CAPITALISM, MODERNISM, and POSTMODERNISM by Terry Eagleton

 

CAPITALISM, MODERNISM, and POSTMODERNISM

Terry Eagleton

 There are two summaries in this blog.

Terry Eagleton is a leading British Marxist critic. He was involved in a project to reconcile Marxism with Catholicism. At the beginning of his career, he supported the British New Left Critical Tradition. Later, he became an ardent follower of the European structuralist and poststructuralist theory. His Criticism and Ideology (1976) and Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976) reflect his engagement with the debates within Marxist literary theory generated by Althusser and Macherey. Eagleton expressed his disillusionment with the Althusserian project in Against the Grain (1986). [Refer to the introductory note by David Lodge and Nigel Wood—Modern Criticism and Theory—A Reader.]

 

[The British New Left was a political movement in the 1960s and the 1970s. It consisted of activists who campaigned for a broad range of social issues such as civil and political rights, Feminism, gay rights, abortion rights, gender roles, and drug policy reforms. 

Louis Pierre Althusser (1918–1990) / lus pier æltʊˈsɛər/ was one of the most influential Marxist philosophers of the 20th century. 

Pierre Macherey [maʃərɛ] is a French Marxist literary critic. A former student of Louis Althusser and collaborator on the influential volume Reading Capital, Macherey is a central figure in the development of French post-structuralism and Marxism]. 

 

Summary:

Frederic Jameson has posed the question: “Is postmodernism in any significant sense a critique [a written assessment of something, usually a creative work, with comments on its good and bad qualities] of contemporary society?” 

Eagleton answers in the negative. He scorns postmodernist art because he believes in the achievements of classical modernist and avant-garde [/æˈvɑ̃.

ɡɑːd/--writers, artists, film-makers, or musicians whose work is innovative, experimental, unconventional, or belonging to the artistically innovative] and is committed to practical socialism. It is also because of his nostalgia for the ‘unified subject of bourgeois humanism¹, which, he suggests, late capitalism is deconstructing rather more effectively than postmodernism or post-structuralism. 

‘Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism’ is reprinted from Against the Grain.

 

In his article, ‘Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, Frederic Jameson argues that the pastiche, rather than the parody is the suitable mode of postmodernist art.

 

pas·tiche:  a piece of creative work, for example, in literature, drama, or art, that is a mixture of things borrowed from other works,  a creative work that imitates and often satirizes another work or style.

 

par·o·dy:  a piece of writing or music that deliberately copies another work in a comic/satirical way, an attempt or imitation that is so poor that it seems ridiculous.

 

The pastiche (like the parody) imitates a particular speech or work, but it has none of the parody’s ulterior motive. It is devoid of laughter. It has no satiric desire. It does not believe in linguistic normality. [See notes¹]

 

Eagleton says that parody is not alien to the culture of postmodernism. Postmodernism dissolves art into prevailing modes of commodity production.

 

Postmodernism parodies the revolutionary art of the twentieth-century avant-garde.

 

• Avant-garde hoped to remove the institutional autonomy of art and erase the borderlines between culture and political society. It also wanted to carry art to its humble, unprivileged place within the social practices. 

 

• Postmodern art is commoditized. Avant-garde wanted a utopian integration of arts and society. Postmodernism turns back upon them the dystopian (/dɪsˈtəʊpɪən/) reality. [For postmodernism, art is a commodity like an electronic gadget. Avant-garde hoped to make art part of society by bringing it to the level of the factory worker. Its ideal for art is utopian. Postmodernists make it dystopian.] 

 

• “Mayakovski’s poetry readings in the factory yard become Warhol’s shoes and soap –cans”.  

 

 

[Mayakovski used to read poems for factory workers. His works were for ordinary people. The pop-art of Andy Warhol cannot be divorced from market forces. It was for mass production.] 

 

[ (Vladimir Mayakovski (/ˌmɑːjəˈkɔːfski,/) Mayakovski produced a large and diverse body of work during his career: he wrote poems, wrote and directed plays, appeared in films, edited the art journal LEF, and produced posters in support of the Communist Party during the Russian Civil War of 1917-1922. In 1930, Mayakovski committed suicide]. 

 

Andy Warhol (/ˈwɔːrhɒl/; 1928 –1987),  an American artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. Andy Warhol was a successful magazine and ad illustrator who became a leader of the 1960s Pop art movements.

 

Frederic Jameson claims that postmodernism is innocent of any satiric impulse because it has no historical memory. Eagleton accepts this argument. He says that any shocking thing (such as placing a pile of bricks in the Tate Gallery) will lose its impact if repeated endlessly. Mere repetition will make anything a ‘brute fact’. [Tate is a family of four art galleries in London, Liverpool, and Cornwall.] 

 

[The plot-less postmodernist fiction becomes tedious when the first shock-value is over. The Unfortunates (1969) by B. S. Johnson is an example. The novel is an experimental book in a box. The 27 sections of the novel are unbound, with a first and last chapter specified: the 25 sections between them, ranging from a single paragraph to 12 pages in length, can be read in any order, giving a total of 15.5 septillion combinations. 1 septillion= A trillion, trillion: 1 followed by 24 zeros, 10²⁴ ]. 

 

Eagleton speaks about the claims of alienation by the postmodernists. They believe that the root-cause for their ‘depthless, styleless, dehistoricized’ postmodernist culture is alienation. Eagleton refuses to buy this argument. He points out that the ‘very concept of alienation must secretly posit (suggest, speculate) a dream of authenticity which postmodernism finds quite unintelligible’. For them, there is ‘nothing to be alienated from’. ‘Postmodernism is thus a grisly [horrible, grim] parody of socialist utopia, having abolished all alienation at a stroke’. By ‘alienating us from our own alienation’, postmodernism motivates us to recognize that utopia is not remote. It is nothing less than the present itself. Utopia cannot belong to the future because the future, in the shape of technology, is already here, synchronous with the present. 

 

Reification, once it has extended its empire across the whole of social reality, effaces (deletes) the criteria by which it can be recognized for what it is and so triumphantly abolishes itself, returning everything to normality.

 

[A reification is an act of "transforming human properties, relations, and actions into properties". They become independent and govern human life. They do not behave humanly but according to the laws of the thing‑world. Reification is a case of alienation, its most radical and widespread form characteristic of modern capitalist society.]

 

Late Capitalism proclaims that if the artefact is a commodity, the commodity can always be an artefact. Art and life interbreed—art models itself upon a commodity form invested with aesthetic allure. 

 

Early twentieth-century avant-garde rejected the notion of artistic representation (that art is a reflection of society). Avant-garde believed that art must try to change the world rather than to imitate it. Postmodernism parodies such anti-representationalism: Art does not reflect the world because there is nothing to reflect; no reality which is not itself already an image, spectacle, simulacrum, or gratuitous fiction.  The unreality of the (artistic) 'image' mirrors the unreality of society. Therefore, the image reflects nothing real, and so does not mirror at all. Eagleton points out that the autonomy and self-identity of the postmodernist artefact is the effect of its thorough integration into an economic system where 'autonomy' (in the form of the commodity fetish) is the order of the day. 

 

[In the Capitalist market-economy, only commodities are valued. Take, for example, Samsung Galaxy. The mention of the name is like magic that brings to your mind an image of the product. Who is the manufacturer? Where are the factories? Who are the labourers who work in the factory? These are shadowy, about which the ordinary consumer does not bother at all. For the consumer, the product is the ultimate truth. There is nothing before or after. This attitude is known as commodity-fetish. Fetish means a talisman, charm, amulet, or தாயத்து ( in Tamil)]. 

 

[/ˌsɪmjʊˈleɪkrəm/= an image or representation of someone/something. A simulacrum is an unsatisfactory substitute.

/ɡrəˈtjuːɪtəs/ done without good reason. 

 

The view of art in Avant-garde

 

Avant-garde views art as a practice, strategy, performance, production, and not as an institutionalized object. Late Capitalism caricatures all these aspects. For it, the performativity principle³ is all that counts, according to Lyotard. 

 

Lyotard feels that the "massive subordination of cognitive statements to the finality of the best possible performance" is a characteristic feature of Capitalism (The Postmodern Condition). He says that "the games of language become the games of the rich, in which whoever is wealthiest has the best chance of being right’.  

 

It is not difficult to see the relation between the philosophy of J. L. Austin and IBM. Classical models of truth and cognition are increasingly out of favour. What matters is whether you deliver commercial or rhetorical goods. The goal is no longer truth but performativity, not reason but power. 

 

However, Eagleton admits that the attacks on classical epistemology [(ɪˌpɪstɪˈmɒlədʒɪ) -- the theory of knowledge, esp. the critical study of its validity, methods, and scope] may originate from politically radical groups or conservative sections. Lyotard himself admits that. After outlining the most 'tyrannical' aspects of the capitalist performativity principle, he says that he has nothing to offer in its place. Postmodernism is only an anarchist version of the same epistemology. It will always be a loser since it has abandoned the grand narrative of human emancipation⁴ of the Enlightenment. 

 

Eagleton does not look at modernism as a cultural practice or historical period. It is a permanent kind of philosophical possibility of upsetting all historical periodization. It is a timeless gesture that cannot be bound in any historical narrative. Thus modernism can never really die. It surfaces in different modes in different periods. History and modernity occupy two varying ontological⁵ sites. Hence they cannot defeat each other. 

 

Modernity sometimes means the Nietzschean ‘active forgetting of history’; ‘the healthy spontaneous amnesia of the animal’, which is always free. [The animal lives un-historically: it hides nothing…it is truthful at all times, unable to be anything else…we will therefore have to consider the ability to experience life in a non-historical way as the most important and original of experiences, as the foundation on which right, health, greatness, and anything truly human can be erected" —Nietzsche]. 

  

This view is the exact opposite of Walter Benjamin’s ‘revolutionary nostalgia’. [This nostalgia is a recollection of the traditions of the oppressed people which stands in violent opposition with the present political powers.] 

 

Lyotard is opposed to any historical consciousness. He celebrates the narrative as an eternal present. Eagleton remarks that if Lyotard had remembered the views of Benjamin, he would never have asserted that the class struggle could be destroyed. Again, it was wrong on his part to polarize ‘the grand totalizing narrative of the Enlightenment’ with the ‘micro-political’. (Postmodernism as the death of the metanarrative). Benjamin throws the binary poststructuralist plan into instant confusion through subtle meditations on history.

 

 

Paul de Man and Nietzsche

 

 

Paul de Man⁶ was the most influential of American deconstructionists. In his writings, we see the Nietzschean sense of the modern as active forgetting. De Man argues that active forgetting can never be entirely successful. The modernist act that seeks to erase or arrest history finds itself surrendered in that very moment to the lineage (ancestry/heredity) it tries to suppress. Active forgetting will succeed only in the perpetuation of history rather than its abolition.  

 

Eagleton comments that literature for de Man is nothing less than the 'constantly doomed, ironically self-undoing attempt to make it new, this ceaseless incapacity ever quite to awaken from the nightmare of history.' ['History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,' says Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses by James Joyce]. Modernism desires some historically unmediated encounter with the real. But this desire is 'internally fissured and self-thwarting.'  To write is to disrupt a tradition that depends on disruption for its 'self-production.'

 

We are all, simultaneously and inextricably, modernists and traditionalists. For de Man, the two terms, modernist and traditionalist, indicate neither cultural movements nor aesthetic ideologies. For him, it is a two-faced phenomenon—'always in and of time simultaneously'—named literature. De Man considers literary history as a paradigm [model/ example/ archetype/ prototype] for general history. Hence, we will never abandon our political illusions or our fantasy of freeing ourselves from tradition and challenging the real. But such actions will always be self-defeating because history has already foreseen them and incorporated them as ruses [ploys, tricks, deceptions] for its self-perpetuation. The choice of Nietzsche ends in a maturely 'liberal Democrat position’—‘wryly [amusingly] sceptical and genially [cordially] tolerant of the radical antics [tricks, pranks] of the young.'

 

Eagleton says that the debate about history and modernity is, in reality, a debate about theory and practice. Literature is at once practice and its deconstruction; it is a spontaneous act and theoretical fact. Writing is both action and a reflection upon that action. Literature is the privileged place where practice comes to know and name its eternal difference from theory. 

 

In the last sentence of his Literary History and Literary Modernity, de Man becomes political. He says that if we extend the above notion (underlined) beyond literature, it merely confirms that the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical [observed] facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade [pretend/cover-up] in the guise of wars and revolutions. Eagleton regrets that the essay begins with a problem related to literary history but ends with an attack on Marxism. However, it is not surprising because if the theoretical basis of actions or the emancipatory power of history is accepted, it will destroy de Man’s arguments. "De Man’s dehistoricizing of modernism is in tune with the steady, silent anti-Marxist polemic running throughout his work". 

 

 

Modernism at once expresses and mystifies a sense of historical conjuncture⁷. There are crises and changes in this conjuncture. Eagleton writes that the conjuncture signifies a self-consciousness of our historical moment that is chaotic yet intense. It is also self-doubting and self-congratulatory, anxious, and triumphalistic together. It offers us a place of advantage, from where we can consign all the previous developments into the ashcan of tradition. All historical epochs are modern to themselves. If modernism is insistently present, it gives us a sense that this present is always the future. The ‘modern’ is something with which we have to catch up. The use of the term ‘futuristic’, to denote the modernist experiment is symptomatic. Modernism is not so much a punctual moment in time as a revaluation of time itself. 

 

High modernism⁸ is born with mass commodity culture. It is a strategy whereby the work of art resists commodification. It holds out against the social forces which would degrade it to an exchangeable object. To this extent, modernist works are contrasts to their material status. To defeat commodification, the modernist thickens the textures and deranges art forms to forestall instant consumability. It draws its 'own' language protectively around it to become a mysteriously autotelic [having a purpose in and justifying itself] object free from any contaminating truck with the real. But the irony is that it escapes from one form of commodification to fall into another. Eagleton comments: 'The autonomous, self-degrading, impenetrable modernist artefact, in all its isolated splendour, is the commodity as fetish resisting the commodity as (an) exchange, its solution to reification part of that very problem'.

 

This part is a bit difficult to comprehend. Please go through the explanation given below: 

Modernism considers an artefact like T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land autonomous. Eagleton says that the artefact degrades itself by isolating itself from society. It tries to occupy a rarefied and impenetrable area, accessible only to the elite sections of society. Eliot’s poem is not for the ordinary reader. Eagleton says that it is a commodity as fetish [talisman, charm, amulet, தாயத்து] when it tries not to become a commodity as exchange [silver, rice, cattle, etc.] 

We have already explained the meaning of reification. It is a process of attributing concrete form to an abstract concept. For example, a red rose may be a reification of love. Reification becomes complex when we treat an abstract idea like happiness, fear, or evil as a material thing. You may remember that the talisman mentioned above is a concrete thing to ward off abstract things like evil/fear, etc. 

 

Contradictions in Modernism

 

The following contradictions pose a challenge to modernism. 

 

• Modernism avoids the real social world as it creates a distance between itself and the ruling social order. Thus modernism removes the political forces which seek to transform the existing order. The modernist work keeps itself away from the common man and avoids politics. 

 

• The political modernism of Brecht is not a representative feature of the movement at all. [Bertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatrical reformer whose epic theatre departed from the conventions of theatrical illusion and developed the drama as a social and ideological forum for leftist causes.]

 

 

• The modernist work removes itself from society. It occupies an impermeable (resistant) space that creates an illusion of aesthetic autonomy.

 

• What we call modernist works are works. They are bounded entities even when there is free play within them. In that sense, a modernist work is not different from a ‘bourgeois humanist’ work. The Waste Land and The Prelude are similar works. 

 

 

• Postmodernism takes the stand that if a work is a commodity, it is better to admit the truth. It can try to become an aesthetic object keeping in mind its economic status. Modernists consider a work of art as an isolated fetish. A change takes place in this concept. In the capitalist market place, it becomes a product of everyday life.  [A poem/novel is something you can buy from a supermarket along with vegetables. Better still, on Valentine’s Day, you can order the local supermarket to deliver a romantic poem (compiled by the computer there) to your girl/boyfriend]. 

 

Capitalist technology is an intense, immense desiring machine. 

 

In our home, we may find several objects we have bought but not used as planned. We may have used the products once or twice, immediately after purchase, and then had kept them away, not knowing what to do. Ultimately these products end up polluting our environment. The business houses generate the desire to buy through advertisements. We are badgered day in and day out through the print and electronic media so that we feel our life worthless without these products. Thus the capitalist marketing methods succeed. 

 

What is wrong with late capitalism is not this or that desire but the fact that desire does not circulate freely enough. [The poor cannot afford to satisfy their desires.] If we can get rid of our metaphysical nostalgia for truth, meaning, and history, we might come to recognize that desire is here and now. Kitsch [vulgar/ cheap/ imitation] is quite as good as the real thing because there is no 'real' thing. The problem with old-fashioned modernism is that it stubbornly refuses to abandon the struggle for meaning.  The bourgeois humanism² of psychic fragmentation and social alienation has entangled it. Ironically, it wants to subvert the same humanism. Postmodernism has overcome modernism's weakness for humanistic fantasies. It believes that the world is just the way it is and not some other way. There cannot be a rational discourse of ethical and political values, for values are not things that can be in the world in the first place, any more than the eye can be part of the field of vision. The dispersed (isolated, detached) schizoid human being prefers a solitary or sheltered lifestyle, secretiveness, emotional coldness, detachment, and apathy. It is quite normal in the late capitalist experience. Compared to this, modernism seems to be a change.  Man's inherited notions like law, ethics, class struggle, and Oedipus complex fascinate modernism. It lives as a parasite on what it wants to deconstruct.

[/ˈskɪtsɔɪd, ˈskɪdzɔɪd/, often abbreviated as SPD, is a personality disorder characterized by a lack of interest in social relationships]

 

Modernism struggles for meaning. This struggle makes it interesting. This struggle continuously drives it towards classical styles of sense-making. These may be empty and unacceptable, but it continues to have its force. 

 

Eagleton quotes Kafka’s fiction as an example. These inherit the form of traditional storytelling without its truth contents—[The Metamorphosis—Kafka uses a conventional style and language to present the absurdities taking place in this novella]. The traditional model of representation is in crisis. But this does not mean that we can abandon the search for truth. 

 

·       Postmodernism upholds the erroneous belief that the discrediting of the principles of representation is the death of truth.  

·       Eagleton says that certain ideologies related to the subject disintegrate. But this disintegration does not affect it. The obituary notices in both cases are greatly exaggerated. 

·       Postmodernism encourages us to renounce (abandon) our fear and distrust of epistemology (the study of the nature, origin, and limits of human knowledge). It makes us embrace random subjectivity. 

·       Contradictions beset modernism. The contradictions are between humanism and the pressures of a different type of rationality that is still anonymous. [ it is not even clear about its identity or name] 

· Modernisms destabilization of traditional humanism has two aspects. It is anguished (tortured/painful/agonized) and at the same time exhilarating (exciting) [Like a roller-coaster ride]. Eagleton says that this happens because, in (classical) rationality, there are progressive forces (like Feminism) and barbarous and irrational forces (like Fascism/ Nazism). 

·       Postmodernism creates a sense of meaninglessness that is different from the meaninglessness of (created by) the avant-garde.  

 

Eagleton speaks about some of the contradictions of modernism in late capitalist society:

Modernism takes into account the key negative aspects of the experience of subjects in a capitalist society. But this may not correspond with the official ideological version. 

The phenomenological reality of capitalism appears to stand against the formal ideologies. Hence modernism cannot embrace either.

[Phenomenological means the study of any phenomenon related to the cultural beliefs of the community. For example, NDE—NDE is Near-Death Experience]. 

 

Thus modernism has a crucial contradiction in its internal structure. Eagleton admits that the bourgeois humanist conception of the subject as free, active, autonomous is appropriate in certain social conditions. But in others, it is hardly workable. 

 

Postmodernists overlook these contradictions when they assume that the ‘unified subject’ is an integral part of contemporary bourgeois society. They believe that the concept of the unified subject is ripe for urgent deconstruction. 

Here, Eagleton thinks that late capitalism has deconstructed the ‘unified subject’ more efficiently than postmodernism.

 

Eagleton further points out: 

 

The contemporary subject is not a monadic agent [a single simple thing that cannot be divided, for example, an atom or a person]. He is a dispersed, decentred network of libidinal [sexual] attachments, without any ethical substance, the function of some consumption, media experience, sexual relationship, trend, or fashion. Eagleton feels that the unified subject is a Shibboleth. [A shibboleth is an old idea, principle, or phrase which many people do not consider appropriate to modern life] It is a straw target, a hangover from an epoch of capitalism before technology and consumerism scattered our bodies to the winds as to many bits and pieces of reified technique, appetite, mechanical operation or reflex of desire’. 

 

If this were true, it would have heralded the victory of postmodernism. The unthinkable or the utopian has already happened. But the bourgeois humanist subject is not part of a history we can leave behind—agreeably or reluctantly. Though it is an increasingly inappropriate model at certain levels, it remains potently relevant in some other areas. 

 

Eagleton gives the example of being a father and a consumer simultaneously: the former role needs ideological requirements like agency, duty, autonomy, authority, responsibility, etc. The latter questions all these, though it is not free from all those commitments. Capitalism’s current model consumer is strictly incompatible with its ideal parent. The subject of late capitalism is an amalgam of the two. 

 

[Remember the example of baby foods. In the 1960s and 70s, advertisers used to charm parents with images of the ‘Farex Baby’ (a chubby, angelic creature any mother would love). Hence, mothers believed more in tinned foods than in breastfeeding. The advertisement campaign went on for many years till WHO intervened. Thus, for the capitalist, the model consumer is one who never breastfeeds her infant. As Eagleton says, the ideal consumer can never be the best parent. Refer to W.H. Auden’s prophetic poem ‘The Unknown Citizen’].  

 

Eclecticism, writes Lyotard, 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 retro-clothing in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter of TV games.

 

[Eclecticism= not following one style or set of ideas but choosing from or using a wide variety. Degree zero= a profile picture of how the person looks like in real life, no obscure angles or poses. Reggae= a style of music developed in Jamaica. Retro clothing= old-style clothing popular years back]. 

 

Eagleton writes: It is not just that there are millions of other human subjects, less exotic than Lyotard’s jet-setters, who educate their children, vote as responsible citizens, withdraw their labour and clock in for work; it is also that many subjects live more and more at the points of contradictory intersection between these two definitions. 

 

[Eagleton says that the postmodernist human being of Lyotard is eclectic. This postmodernist listens to reggae in retro clothing. He is an exception rather than the rule. On the other hand, there are millions of ordinary citizens in this world, leading regular lives. Perhaps, many people live in the intersections of these extremes.]

 

Postmodernism takes something from both modernism and the avant-garde and plays one off against the other.

 

·       From modernism proper, postmodernism inherits the fragmentary self but eradicates all critical distance from it.

·   From the avant-garde, postmodernism takes the dissolution of art into social life, the rejection of tradition, opposition to high culture as such, but crosses this with the unpolitical impulses of modernism. Thus it exposes the lingering traces of formalism in any radical art form. This art form might earlier have identified itself with the process of de-institutionalization of art and reintegration with social practices as a revolutionary step.

·       What are the conditions? What are the effects of reintegration with social practices? An authentic political art in our own time might draw upon both modernism and the avant-garde but in a different combination form postmodernism.

·       The contradictions of the modernist work are implicitly political that seemed to belong precisely to the traditional rationality it was trying to escape. These remained, for the most part, submerged beneath the mythological and metaphysical.

·       Moreover, the self-reflexiveness of modernist culture rendered its products opaque and unavailable to the public.

·     An art today, having learned the openly committed nature of avant-garde culture must frame the contradictions of modernism in a political light.

·       Otherwise, it will appear to be part of the old tradition from which modernism is trying to free itself.

 

NOTES

1. Pastiche & parody

Pastiche is a literary piece that imitates a famous work by another writer. Unlike parody, its purpose is not to mock but to honour the literary piece it imitates. The term pastiche also applies to the work that is a broad mixture of things – such as themes, concepts, and characters – imitated from different literary works. For instance, many examples of pastiche are in the form of detective novels that follow the style of the original stories of Sherlock Holmes. It features either Sherlock Holmes or a character like him. [For example, the Amazon Prime video-- Elementary].  

Example for pastiche --The Traveler (By Dave McClure)

Dave McClure’s poem The Traveler is a comical imitation written after Edgar Alan Poe’s poem The Raven. Look at McClure’s opening stanza:

“Long ago upon a hilltop (let me finish then I will stop)

I espied a curious traveler where no traveler was before.

As I raised an arm in greeting all at once he took to beating

At the air like one entreating passing boats to come ashore

Like a castaway repeating empty movements from the shore

Or an over-eager whore.”

It keenly imitates the arrangement of words used by Poe in the original poem. Likewise, it echoes the same rhyming scheme. Read the opening lines from Poe’s ‘The Raven’ for a better comparison:

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

” ‘Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door –

Only this, and nothing more.”

The serious tone of the original is a contrast to the playful imitation. 

Function of Pastiche

Pastiche may be comic in its content, but it does not mock the original work. In pastiche, the writers imitate the style and content of a literary piece to highlight their work. So, imitation in such works celebrates the great writers of the past.

 

Parody

Parody is an imitation of a particular writer, artist, or genre, exaggerating it deliberately to produce a comic effect. The parody gets the humorous effect by imitating and overstressing noticeable features of a famous piece of literature. 

Examples of Parody in Literature—Sonnet 130 (By William Shakespeare)

William Shakespeare parodies the traditional love poems of his time in Sonnet 130, mocking the exaggerated comparisons the poets used to make:

“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damasked, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks…”

Function of Parody

Parody imitates and mocks individuals or a piece of work. However, when it mingles with satire, it makes satire more pointed and effective. Most importantly, a parody appeals to the reader’s sense of humour. He enjoys the writer poking fun at the set ideals of society. He also becomes aware of the lighter side of serious things. Thus, parody adds spice to a piece of literature.

 

2. Bourgeois humanism = Bourgeois humanism made man the principle of all theory- Althusser.

3. For Lyotard, performativity is the defining mode of legitimation of postmodern knowledge and social bonds. Performativity is power. Performativity operates by system optimization or the calculation of input and outputs. On the other hand, knowledge gets legitimacy through such grand narratives as Progress, Revolution, and Liberation. In a footnote, Lyotard aligns performativity with Austin's concept of performative speech act. Postmodern knowledge must not only report: it must do something and do it efficiently by maximizing input/output ratios.

 

4. The seeds of Enlightenment lay in the new mathematics, astronomy, and physics advanced by Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. The heliocentric universe posited earlier by Nicholas Copernicus, and the inductive method of scientific investigation developed by Sir Francis Bacon assisted the movement. Galileo conclusively demonstrated the heliocentric cosmology, and Newton discovered the physical laws that governed the universe. Their astronomy and physics remained uncontested until the twentieth century. The motto of Descartes [‘I think, therefore I am’ (cogito ergo sum)] and Isaac Newton’s law of gravity came to epitomize the daring rationalism and Universalist certainties of the Scientific Revolution. As this epoch dawned into the Enlightenment, Alexander Pope epitomized the evolving sequence in verse:

 

Nature and Nature’s Law’s lay hid in night:

God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.

 

5. Ontological [/ˌän(t)əˈläjək(ə)l/  The philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence, or reality. It is part of the main branch of philosophy known as metaphysics. Ontology deals with questions about what things exist or can be said to, and how we may group such entities according to similarities and differences.]

6. Paul de Man (December 6, 1919 – December 21, 1983) was one of the most prominent critics who succeeded in bringing German and French philosophical approaches into Anglo-American literary studies and critical theory. His companionship with Jacques Derrida proved influential as both took up the epistemological difficulties inherent in any text or criticism. This approach aroused considerable opposition, which de Man attributed to the resistance inherent in the enterprise of literary interpretation itself. 

 

Paul de Man played a stellar role in the growth and development of Deconstruction. He got the opportunity as a faculty in French and Comparative Literature at Yale University. Derrida was a frequent visitor to the University at that time. Together, they piloted the destiny of what is today known as the Yale School of Deconstruction. At the time of his death from cancer, de Man was Sterling Professor of the Humanities and chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale. Gayatri Spivak, Hillis Miller and Barbara Johnson were his followers at Yale.  

 

7. ‘Historical conjuncture’ is a term used by structural Marxists like Louis Althusser to refer to the concrete state of political-economic and class relations, in a specific society, at a particular point in time.

 

8. High modernism is accepted shorthand for the core phase of literary modernism in the 1920s, when Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Woolf, Mann, Kafka, Proust, Gide, and others published pivotal works. There is consensus about the meaning of the term. But there are doubts about the value and significance of the Works it designates. The critics, who helped to establish high modernism in the canon, regard it as the culmination of literature as high art. But for others, high modernism is elitist, inaccessible, patriarchal, imperialist, and reactionary. However, all the critics agree that the main features of high modernism are aestheticist: formal innovation and detachment from history, society, and politics. Kafka, Woolf, Mann, and Faulkner give the privilege to form not as an end in itself but as a means to empower the socio-political function of literature. 

 

Blogger’s Note

The critical summary of Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism is for students of Indian universities. The blogger has tried to make the explanations as lucid as possible. This summary does not pretend to offer an alternative to the original. Further, it is for scholarly purposes only.  

Here is a request to the scholars going through this summary. Please point out the spelling mistakes and grammatical errors in it [You can include them in the comments]. The blogger is working from a place where he does not have the services of an efficient proof-reader. 

 Note that there are two summaries available in this blog. 

S. SREE KUMAR