this vision is undercut by its comic style, as though Marx’s dictum about tragic history repeating itself as farce had been fully understood and accepted with a shrug of the shoulders. Such forms of fictional fantasy are disturbing because they seem to deny the possibility of dignified and significant action. They suggest an aleatory, post-humanist dispensation in which nothing that happens could conceivably matter
The spirit of revolt is frequently mocking, playful, anti-authoritarian yet paradoxically authoritative. It breathes the air of scepticism and imaginative freedom and treats all forms of writing as performance rather than expression. It claims the Author is dead yet gives the writer unprecedented licence. Such a way of looking at the world is new enough to demand to be understood and judged by new standards.
When the history of late 20th-century literary culture comes to be written, the extraordinary vogue of metatheoretical works will surely require explanation. What can account for the obsessive concern with theory in cultural commentary over the last twenty years?
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