{"id":500,"date":"2009-03-24T22:34:49","date_gmt":"2009-03-25T03:34:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/?p=500"},"modified":"2009-03-24T22:36:00","modified_gmt":"2009-03-25T03:36:00","slug":"500","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/?p=500","title":{"rendered":"Premodernism, modernism, postmodernism, antipostmodernism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>While we&#8217;re all struggling with how <em>Beloved <\/em>challenges our notions of what counts as &#8220;postmodern,&#8221; I think it&#8217;s helpful (as some of you already have done) to go back and look at some of the various theoretical conceptions of postmodernism we&#8217;ve encountered. Hassan and Harvey are good places to begin. Here&#8217;s something else I read recently that might be helpful (or perhaps confusing). Louis Menand recently wrote in the <em>New Yorker<\/em> about Donald Barthelme, an undeniably postmodern writer. But what, Menand asks, is postmodernism again?<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"margin: 0pt;\">Postmodernism is the Swiss Army knife of critical concepts. It&#8217;s definitionally overloaded, and it can do almost any job you need done. This is partly because, like many terms that begin with &#8220;post,&#8221;\u00a0 it is fundamentally ambidextrous.\u00a0 It can mean, &#8220;We\u2019re all modernists now. Modernism has won.&#8221; Or it can mean &#8220;No one can be a modernist now. Modernism is over.&#8221; (Louis Menand, \u201cSaved From Drowning: Barthelme Reconsidered,\u201d <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">New Yorker<\/span> 23 Feb 2009: 68-76)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"margin: 0pt;\">The funny thing about this division and its anchoring in modernism is that it seems to exclude Toni Morrison. In a sense, she precedes it all. With her emphasis on folklore, mythology, and oral storytelling, she really seems to be pre-modern. (Is that what antipostmodern means?)<\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0pt;\">\n<p style=\"margin: 0pt;\">Or is being pre-modern actually a kind of postmodernism (in that it is antogonistic to modernism)?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>While we&#8217;re all struggling with how Beloved challenges our notions of what counts as &#8220;postmodern,&#8221; I think it&#8217;s helpful (as some of you already have done) to go back and look at some of the various theoretical conceptions of postmodernism we&#8217;ve encountered. Hassan and Harvey are good places to begin. Here&#8217;s something else I read &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/?p=500\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Premodernism, modernism, postmodernism, antipostmodernism<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-week-10-beloved"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=500"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":504,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500\/revisions\/504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}