BOOKS RE-VISITED: TRANSLATING ZSUZSA RAKOVSZKY AND THE ART OF STORYTELLING
BOOKS RE-VISITED: TRANSLATING ZSUZSA RAKOVSZKY AND THE ART OF STORYTELLING

Summary/Abstract: In his well-known book Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Frederic Jameson refers to the post-literacy of late capitalist culture as a condition in which literature can aspire to little more than the status of pastiche. All too self-conscious of the nature of writing as a tissue of citations, of déja lu, the postmodern author can do little more than foreground, through the citation of or allusion to established styles, his or her own powerlesness to transcend the conventions of the “literary” text. The gesture of borrowing seems reminiscent of parody, but unlike parody, pastiche in Jameson’s reading is devoid of any ulterior motives. It lacks any confidence in its own ability to reestablish, through irony, some sort of literary or aesthetic value. Ultimately it becomes, according to Jameson, little more (and at the same time nothing less) than “the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past.”

• Details
• Contents