Introduction: After Postmodernism

Abstract

Twentieth-Century Literature propose new models for understanding contem porary fiction in the wake o f postm od ernism 's waning influence.By now, as Jeremy Green notes, declarations o f postm odernism 's demise have becom e a critical com m onplace (19-24).T h e intellectual historian M insoo Kang provides a usefully succinct ex ample, dating "the death knell o f postm odernism in the U S " on "June 18, 1993," the date that the John M cT iernan-directed A rnold Schwarzeneg ger vehicle The Last Action Hero brought "the standard [postmodern] devices o f self-reference, ironic satire, and playing w ith m ultiple levels o f reality" to the multiplex."[I]n the US," Kang wryly notes,"there's no surer sign o f an intellectual idea's final demise than its total appropriation by mass culture."In this formulation, postm odernism was done in by its own success.Postm odern w riters had enjoyed a notorious and w ild ride o f radical challenge to institutionalized art and its generic categories in the 1970s and 1980s, but their ironic, skeptical, and knowing (yet celebratory) juxtapositions o f high and low, and their rejection o f objective (or politi cal) reality as a significant object o r lim it for representation, no longer w orked by the 1990s.Mass culture itself had appropriated the aesthetics o f postm odernism , w hich-now playing m onotonously on everyone's television and com puter screens-tu rn ed ou t to be as reproducible as its creators had contem ptuously said all previous art was.At least that's one way to tell the story.B ut w hile there are good rea sons, as the contributors to this issue show, for arguing that contem porary fiction is no longer adequately described as postm odern, this particular narrative o f postm odernism 's decline has three interrelated problems.First and perhaps m ost obviously, it perpetuates a hierarchical view o f culture that confuses aesthetic questions about literary form w ith sociological

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