Postmodern Literature Does Not Exist
Postmodern Literature Does Not Exist

Summary/Abstract: Saying, in effect, that postmodern drama does not exist, that it is a contradiction in terms, is one way of protesting against the kind of fashionable theorizing which prescribes what can only be called various forms of cogito interruptus as a criterion of what constitutes postmodern art, and implies moreover that, thus defined, postmodern art is a welcome democratic development. My own response to these definitions is to claim that what is currently promoted as postmodern art is either not art or it is not postmodern. The literary techniques and devices usually singled out to distinguish the specifically postmodernist outlook are not decisive. For such deliberate interruptions of the processes of knowing, and of feeling, such a dispersal of experience and understanding into a meaningless kinetics of intellectual and aesthetic games at which formal literary devices like, say, heteroglossia, or heterotopia, or any device with this prefix - allegedly aim, are, in fact, contrary to the purpose of art, which still is what it was for Conrad: 'to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions...and ... make you feel,... above all, make you see ...that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask'. There is no postmodern literature, there are only postmodern interpretations of literature.

• Details
• Contents