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Postmodern | Postwar â" and After
Rethinking American Literature
By Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek, Daniel Worden University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2016 University of Iowa Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-428-9
CHAPTER 1
PART I
DIALOGUE
ANDREW HOBEREK
with
SAMUEL COHEN
AMY J. ELIAS
MARY ESTEVE
MATTHEW HART
DAVID JAMES
POSTMODERN, POSTWAR, CONTEMPORARY
A Dialogue on the Field
What follows is a partial and inconclusive conversation about the state of post-1945 literary studies at the present moment. It is partial and inconclusive in the way that all conversations are, since it brings together a particular group of people to discuss matters on which they do not — as becomes clear almost immediately — always agree.
The aim of the conversation was to obtain a snapshot of the study of post–World War II literature that would touch upon the institutional frameworks shaping the field. To that end, in early 2013 I asked a group of people if they would agree to answer a series of questions collaboratively over e-mail. Because of their schedules, the conversation went on until summer 2014. The participants were Mary Esteve, a founding member of the group Post•45 and an editor of its online journal; Amy J. Elias, one of the founders of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP); Matthew Hart, then president of ASAP and one of the editors of the Columbia University Press book series Literature Now; David James, coeditor with Hart and Rebecca Walkowitz of Literature Now; and Sam Cohen, editor of the University of Iowa Press series The New American Canon. Each of these people, as the interview makes clear, necessarily approaches the study of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century literature with an awareness of the organizational structures in which research is produced and circulates.
This generates, of course, a version of the field very different from one that would have drawn, say, on proponents of different methodologies (nonsymptomatic reading, digital humanities) or critical schools (affective criticism, transnational studies, the critique of neoliberalism). While all of these differences of approach matter deeply to the study of post-1945 literature, Daniel, Jason, and I thought — in keeping with the overall aims of this volume — that what makes the field distinctive is its relatively recent solidification and the consequent emergence of new groups and new publishing venues for those working within it.
Of course, even as an institutional snapshot this conversation leaves things out — perhaps most important the rise of semiacademic publishing venues like the Los Angeles Review of Books and Public Books — fora that stress contemporary writing and that encourage the academics who contribute to them to write in a more public way. That's another conversation, and it would be a great one. For now, though, we hope what follows offers insight and — perhaps even more important — encourages rebuttal. We offer it not as an ex cathedra summing up but rather as a frozen moment in a much larger conversation that all of us in the field are, in fact, having every day, and that will hopefully go on for a long time.
Andrew Hoberek
August 2014
AH: It's not that long since modernism was the leading edge of historically informed, period-specific literary study in English departments, with studies of post–World War II writing carried forward only in various fragmented ways: under the rubric of postmodernism, which focused primarily on a limited canon of experimentalist writers; via discrete subfields like ethnic studies and postcolonial studies; or through attention to individual authors like DeLillo, Morrison, or Rushdie. In the past decade or so, post-1945 literature has become a recognizable field (or set of nationally defined fields) in its own right, with journals, book series, and job searches all proceeding under this rubric. As scholars who experienced and in many ways participated in this transition, what is your sense of how and why it took place? What are the gains and, perhaps less obviously, the losses entailed by this development?
MH: Whatever we call it, it's true that there's currently a boom in contemporary literary studies. As for what caused that boom, three possibilities come to mind right away: time; or what Amy Hungerford, in her essay "On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary," called "focal distance" (418): the fact that the literary history of, say, the 1960s really is history for most of us working today, not something remembered. Anyway, I think she's right that focal distance enables new sorts of scholarship, whether historicist or not, that aren't just different or differently interesting. It enables the sort of work that gets recognized and rewarded by our colleagues, most of whom assume such focal distance as a matter of course.
Market pressures: In that same essay, Hungerford quotes Gordon Hutner's story about the underprivileged status of contemporary literary studies circa 1970. Kenyon College offered a class on recent American writing, but students couldn't get credit for it (417–18). Could this happen now, in an era when market forces — student bums on classroom seats — shape the curriculum as well as standards of canonicity? Every place I've taught, classes in contemporary literature have been very popular. It might be that, given the corporatization of the university, our broad professional practices are now more sensitive to, or at least in tune with, the logic of curricular supply and demand. There's no simple equation that explains the link between undergraduate enrollments and such things as graduate teaching, conferences, book series, and the contents of scholarly journals. No one's going to deny that a link exists, though, are they?
Modernist studies: In the last twenty years, modernist studies has become institutionalized in new ways. This has been accomplished via a massive expansion of that field, not least in temporal terms. Modernism bleeds forward into the present, just as it pushes back into areas traditionally covered by specialists in the nineteenth century. Still, I think the expansion of modernist studies has had a clarifying effect for our field. It's given us institutional structures to imitate and react against. It's helped us see modernism as a diversity of historical objects, not as the common sense of what it means to read and write in a sophisticated manner. It's helped kill off postmodernism by demonstrating how much of what passed for postmodern theorizing depended on an impoverished account of the modern. Finally, because the new modernist studies has so aggressively colonized new areas of literary history, it's forced us to do a better job of describing the literature we study — and of exploring whether we need new theories and methods to understand it. Postmodernism tried to do that from a position at once within and after the penumbra of the modern, with the result that, unless you made a strong claim — à la Jameson — for an epochal break, your argument always risked being dragged back into modernity's shadow. I don't claim that we've finally escaped modernity. I don't even know if that would be desirable. But two things have happened for sure. Modernist studies now sometimes overreaches, especially in its globalist or transnational versions. This creates opportunities for pushback and clarification; it certainly made me, for instance, newly conscious of the limitations of that literary-historical term. More positively, because the growth of modernist studies as a field has been accomplished by the demystification and diversification of its objects of study, it's become possible to talk about the relation between then and now in less anxious and more open-ended terms.
DJ: For me these questions draw attention to two overlapping aspects of the way we think about what we do: pedagogy and periodicity.
Matt's reflections on the institutionalization of modernism as a field remind me of Hungerford's witty plea that we should aspire to be the kind of critics and teachers who are not confined to those "hefty postmodern slabs that formerly sat on syllabi as proof of the difficulty, and thus the worth, of contemporary writing in the academy" (418). While we no longer need postmodernism — and its accompanying theoretical apparatus — as an aesthetic premise or historical paradigm to justify the value of what we research as something that's also worth teaching, we're now entering (if not already well within) a more challenging moment where it's becoming increasingly tricky to engage with post-'45-to-the-present as a coherent field in its own right. The period is no longer entirely tenable as a period. John Duvall recently admitted as much in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to American Fiction after 1945, claiming that his volume would be the last of its kind, given that "after 1945" is now so temporally distended as to become literary-historically amorphous. By the same stroke, however expansive "modernism" becomes conceptually, it's always going to be a historically localizable set of movements as well as a more flexible and historically transportable set of formal ambitions, imperatives, or possibilities. The same can't be said for those bedfellows "postwar" and "contemporary," since the latter is always running away — critically, institutionally, culturally — from the former. And so it should.
That said, I'm hardly alone in implicitly defending post-'45 literature as a pedagogically useful frame, despite all the challenges it presents to our efforts to sustain some kind of particularity in addressing specific writers within discrete decades in the face of broader-brush gestures of retrospective periodization. Courses in this field are more popular than ever among undergraduate students, and students in further education who are taking A-level English (sixteen- or seventeen-year-olds) continue to be offered a strong provision in contemporary writing, and that's been the case for over twenty years. In scholarly terms, likewise, the range of options for reconstructing the field seems more wide ranging than ever, and the rise of "decade studies" (of which Sam Cohen's book on the 1990s in an American context, and James Brooker's book on the 1980s in a British context, are key examples) offers one avenue. These new formats offer welcome alternatives to the paradigm-instituting and symptomatizing vocabularies of the postmodern, which left us with limited resources to account for more contextually confined, temporally or regionally specific conditions of literary innovation.
But it would be reductive, of course, to dismiss the currency of postmodernism outright, given how temporally complex its development was and how generically and ideologically multifarious its influence on recent writers continues to be. I remember a conversation with Brian McHale, at the first ASAP conference in Knoxville, following a complex paper on Pynchon's Against the Day. After the Q&A, Brian said to me: "I wonder whether we defined 'postmodernism' too soon?" I'm still pondering what he meant; or rather, I think his intriguing question has a pertinent set of implications. Yes, that label was perhaps too easily arrived at, too quickly assumed (indeed, institutionalized) as the interpretive status quo, and then too easily dismissed as metacritical conversations about contemporary writing moved on — all before we had a chance to see whether actually "postmodernism" legitimately applied to writers we can draw under its umbrella. But on another scale, I also think Brian meant something like this: that deciding how to define the character of a period is the easy part; testing how and why those definitions work for us, and asking ourselves honestly whether they square our scholarly and pedagogical priorities, is a tougher exercise.
AE: First, while I understand the desire to see the field of contemporary literature studies as still smoking from the forge, if one looks at actual research and teaching, it's clear that the post-WWII period has been a recognizable field for over half a century. I'm not the only one who firmly believes that there is a difference between modernism and what happens in art after the 1960s. The first issue of Contemporary Literature was published in 1960 as Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, "a critical journal primarily devoted to a consideration of the new literature which has emerged since World War II on both sides of the Atlantic" (and primarily containing essays not on experimental postmodernists but on Mailer, Faulkner, and Bellow). boundary 2 was publishing with the subtitle "a journal of postmodern literature" in the early 1980s, when many of the influential monographs for and against postmodernism were published. (The scores of major studies ranging through literary criticism, sociology, architecture, visual arts, philosophy of history, and philosophy of science make clear that even people who hated the idea of postmodernism were often willing to consider the postwar period a break of some kind.) Postmodern Culture started publishing in 1990 (grappling with the language not of modernism or literary postmodernism but of poststructuralism). While what scholars do and what the corporate university considers legitimate work are often not the same things, a quick look through back issues of the MLA Joblist (English edition) reveals that by the early 1990s — twenty-odd years ago — a number of schools were advertising for positions in "modern/contemporary." I had such a position, titled "Postmodern American Literature" when "postmodern" meant "contemporary" because no one knew (or knows) what to call the post-WWII period.
With that said, however, certainly one can see in the twenty-first century a distinct influx of vital energy into the study of contemporary literature and a desire to historicize this writing in some concrete way. The near-death of poststructuralism and the expansion of historicism beyond older Marxist paradigms — concomitant with interest in gender studies, postcolonialism, and ethnic studies — helped a lot here: an ebbing of Marxist hegemony opened the door to new work in ethics, new economic criticism, and (most important to our conversation) aesthetics in the 1990s and aughts that could reexamine the nature of the self, communication, other, and text without positing difference or total system as primary operators and values in those relations. (Postmodernism was entwined with poststructuralism; they waxed and waned together, perhaps.) Other factors contributing to a rise of interest certainly include historical distance, though I wouldn't shortchange the end of the Cold War as an incentive to reevaluate periodization and aesthetic movements (as does Badiou, for example) or the urgency felt by many in the face of rapid and wrenching globalization to determine how art can speak to what is unique and different about our contemporary moment. We see it in the range of key words being floated to name our time and then tested in literary criticism: digimodernism, cosmodernism, the New Sincerity, Remodernism, planetarity, performatism, geoculture, transculturalism, neocosmopolitanism, network society.
On the ground today, scholarly interest in the post-WWII period has certainly been ignited. The development of digital technology during the past twenty years has been important to this: while the modern certainly is influenced by technological development (as Stephen Kern and others have shown), the post-WWII period saw a paradigm shift in how technology defined lived time and space. Matt and David also are correct to say that the growth of the new modernist studies has encouraged a reconsideration of twentieth-century periodization, though I believe that it has been more important for those who wish to break old shibboleths about modernism, or who started their academic work primarily in modernist studies, than for those who have always worked squarely in post-1960s art. Alan Wilde was using the phrase "Late Modernism" in 1987 to distinguish aesthetic transitions in the twentieth century, yes? Statements such as that by Craig Owens that postmodernism was characterized (and distinguished from modernism) by its "appropriation, site specificity, impermanence, accumulation, discursivity, hybridization" (321), or Ihab Hassan's obsessive parallel lists of different period characteristics, or Andreas Huyssen's distinctions between modernism and pomo based on art's relationship to popular culture, or Brian McHale's claims about ontological vs. epistemological dominants — these and scads of other statements on post-1945 arts in the C20 set off firestorms of modernism/postmodernism debate but eventually made it clear that we needed to think break as well as continuity between modernism and what followed. Brian McHale was right, I think, that we theorized the postmodern too early, but only in the sense that we theorized it as a break from modernism — as late modernism, it worked just fine.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Postmodern | Postwar â" and After by Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek, Daniel Worden. Copyright © 2016 University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
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