Fredric Jameson

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Fredric Jameson

On this page: {Stuff} {Postmodernism and Consumer Society} {On Language} {Refs} Next: Stuff. {Back to the TOP of this page}

Stuff

"Magical Narratives" Next: Postmodernism essay by FJ. {
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Postmodernism and Consumer Society.

Essay in "Movies and Mass Culture", ed by John Belton, LCCN PN 1995.9.S6.M68.1996, DDN 302.23.43.0973-dc20, ISBN 0.8135.2228.5 (Rutgers, New Brunswick, 1996), Pp. 185-204, (1983). BEGIN BLOCK QUOTE
The concept of postmodernism is not widely accepted or even understood today. Some of the resistance to it may come from the un-familiarity of the works it covers, which cna be found in all the arts [!]: The poetry of John Ashbery, for instance, but also the much simpler talk poetry that came out of the reacation against complex, ironic, academic modernist poetry in the 1960's; the reaction against modern architecture and in particular against the monumental buildings of the International Style, the pop buildings and decoroated sheds celebrated by Robert Venturi in his manifesto, Learning from Las Vegas; Andy Warhol and pop part, but also more recent photo-realism; in music, the moment of John Cage, but also the later synthesis of classical and "popular" styles found in composers such as Philip Glass and Terry Riley and also punk and new-wave rock with such groups as Clash, the Talking Heads, and the Gang of Four; in film everything that comes out of Godard -- contemporary vanguard film and video -- but also a whole new style of commericial or ficion films, which has its equivalent in contemporary novels as well, in which the works of William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, or Ishmael Reed on the one hand, and the French new novel on the other are also to be numbered among the varieties of what can be called post-modernism. This list would seem to make two things clear at once: First, most of the postmoderisms metnoioned a bove as specific reactions against the established forms of high modernism, against this or that [P.185/187] dominant high modernism that conquered the university, the museum, the art gallery network, and the foundations. Those formerly subversive ad embattled styles -- AbEx; the great modernist poetry of Pound, Eliot or Wallace Stevens; the International Style (Le Coubusier, Frank Lloyd Wrigt, Miese); Starvinsky; Joyce; Proust, and Mann -- felt to be scandalous or shocking by our grandparents are, for the generation that arrives at the gate in the 1960's, felt to be the establishment and the enemy -- dead, stifling, canonical, the reified monuments one has to destroy to do anything new. This means that there will be as many differrent forms of post-modernism as there were of high modernisms in place, because the former models. That obviously does not make the job of describing post-modernism as coherent thing any easier, because the unity of this new impulse -- if it has one -- is given not in iteslef bu in the very modernism that it seeks to displace. The second feature of this loist of post-modernisms is the effacement in it of some key boundaries or separations, most notably the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture. This is perhaps the most distressing developmetn of all from an academic stand-point, which has traditionally had a vested interest in preserving a realm of high or elite culture against the surrounding environment of philsitinism, of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader's Digest culture, and in transmitting difficult and complex skills of reading, listening, and seeing to its initiates. But many of the newer post-modernisms have been fascinated precisesly by that whole landscpae of advertising and motesls, of the Las Vegas strip, of the late show and paperback categories of the gothic and the romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery, and the science fiction or fantasy novel. They no longer "quote" such "texts" as a Joyce might have or a Mahler; they incorporate them, to the point where the line between high art and commecrial forms seems increasingly difficult to draw. END BLOCK QUOTE NOTES (this section only) [1] {Back to the TEXT} Next: ???? {Back to the TOP of this page}

On Language

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Refs

Essay in "Movies and Mass Culture", ed by John Belton, LCCN PN 1995.9.S6.M68.1996, DDN 302.23.43.0973-dc20, ISBN 0.8135.2228.5 (Rutgers, New Brunswick, 1996), Pp. 185-204.