Hi. I have a weird love of over-simplified "modernist vs. post-modernist" definitions that always do better than the deeper takes, and yours is pretty great.
I also love your take on rationalism pretty much as a method of sequestering the fear of the unknown, particularly death. This is especially important in the pseudo-Revelations structure of the post-human / singularity zealots of Silicon Valley. But the reason I like your take particularly is because intellectually I am really attracted to rationalism -- I really want things to be rational and understandable through logic whenever feasible -- but when I learned the rationalists existed I spent some time with their work and immediately realized that something profound was missing.
I had a very long streak in my teenage years involving a lot of death: friends, family, classmates. For about seven years I attended funerals all too frequently. And the midpoint of that period was 9/11. So one thing I learned during that period was that American culture's materialistic magical thinking that we call the Dream is exceptionally incapable of handling the discomfort of death. It's one of the areas where I believe Americans in particular are broken, even if the world overall is dealing with similar issues.
And rationalism obviously, in fact cringingly, is just another magnitude higher of desperately seeking to keep death out of sight. Which is really sad because another thing I learned about my seven years of death is that when you can look death in the face, in fact in the mirror, you really can own your own mind and its agency without any of the puzzles and games rationalists set up for themselves to keep their minds busy.
In that sense I love that you referred to Gravity's Rainbow particularly as the exact sort of book that would do those people a lot of good to read. I conclude the same often. These guys are clearly intelligent but too lost to get smart.
Weighty masculine postmodernism vanished, but slim feminine postmodernism in the Renata Adler mold with Kate Zambreno, Jenny Ofill, Miranda July, etc. It's usually characterized by the first person, somewhat detached tone, lots of pop culture references, shifts in time, flights of imagination and fantasy, and a feeling of restrained terror or despair.
I enjoyed this piece very much, and always appreciate discussions of definitions of things that are hard to get a real grasp on like modernism vs pomo. For my own experience--in high school and undergrad in the seventies, I read (sometimes struggled through--let's face it almost ALWAYS struggled through) various post-modern authors. Liked Nabokov, though Pale Fire was a stretch for me though I have always remembered and loved the lines "I was the shadow of a waxwing slain by the pure azure of a windowpane"), didn't get Barth at all, liked Pynchon (read Gravity's Rainbow senior year of HS while taking calculus at the same time which synced nicely). Probably a few others. Gradually as an undergrad English major, I shifted back to mostly realism (though like you say, Tristram Shandy is as pomo as anything, and even Dickens has delightful fantastic elements embedded in novels such as Bleak House).
I was in a "top" PhD English program for one year starting in 81, and that's when post-modernism almost defeated me. The first thing I was assigned in a core class was Roland Barthes' S/Z, and I, basically, did not understand a word of it. I gradually realized that lit classes had become more about lit crit theory than, you know, lit. Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, etc were a language I didn't get. For personal reasons, I had to take a leave after a year and ended up, sadly, never going back. I was mostly enjoying being immersed in words, even though I didn't feel at home in that current construction of the literary milieu. I think I'd have gotten the hang of it eventually. Probably. But I also think that the swing away from that kind of crit theory that I feel has occurred since would have made my experience a lot more person-friendly. (I could have used some guidebooks to these writers instead of being tossed into that ocean without a raft, but that's another story.)
On my own as a reader in the later eighties and nineties, I embraced the "new sincerity". (Aside--as po-mo-y as Infinite Jest was, I think Wallace could also be slotted as embracing sincerity; he was trying to break though to truths about human, as I read it.) I didn't want an emptiness beyond the words. Structuralism and post-structuralism felt like playing games to me. Like, I love baseball partly because it resists being a metaphor for something else like most sports do, but I don't want all my reading to be that. (Another of my infinite asides--thinking about baseball's non-metaphor-ishness--that one team is running around bases while another is catching and throwing a ball, etc., helped me get some understanding of post-structuralism's enclosed, non-referential worlds, years after I was formally studying them).
Reading back, I'm not sure how much of this was coherent! I'm going back a long way in my reading/literary experience. Thanks for a fascinating post that made me think about all this again!
I pursued my MFA in fiction from 1991-1995, and the battle between postmodernism and "traditionalism" raged. Every time an author came to campus, the introduction of that author by one of the faculty inevitably turned into an impassioned treatise on their "camp" and a high-minded take down of the other camp. This binary of us vs them filtered down into every aspect of your experience as a grad student: which faculty (in CW and Lit) you chose to take classes with or have on your thesis committee, what kind of fiction you put up for workshop, which students won "the plums" and who chose them, who was invited for the visiting writers series, what you said in class about the books the faculty chose for their reading lists and about the stories your peers put up for workshop, even who you were friends with and who you dated. Because I was from Indiana and because I wanted to be taken seriously by male writers (long story) and because in my program, the male writing faculty were all different versions of my dad, I chose the traditional side, and I fought valiantly for "the cause." When I became a faculty member in a small MFA program myself in 1997, I was determined to not take sides, but to present novels and stories that represented everything on the spectrum. I used a Norton anthology called Postmodern American Fiction by Geyh, Leebron, and Levy. And I discovered much to my chagrin and embarrassment that I loved a lot of postmodern fiction. I had just never been exposed to much of it because I'd self selected into the traditional camp in grad school. Another anthology I loved to use for years was The Granta book of the American Short Story edited by Richard Ford, which was very aesthetically representative--Coover, Barth, Gass AND Carver and Bobbie Ann Mason, etc. As I finished my first book, The Circus in Winter, I let myself break so many grad-school rules, esp with regards to POV. I used lots of old-fashioned conventions in ways that also seemed postmodern/metafictional to me, like those subtitles: Chapter One, in which our narrator goes on an adventure. I've taught in four different creative writing programs, and each time, I've tried to not impose "my aesthetic" on students, but to teach them how to pay attention to what their own aesthetic might be. I've even shifted my aesthetic identity a few times, depending on the program and the aesthetic of my fellow fiction faculty. Where I teach now, my fiction colleague is more of a postmodern flash aficionado, so I offer the opposite aesthetics: novel writing, realism, more "commercial" aesthetics. Before that, I taught in an MFA program where traditional aesthetics were already well represented by my fellow fictioneer, so I offered myself as a mentor to those who were more experimental. I know this pedagogy of mine, and my recent forays into teaching "professionalization" for creative writers and English majors, all stems from the way in which I often feel that my MFA experience was kind of fucked up--even though there were nights at the bar when our arguments about postmodernism seemed like the most important conversation in the whole damn world. Thank you for reminding me of all of this, John. Cheers to you.
Hot take: this is a good trend. we want less post-modernists and more people excited about the future who have actual views that aren’t rooted in a milieu of moral relativism
You bring up excellent points about the narrative finesse that is missing in much of the writing that comes out today. To read the way Faulkner, Nabakov, Vonnegut and other postmodern writers unreel their tales is to witness precious magic prose. George Saunders, Haruki Murakami, and Margaret Atwood are some of the few contemporary writers who can rise to those same heights. But in all honesty, I do have to admit that I tried numerous times to get through Pychon's "Gravity's Rainbow" but it was too much of an amazingly well written dense slog to suffer through.
This is well-done. I think there's a straightforward reality here: major publishers simply will not publish anything akin to Barth or Pynchon anymore. Whether the market exists or not, we'll never know - a lot of veteran editors have been cleaned out, "long" novels are viewed as vaguely threatening, and most fiction is mined for its IP potential. I can't tell you how many 200-250 page newer novels I've read that simply do not work; the writer clearly is told, explicitly or implicitly, to wrap it up, to not push the form to its limits, to not spend time toying with character, with structure, with the novel form itself.
Autofiction, for a while at least, seemed to supplant postmodernism. Some ok stuff there, but ultimately I'm with Oates - it's a lot of wan little husks, not terribly memorable, self-involved in the worst way. One could call Gravity's Rainbow self-indulgent, but Pynchon was wrestling with the twentieth century. Few novelists are even permitted to do that anymore - not if they want to be at a Big 5, and *especially* if they're not established already. Franzen and Saunders can get a little runway.
You didn't address the Oyler dust-up this week (no problem there!) but lost in the shuffle is how bad and forgettable her novel, Fake Accounts, was. In another market, another decade, maybe Oyler is tempted to chase bigger game.
Off topic from postmodern but ... read your Apr 9 Inside Higher Ed piece on AI: for me, this was an important insight:
"Each of these examples illustrates what I view as a privileging of institutional operations over the institutional mission. ... Institutional operations revolve around the entity as a business under which activities happen. The most consequential aspect of operations is the realization of revenue through tuition and other means"
This is highly relevant to the status of college athletics at big-time (and not so big-time) universities
Thanks for the mini course on literary movements that kind of passed me by. 😕 I started out measuring everything against Lord of the Rings.... what can I say, that's who I was and sort of still am. I have made some forays into the modern and post modern world, in no small part thanks to you and your correspondents. But I think I am happiest in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Strout, Lauren Groff, and Claire Keegan notwithstanding.
Helprin is one of many writers included in my book on America’s literary history - The Judeo-Christian Experience In American Literary History: Surprising Spiritual Writings That Once Nourished Our Nation - Rediscovered https://a.co/d/3Y3vE9r
Great insights as always. The whole time I was reading I was hoping you'd mention the rationalists. I distinctly remember Steven Pinker's book The Blank Slate, besides being full of logical inconsistencies and strawmen, taking shots at post-modernism several times in the book with the final chapter turning into a strange diatribe against postmodern art (I say strange because he spent the introduction highlighting how he was the most rational, unbiased person out there). This to me is connected to "the end of history" mindset which incredibly mistakenly believed we had found the one best political-economic system in capitalism.
Also I think the cultural shifts are spot-on. There's a weird thing where the internet is 90% sarcasm so people can always claim they weren't being serious if someone gets upset, while at the same time being (somewhat) permanent so you can collect up evidence of a person's behavior over time to "rationally" prove their true opinions
I like the theory that we are in an age of metamodernism. Where the tropes and ideas of postmodernism are used in works that are more sincere (oversimplified as "about something") than purely postmodern works were.
Hi. I have a weird love of over-simplified "modernist vs. post-modernist" definitions that always do better than the deeper takes, and yours is pretty great.
I also love your take on rationalism pretty much as a method of sequestering the fear of the unknown, particularly death. This is especially important in the pseudo-Revelations structure of the post-human / singularity zealots of Silicon Valley. But the reason I like your take particularly is because intellectually I am really attracted to rationalism -- I really want things to be rational and understandable through logic whenever feasible -- but when I learned the rationalists existed I spent some time with their work and immediately realized that something profound was missing.
I had a very long streak in my teenage years involving a lot of death: friends, family, classmates. For about seven years I attended funerals all too frequently. And the midpoint of that period was 9/11. So one thing I learned during that period was that American culture's materialistic magical thinking that we call the Dream is exceptionally incapable of handling the discomfort of death. It's one of the areas where I believe Americans in particular are broken, even if the world overall is dealing with similar issues.
And rationalism obviously, in fact cringingly, is just another magnitude higher of desperately seeking to keep death out of sight. Which is really sad because another thing I learned about my seven years of death is that when you can look death in the face, in fact in the mirror, you really can own your own mind and its agency without any of the puzzles and games rationalists set up for themselves to keep their minds busy.
In that sense I love that you referred to Gravity's Rainbow particularly as the exact sort of book that would do those people a lot of good to read. I conclude the same often. These guys are clearly intelligent but too lost to get smart.
A Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin is the best novel I’ve ever read. Is this considered post-modernism?
Weighty masculine postmodernism vanished, but slim feminine postmodernism in the Renata Adler mold with Kate Zambreno, Jenny Ofill, Miranda July, etc. It's usually characterized by the first person, somewhat detached tone, lots of pop culture references, shifts in time, flights of imagination and fantasy, and a feeling of restrained terror or despair.
*limps along with Kate Zambreno, Jenny Ofill, etc
I enjoyed this piece very much, and always appreciate discussions of definitions of things that are hard to get a real grasp on like modernism vs pomo. For my own experience--in high school and undergrad in the seventies, I read (sometimes struggled through--let's face it almost ALWAYS struggled through) various post-modern authors. Liked Nabokov, though Pale Fire was a stretch for me though I have always remembered and loved the lines "I was the shadow of a waxwing slain by the pure azure of a windowpane"), didn't get Barth at all, liked Pynchon (read Gravity's Rainbow senior year of HS while taking calculus at the same time which synced nicely). Probably a few others. Gradually as an undergrad English major, I shifted back to mostly realism (though like you say, Tristram Shandy is as pomo as anything, and even Dickens has delightful fantastic elements embedded in novels such as Bleak House).
I was in a "top" PhD English program for one year starting in 81, and that's when post-modernism almost defeated me. The first thing I was assigned in a core class was Roland Barthes' S/Z, and I, basically, did not understand a word of it. I gradually realized that lit classes had become more about lit crit theory than, you know, lit. Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, etc were a language I didn't get. For personal reasons, I had to take a leave after a year and ended up, sadly, never going back. I was mostly enjoying being immersed in words, even though I didn't feel at home in that current construction of the literary milieu. I think I'd have gotten the hang of it eventually. Probably. But I also think that the swing away from that kind of crit theory that I feel has occurred since would have made my experience a lot more person-friendly. (I could have used some guidebooks to these writers instead of being tossed into that ocean without a raft, but that's another story.)
On my own as a reader in the later eighties and nineties, I embraced the "new sincerity". (Aside--as po-mo-y as Infinite Jest was, I think Wallace could also be slotted as embracing sincerity; he was trying to break though to truths about human, as I read it.) I didn't want an emptiness beyond the words. Structuralism and post-structuralism felt like playing games to me. Like, I love baseball partly because it resists being a metaphor for something else like most sports do, but I don't want all my reading to be that. (Another of my infinite asides--thinking about baseball's non-metaphor-ishness--that one team is running around bases while another is catching and throwing a ball, etc., helped me get some understanding of post-structuralism's enclosed, non-referential worlds, years after I was formally studying them).
Reading back, I'm not sure how much of this was coherent! I'm going back a long way in my reading/literary experience. Thanks for a fascinating post that made me think about all this again!
I pursued my MFA in fiction from 1991-1995, and the battle between postmodernism and "traditionalism" raged. Every time an author came to campus, the introduction of that author by one of the faculty inevitably turned into an impassioned treatise on their "camp" and a high-minded take down of the other camp. This binary of us vs them filtered down into every aspect of your experience as a grad student: which faculty (in CW and Lit) you chose to take classes with or have on your thesis committee, what kind of fiction you put up for workshop, which students won "the plums" and who chose them, who was invited for the visiting writers series, what you said in class about the books the faculty chose for their reading lists and about the stories your peers put up for workshop, even who you were friends with and who you dated. Because I was from Indiana and because I wanted to be taken seriously by male writers (long story) and because in my program, the male writing faculty were all different versions of my dad, I chose the traditional side, and I fought valiantly for "the cause." When I became a faculty member in a small MFA program myself in 1997, I was determined to not take sides, but to present novels and stories that represented everything on the spectrum. I used a Norton anthology called Postmodern American Fiction by Geyh, Leebron, and Levy. And I discovered much to my chagrin and embarrassment that I loved a lot of postmodern fiction. I had just never been exposed to much of it because I'd self selected into the traditional camp in grad school. Another anthology I loved to use for years was The Granta book of the American Short Story edited by Richard Ford, which was very aesthetically representative--Coover, Barth, Gass AND Carver and Bobbie Ann Mason, etc. As I finished my first book, The Circus in Winter, I let myself break so many grad-school rules, esp with regards to POV. I used lots of old-fashioned conventions in ways that also seemed postmodern/metafictional to me, like those subtitles: Chapter One, in which our narrator goes on an adventure. I've taught in four different creative writing programs, and each time, I've tried to not impose "my aesthetic" on students, but to teach them how to pay attention to what their own aesthetic might be. I've even shifted my aesthetic identity a few times, depending on the program and the aesthetic of my fellow fiction faculty. Where I teach now, my fiction colleague is more of a postmodern flash aficionado, so I offer the opposite aesthetics: novel writing, realism, more "commercial" aesthetics. Before that, I taught in an MFA program where traditional aesthetics were already well represented by my fellow fictioneer, so I offered myself as a mentor to those who were more experimental. I know this pedagogy of mine, and my recent forays into teaching "professionalization" for creative writers and English majors, all stems from the way in which I often feel that my MFA experience was kind of fucked up--even though there were nights at the bar when our arguments about postmodernism seemed like the most important conversation in the whole damn world. Thank you for reminding me of all of this, John. Cheers to you.
Hot take: this is a good trend. we want less post-modernists and more people excited about the future who have actual views that aren’t rooted in a milieu of moral relativism
I bet Sam Bankman-Fried wishes he had a book right now.
You bring up excellent points about the narrative finesse that is missing in much of the writing that comes out today. To read the way Faulkner, Nabakov, Vonnegut and other postmodern writers unreel their tales is to witness precious magic prose. George Saunders, Haruki Murakami, and Margaret Atwood are some of the few contemporary writers who can rise to those same heights. But in all honesty, I do have to admit that I tried numerous times to get through Pychon's "Gravity's Rainbow" but it was too much of an amazingly well written dense slog to suffer through.
This is well-done. I think there's a straightforward reality here: major publishers simply will not publish anything akin to Barth or Pynchon anymore. Whether the market exists or not, we'll never know - a lot of veteran editors have been cleaned out, "long" novels are viewed as vaguely threatening, and most fiction is mined for its IP potential. I can't tell you how many 200-250 page newer novels I've read that simply do not work; the writer clearly is told, explicitly or implicitly, to wrap it up, to not push the form to its limits, to not spend time toying with character, with structure, with the novel form itself.
Autofiction, for a while at least, seemed to supplant postmodernism. Some ok stuff there, but ultimately I'm with Oates - it's a lot of wan little husks, not terribly memorable, self-involved in the worst way. One could call Gravity's Rainbow self-indulgent, but Pynchon was wrestling with the twentieth century. Few novelists are even permitted to do that anymore - not if they want to be at a Big 5, and *especially* if they're not established already. Franzen and Saunders can get a little runway.
You didn't address the Oyler dust-up this week (no problem there!) but lost in the shuffle is how bad and forgettable her novel, Fake Accounts, was. In another market, another decade, maybe Oyler is tempted to chase bigger game.
Off topic from postmodern but ... read your Apr 9 Inside Higher Ed piece on AI: for me, this was an important insight:
"Each of these examples illustrates what I view as a privileging of institutional operations over the institutional mission. ... Institutional operations revolve around the entity as a business under which activities happen. The most consequential aspect of operations is the realization of revenue through tuition and other means"
This is highly relevant to the status of college athletics at big-time (and not so big-time) universities
Thanks for the mini course on literary movements that kind of passed me by. 😕 I started out measuring everything against Lord of the Rings.... what can I say, that's who I was and sort of still am. I have made some forays into the modern and post modern world, in no small part thanks to you and your correspondents. But I think I am happiest in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Strout, Lauren Groff, and Claire Keegan notwithstanding.
Helprin is one of many writers included in my book on America’s literary history - The Judeo-Christian Experience In American Literary History: Surprising Spiritual Writings That Once Nourished Our Nation - Rediscovered https://a.co/d/3Y3vE9r
Great insights as always. The whole time I was reading I was hoping you'd mention the rationalists. I distinctly remember Steven Pinker's book The Blank Slate, besides being full of logical inconsistencies and strawmen, taking shots at post-modernism several times in the book with the final chapter turning into a strange diatribe against postmodern art (I say strange because he spent the introduction highlighting how he was the most rational, unbiased person out there). This to me is connected to "the end of history" mindset which incredibly mistakenly believed we had found the one best political-economic system in capitalism.
Also I think the cultural shifts are spot-on. There's a weird thing where the internet is 90% sarcasm so people can always claim they weren't being serious if someone gets upset, while at the same time being (somewhat) permanent so you can collect up evidence of a person's behavior over time to "rationally" prove their true opinions
I like the theory that we are in an age of metamodernism. Where the tropes and ideas of postmodernism are used in works that are more sincere (oversimplified as "about something") than purely postmodern works were.