Linda Hutcheon. A poetics of postmodernism

Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz - UESC

Departamento de Letras e Artes - DLA

Projeto de Extensão Dinamizando o Ensino da Língua Inglesa na UESC

Coordenação geral: Prof. Dr. Isaias Francisco de Carvalho

Fichamentos diplomáticos de Isaias Carvalho

Annotated Reading Records by Isaias Carvalho

Acesse outros autores e obras

HUTCHEON, Linda. A poetics of postmodernism: history, theory, fiction. New York - London: Routledge, 1988.

A - Considerações Gerais:

1. Linda Hutcheon is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is also author of A politics of postmodernism, A theory of Parody, and Irony’s edge.

2. ver MISHRA > [p. 281] “Linda Hutcheon, whose reading of postmodernism as parody has been taken up by so many post-colonial writers, gets her own discussion of the two (postmodernism and post-colonialism) under way by emphasizing their distinct political agendas. Implicit in the diverging political agendas is the question of the definition of the subject. If for postmodernism the object of analysis is the subject as defined by humanism, with its essentialism and mistaken historical verities, its unities and transcendental presence, then for post-colonialism the object is the imperialist subject, the colonized as formed by the processes of imperialism.” >> [p. 282] “In spite of Linda Hutcheon’s warning – one she herself later in the same essay seems to forget in proclaiming the ambiguous post-colonialism of Canadian culture – the project of [The Empire…] is essentially postmodern.”

3. Esta obra tem uma lista bibliográfica de cerca de 600 itens!!

4. Omeros é Metaficção historiográfica em poesia? [ver se BOTELHO aborda a questão]

5. p. 9 e 10 algumas caracterizações de Quaseu?

6. ver texto de Habermas: Modernidade versus Pós-modernidade.

7. ver LYOTARD e HUYSSEN.

8. tentar encontrar CULLER.

B - Termos basilares/vocabulário:

1. Modernidade: nesse texto de VATTIMO: [P. 7] “a modernidade é a época em que se torna valor determinante o facto de ser moderno. [...] Mais ou menos, esta considerção ‘eulógica’, elogiosa do ser moderno é aquilo que, na minha opinião, caracteriza toda a cultura moderna.” (Aurélio): qualidade de moderno: 1. dos tempos atuais (...) 2. Atual, presente, hodierno. (...) 4. Que está na moda. 5. Restr. Diz-se das manifestações artísticas e literárias do séc. XX. (...)

2. Modernismo Estético: (Alta Modernidade) a partir de Baudellaire. X Modernidade: a partir do século XV (Colombo). História.

3. Pós-modernidade: (Aurélio): não contém. (In: HUYSSEN, Andreas. Mapeando o pós-moderno. In HOLANDA, Heloísa Buarque. Pós-modernismo e política. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1991. p. 15-80.): “(...) o pós-moderno não pode ser considerado simples seqüela do modernismo, como o último passo na infindável revolta do modernismo contra si mesmo. (...) ele opera num campo de tensão entre tradição e inovação, conservação e renovação, cultura de massas e grande arte, em que os segundos termos já não são automaticamente privilegiados em relação aos primeiros: um campo de tensão que já não pode ser compreendido mediante categorias como progresso versus reação, direita versus esquerda, presente versus passado, modernismo versus realismo, abstração versus representação, vanguarda versus kitsch. [p. 74] // “[Kristeva] afirma que o pós-moderno é ‘aquela literatura que se escreve com a intenção mais ou menos consciente de expandir o significável e assim o domínio humano.” [p. 70] // “Lyotard (...) define o pós-moderno (...) como um estágio recorrente no interior do modernismo.” [p. 71]

4. Vanguarda: (Aurélio): francês avant-garde. 1. Exérc. Extremidade dianteira de unidade ou subunidade em campanha. 2. Frente, testa, dianteira. (retaguarda é antônimo) 3. A parcela mais consciente e combativa, ou de idéias mais avançadas, de qualquer grupo social. 4. P. ext. Grupo de indivíduos que, por seus conhecimentos ou por uma tendência natural, exerce papel de precursor ou pioneiro em determinado movimento cultural, artístico, científico, etc.

5. Modernidade: (Aurélio): qualidade de moderno: 1. dos tempos atuais (...) 2. Atual, presente, hodierno. (...) 4. Que está na moda. 5. Restr. Diz-se das manifestações artísticas e literárias do séc. XX. (...)

C – Trechos extraídos do texto:

Preface

[ix] […] what would characterize postmodernism in fiction would be what I here call ‘historiographic metaficiton’, those popular paradoxical works like García Márquez’s One Hundred Yars of Solitude […], Rushdie’s Shame, and the list could go on. \\ [x] [lista e resumo de obras anteriores de HUTCHEON: Narcissistic Narrative and A Theory of Parody.] \\ There is no dialectic in the postmodern: the self-reflexive remains distinct from its traditionally accepted contrary – the historio-political context in which it is embedded. \\ [x-xi] And the contradictions of the self-reflexive and the historical can be found in Shakespeare’s history plays, not to mention Don Quixote. What is newer is the constant attendant irony of the context of the postmodern version of these contradictions and also their obsessively recurring presence as well. [xii] Part I ends with a detailed consideration of what is, in fact, the guiding concern of the entire book: the problematizing of history by postmodernism. Despite its detractors, the postmodern is not ahistorical or dehistoricized, though it does question our (perhaps unacknowledged) assumptions about what constitutes historical knowledge. Neither is it nostalgic or antiquarian in its critical revisiting of history. [xii-xiii] Postmodernism teaches that all cultural practices have an ideological subtext which determines the conditions of the very possibility of their production of meaning. And, in art, it does so by leaving overt the contradictions between its self-reflexivity and its historical grounding. [xiii] This study is an attempt to see what happens when culture is challenged from within: challenged or questioned or contested, but not imploded.

PART I

1 – Theorizing the postmodern: towards a poetics

[3] [Postmodernism] is usually accompanied by a grand flourish of negativized rhetoric: we hear of discontinuity, disruption, dislocation, decentrign, indeterminacy, and antitotalization. What all these words literally do (precisely by their disavowing prefixes – dis, de, in, anti) is incorporate that which they aim to contest – as does, I supoose, the term postmodernism itself. […] I would like to begin by arguing that, for me, postmodernism is a contradictory phenomenon, one that uses and abuses, installs and then subverts, the very concepts it challenges – be it in architecture, literature, painting, sculpture, film, video, dance, TV, music, philosophy, aesthetic theory, psyshoanalysis, linguistics, or historiography. […] What I want to avoid are those polemical generalizations – often by those inimical to postmodernism: Jameson (1984a), Eagleton (1985), Newman (1985) – that leave us guessing about just what it is that is being called postmodernist, though never in doubt as to its undesirability. [4] […] postmodernism cannot simply be used as a synonym for the contemporary. And it does not really describe an international cultural phenomenon, for it is primarily European and American (North and South). [not Central!!!] [5] While all forms of contemporary art and thought offer examples of this kind of postmodernist contradiction, this book (like most other on the subject) will be privileging the novel genre, and one form in particular, a form that I want to call ‘historiographic metafiction’. By this I mean those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages […]. In most of the critical work on postmodernism, it is narrative – be it in literature, history, or theory – that has usually been the major focus of attention. Historiographic metaficiotn incorporates all three of these domains […]. Such labeling [‘paramodernist’ and ‘midfiction’] is another mark of the inherent contradictoriness of historiographic metafiction, for it always works within conventions in order to subvert them. [7] [In postmodernism] the familiar humanist separation of art and life (or human imagination and order versus chaos’ and disorder) no longer holds. [8] Perhaps it is another inheritance form the 1960s to believe that challenging and questioning are positive values (even if solutions to problems are not offered), for the knowledge derived from such inquiry may be the only possible condition of change. [9] What precisely, though, is being challenged by postmodernism? First of all, institutions have come under scrutiny: from the media to the university, from museums to theaters. \\ The borders between literary genres have become fluid: who can tell anymore what the limits are between the novel and the short story collection […], the novel and the long poem [Omeros?] […], the novel and autobiography […], the novel and history […], the novel and biography […]? But, in any […] example, the conventions or the two genres are played off against each other; there is no simple, unproblematic merging. [11] Parody is a perfect postmodern form, in some senses, for it paradoxically both incorporates and challenges that which it parodies. [Omeros tanto homenageia quanto desconstrói Homero?] [...] While theorists like Jameson (1983, 114-19) see this loss of the modernist unique, individual style as a negative, as an imprisoning of the text in the past through pastiche, it has been seen by postmodern artists as a liberating challenge to a definition of subjectivity and creativity that has for too long ignored the role of history in art and thought. [12] […] from the decentered perspective, the ‘marginal’ and what I will be calling (Chapter 4) the ‘ex-centric’ (be it in class, race, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnicity) take on new significance in the light of the implied recognition that our culture is not really the homogeneous monolith (that is middle-class, male, heterosexual, white, western) we might have assumed. […] Culture (with a capital C and in the singular) has become cultures (uncapitalized and plural), as documented at length by our social scientists. And this appears to be happening in spite of – and, I would argue, maybe even because of – the homogenizing impulse of the consumer society of late capitalism: yet another postmodern contradiction. \\ Postmodernism is careful not to make the marginal into a new center […]. Any certainties we do have are […] ‘positional’, that is, derived from complex networks of local and contingent conditions. Those humanistic principles [value, order, meaning, control, and identity] are still operative in our culture, but form many they are no longer seen as eternal and unchallengeable. [14] […] I see [postmodernism] as an ongoing cultural process or activity, and I think that what we need, more than a fixed and fixing definition, is a ‘poetics’, an open, ever-changing theoretical structure by which to order both our cultural knowledge and our critical procedures. This would not be a poetics in the structuralist sense of the word, but would go beyond the study of literary discourse to the study of cultural practice and theory. [a switch form literature\art to culture: cultural studies; crítica cultural?] [16] [In postmodern historiographic metafiction] History is not made obsolete: it is, however, being rethought – as a human construct. And in arguing that history does not exist except as text, it does not stupidly and ‘gleefully’ deny that the past existed, but only that its accessibility to us now is entirely conditioned by textuality. \\ Certainly women and Afro-American artists’ use of parody to challenge the male white tradition form within, to use irony to implicate and yet to critique, is distinctly paradoxical and postmodernist. [18] Postmodernism’s relation to modernism is, therefore, typically contradictory, as we shall see in Chapter 3. it marks neither a simple and radical break from it nor a straightforward continuity with it: it is both and neither. And this would be the case in aesthetic, philosophical, or ideological terms.