Thus spake Opus the Penguin:
"Thus spake Opus the Penguin: I've read it, but don't remember what he said. I don't remember disagreeing with him, though."
"I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows ... and with pleasure play the game of irony...But both will have succeeded, once again, in the speaking of love."
This was covered by Sartre years earlier. In "What is Literature", he claimed that when you name something, you change it. Henceforth, it will not be possible to relate to what ever it is disregarding the naming. You might decide to relate to it anyway, but then you are doing so in willful defiance of the naming.
"Modernism spelled the death of meaning, and therefore of significance."
I would argue with that, to the extent that the New Critics (Hi, Franke) were Modernists, yet were searching for the authoritative meaning through close reading. "Grand Narratives" and all that.
In literature also, the High Modernists, such as Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce sought after meaning. Woolf looked to the mundane, leaving the question unanswered. Eliot and Joyce, however, looked to older and/ or foreign literature to underpin their work, insisting on meaningfulness.
(If it hasn't already been done, a comparison of Mrs Dalloway , in which the question of meaning in the mundane is left open, with Ulysses , in which the mythological structure insists there is a meaning in Bloom's daily life, would provide hours of fun for the whole family.)
"Postmodernism is a way of rolling with that punch and subversively asserting meaning and significance anyway. Hence my statement that The Simpsons is postmodern a postmodern Brady Bunch to be more specific."
Yes, but I would place the death of significance in postmodernism, as implied in the above. Postmodernism is the movement (if it is a movement) that has drawn the conclusion that meaning is dead (cf. the writings of the deconstructionists).
"Unlike other movements, postmodernism does not succeed its predecessor but exists alongside it. Indeed, postmodernism, by this definition, can't exist except in tension with modernism. If we forget the anti- significance of modernism, we no longer need to express meaning subversively."
See the Sartre thing above. We can't ignore it now it's been named. If we purposefully ignore it, we are still acknowledging it by the snub.
"To me, part of the essence of postmodernism is that you can't appear to take the struggle seriously. You don't ... them. Whether this describes Nabokov, I don't know. It doesn't seem to me to describe Joyce or Sterne or Homer."
It certainly does describe Sterne. And Cervantes, come to think of it. If Joyce's later work, ostensibly Finnegans Wake , is taken seriously, it is a sad testiment to the academy. He plays!
Perhaps Homer doesn't play. It's difficult to tell when his hero is called Hector.
"There are other ways of dealing with modernism, of course. One way is to pretend it never happened."
Sartre.
"I would call this the "premodern" movement. Often this involves going back to a literally premodern time. Last decades infusion of Jane Austen based movies would be an example. (Except for Clueless which was decidedly postmodern.)"
Didn't I mention nostalgia? That's another feature.
Bruno Latour claims that we have never been modern (in his book, the translation of which is entitled We Have Never Been Modern ). He claims that we are still living in the Enlightenment. It's been too long since I read it for me to remember what I thought of his argument. (It's also been not long enough since I read it; he is, after all, a French theorist, and I am trying to give them up, fertile for thought as their writings may be.)
"Another way is to bid open defiance to modernism, asserting meaning in the face of meaninglessness. This is done in contrast to postmodernism's slyness. The film Magnolia would be a good example of this approach."
Sartre again.
"The definition I really like, however, is a reaction to ... for Sterne, and a water-tight one for the later Joyce."
"I think your preferred definition is different from mine. I suspect yours is closer to what most academicians mean and ... want to call it, seems more geared toward your definition of postmodernism. Maybe that makes Eco's definition really about post-postmodernism."
No, I think the term is such a hold-all that there is room for everything. I don't see any inconsistency between Eco's example and the textual features I listed. Do we need a new term? No, we can just pretend the term was never invented, and talk about it anyway.
Jean Paul Sartre is my accuser.
Simon R. Hughes