By Douwe W. Fokkema †
In those lectures, introduced at Harvard college in March 1983, the variations among Modernism and Postmodernism are mentioned in semiotic phrases, in keeping with a contrastive research of semantic and syntactical (compositional) positive aspects. They current the foremost result of study into the literary conventions of Modernism (Gide, Larbaud, V. Woolf, du Perron, Th. Mann) and the suggestions of Postmodernism (Borges, Fuentes, Barthelme, Calvino, Hermans). The research of innovation in literary background relies on an idea of literary evolution, introduced by way of the Russian Formalists and elaborated through reception idea and semioticians akin to Lotman and Eco. the writer argues for extra corroboration via empirical – textual in addition to mental – study
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Extra info for Literary History, Modernism, and Postmodernism : (The Harvard University Erasmus Lectures, Spring 1983)
Example text
100 Here, the word "impossible" refers to an em pirical possibility based on our knowledge of the world. There is also a logical impossibility in Postmodernist texts, based on an internal contradiction in the structure of the Postmodernist code: the paradox that the preference for nonselection is a preference, a choice. In his novel De Man achter het Raam, which we briefly discussed above, Gerrit Krol carried this POSTMODERNIST IMPOSSIBILITIES 55 paradox to its ultimate conclusion. He created a narrator who most consistently displays a sort of intelligent indifference or nonselection.
The story clearly shows that consistent indifference, if at all possible, is not in the least interesting. This is one of the major "philosophical" problems that Postmodernism has brought forward. Consistent indifference or nonselection does not seem to be a human quality, and can hardly be conceived. In most Postmodernist texts, however, the principle of nonselection has not been as rigorously maintained as in De Man achter het Raam. In general, Postmodernism shows a preference for words over silence, imagination over experience, verbal texts over the empirical context.
Instead of discussing the various options open to him in a detached, intellectual way, as the Modernist did, the Postmodernist assimilates and absorbs the world that he perceives, without knowing or wanting to know how to structure that world so that it might make sense. The semantic field of perception, including "observation," but also "reading," "listening," and "talking," is close to the center of the Postmodernist semantic universe, but this 50 LITERARY HISTORY perception is assimilating and possessive, rather than reserved and judicious, as in Modernism.