Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 20

16

Popular Culture Review

the word became all about ontology and the nature of text, about the consciousness
of writing, about the all-out assault upon traditional narrative.
Then the squabbling really began, theorists and academicians and writers
slapping and scratching each other like myopic third-graders on a muddy play
ground. Was postmodernism, they asked, a continuation of Modernism? Or was it
a counter to, a decisive break from Modernism, a brand-spanking new artistic
movement? Defenders of the Modern tradition responded, usually (and as most
theorists still do) to the upstart Postmodernists in one of three ways: they calmly
declared postmodernism a passing fad, the hula hoop of literary criticism; they
attacked, spewing forth great quantities of polysyllabic words; or, more often, they
ignored them altogether, these hippie-like perpetrators of dreck. Their apparent
lesson: don’t rock the ivory tower.
Enter during the 60s and 70s, Derrida, Foucault, and their persnickety,
text-mad crew of Theorists (think of them as a sort of a Justice League of America
with really thick glasses and really big vocabularies): by their powers, formalism
mutated into structuralism (in original, post, and decon flavors), and postmodernism
evolved into postmodemity. Postmodem/7v they concluded, was (as one triad of
theorists puts it) an “historical period stretching from the 1960s to the present,
marked by such phenomena as upheavals in the international economic system,
the Cold War and its decline, the increasing ethnic heterogeneity of the American
population, the growth of the suburbs as a cultural force, the predominance of
television as a cultural medium, and the rise of the computer” (Geyh, Leebron, and
Levy x). Got that? On the other, simpler hand, postmodern/s/w referred to certain
experimental works of literature and art produced after World War II.
Pause here to remember Ms. Fenn’s words: “Postmodernism is some
thing none of us really understands — but we all think it’s really interesting”—
which, in turn, is simply a Twin Peaks-ean paraphrasing o f Ihab Hassan’s assess
ment that “postmodernism suffers from a certain semantic instability: that is, no
clear consensus about its meaning exists among scholars (87)”.
Since then postmodernism has been described as a turn, a culture, a mo
ment, a condition, a movement, a period, a thought. It is paradoxical and self
reflexive, ambiguous and ironic, indeterminate and impennanent. It is also ex
haustive, pluralistic, ontological, contradictory, and subversive. It is even decentered,
introverted, and ambidextrous. It will soon, undoubtedly, cure acne and male-pat
tern baldness.
Jean-Francois Lyotard says that postmodernism is “an incredulity toward
metanarratives” {The Postmodern Condition xxiv); Brenda K. Marshall states that
it is a “rupture in our consciousness” {Teaching the Postmodern 5). Hassen ex
plains it as a “decisive historical mutation” {The Dismemberment o f Orpheus 5);
Linda Hutcheon, the empress of porno criticism, says that it is “a contradictory