History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922)
Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (tr. Régis Durand)retroclothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games. It is easy to find a public for eclectic works. By becoming kitsch, art panders to the confusion which reigns in thetasteof the patrons. Artists, gallery owners, critics, and public wallow together in theanything goes[…] But this realism of theanything goesis in fact that of money; in the absence of aesthetic criteria, it remains possible and useful to assess the value of works of art according to the profits they yield. Such realism accommodates allneeds,providing that the tendencies and needs have purchasing power.
| Modernism | Postmodernism |
|---|---|
| Form (conjunctive, closed) | Antiform (disjunctive, open) |
| Purpose | Play |
| Design | Chance |
| Mastery/logos | Exhaustion/silence |
| Art object/finished work | Process/performance/happening |
| Totalization/synthesis | Deconstruction/antithesis |
| Signified | Signifier |
| Depth/center | Surface/periphery |
| Readerly texts | Writerly texts |
| Master code | Idiolect |
| Type | Mutant |
| Paranoia | Schizophrenia |
| God the Father | The Holy Ghost |
| Metaphysics | Irony |
| Transcendence | Immanence |
Based on Table 1.1 in David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity
a certain set of assumptions conventionally accepted among literary historians and critics […] that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old-presence of, first, Africans and then African-Americans in the United States.(111)
literature,as a humanizing force, can be divorced from those traditionally defined as
Other– non-whites, women, the disabled, the queer, and political and religious minorities, among others – is a tacit assumption in most humanist understandings of literature.
it may be possible to discover, through a close look at literary(112)blackness, the nature – even the cause – of literarywhiteness.What is it for? What parts do the invention and development of whiteness play in the construction of what is loosely described asAmerican?
Americannessinitially defines itself in terms of eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideals, notably the exclusion of
rawness and savagery(115).
flowing from his [slave-owner William Dunbar’s] absolute control over the lives of others(115).
Of that place where she [Sethe] was born (Carolina maybe? or was it Louisiana?) she remembered only song and dance. Not even her own mother.(37; ch. 3)
She and Baby Suggs had agreed without saying so that it [the past] was unspeakable; to Denver’s inquiries Sethe gave short replies or rambling incomplete reveries.(69; ch. 6)
words whispered in the keeping room had kept her going. Helped her endure the chastising ghost; refurbished the baby faces of Howard and Buglar and kept them whole in the world because in her dreams she saw only their parts in trees.(101; ch. 9)
[Denver:] What did you come back for?
Beloved smiled. To see her face.
(88; ch. 8)
(184; ch. 17)But this ain’t her mouth,Paul D said.This ain’t it at all.
Beloved, inserting a thumb in her mouth along with the forefinger, pulled out a back tooth. There was hardly any blood, but Denver said, Ooooh, didn’t that hurt you?
Beloved looked at the tooth and thought, This is it. Next it would be her arm, her hand, a toe. Pieces of her would drop maybe one at a time, maybe all at once. Or on one of those mornings before Denver woke and after Sethe left she would fly apart. It is difficult keeping her head on her neck, her legs attached to her hips when she is by herself. Among the things she could not remember was when she first knew that she could wake up any day and find herself in pieces.