DURABILITY AND TRANSIENCE IN THE TYPOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL PREFIX “POST”: REVISITING THE MODERNIST AND POSTMODERNIST VERSIONS OF THE ARTISTIC PASTORA
DURABILITY AND TRANSIENCE IN THE TYPOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL PREFIX “POST”: REVISITING THE MODERNIST AND POSTMODERNIST VERSIONS OF THE ARTISTIC PASTORA

Summary/Abstract: We are interested in the reconciliation made possible in modern (literary) art between durability and transience, trying to ignore the power of the prefix “post-" (in “post-modernism", as a marker of transience within the durable field of modernity.) We interrogate a number of canonical 20th c. British literature texts from the point of view of their handling of intertextuality, which actualizes the durable tradition, charging the moment with it. To account for the way intertextual reference works in recent literature, the paper draws upon the philosophy of language distinction made over 100 years ago by Bertrand Russell’s “On Denotation”, between acquaintance and knowledge about, between “the things we have presentations of, and the things we only reach by means of denoting phrases” respectively. Modern, artistic reference aims at creating uniquely referring proper names (or singularities), from universal designations - as we learn from Thierry de Duve’s philosophy of (post)-modern(ist) art in Kant after Duchamp. But as for all proper names, the relationship with tradition as mediated by intertextuality is paradoxical, if not really unaccountable. In the applicative part of the paper, we illustrate the uses of intertextuality in high modernism and post-modernism, trying to compare them and show how they differ.

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