TOOM and the news - Oz press

[Stephen Scobie/Maureen Scobie]

Sorry, I can no longer keep track of who wrote what. But someone asked:

> >
> > > Does anybody know what "post-modern" is supposed to mean here? I don't
> > > know what it even means in general, but it seems like a particularly
> > > ridiculous adjective to use.

And then someone replied:

> >
> > It's popularity I think reflects the general impulse of society in
recognizing
> > that our "beginnings" as a "modern" era are circa 1945 to 1972. TV, Space
> > exploration, technology, and many other distinctions. But we are not those
> > 1945 and 1972 guys anymore, and those beginnings are now refined, expanded,
> > and in our lap everyday. So we are in a Post Modern age. Sometimes
the jaded
> > attitude we have about this is also called Post Modern.

And I contribute:

The word "postmodern" has been used so widely and loosely, in so many
contexts, that it has become more or less useless as a precise critical
term. I agree that nowadays, it is most often used as a show-off, jargony
kind of word, designed to show that the writer is hip. I'm trying to give
it up in my own writing, but it's almost as addictive as cigarettes.

Back in the good old days, when it did have a precise meaning, it
indicated a certain attitude towards "modernity." But the "modern" did
not, in that context, mean 1945-1972; indeed 1945-1972 were for some
critics the high years of post-modernism. "Modernism" more often refers
to the period from about 1910 (the date at which, claimed Virginia Woolf,
human nature changed) to about 1939 (outbreak of war). In painting, the
key modernist movement is Cubism; in literature, Imagism. The "post" in
"postmodern," however, like the "post" in other similar phrases
(post-structuralist, post-colonial), should not be limited to simple
chronological succession. That is, post-modernism does indeed come after
modernism, but not simply. Often, post-modernism is a re-exploration of
modernist themes from a different perspective, or a re-interpretation of
modernist history to find alternative sources, alternative routes out of
it. For example, although Gertrude Stein wrote entirely within the
modernist period, it is postmodernism that has found her work most
fruitful and suggestive.

Another commonly drawn distinction is that both modernism and
postmodernism respond to a sense of alienation and fragmentation in 20th
century society; but whereas modernism laments that fragmentation, seeing
it as the collapse of some past ideal integration, postmodernism embraces
and even celebrates fragmentation. It is in this sense that I have always
argued that Bob Dylan is not a post-modernist at all, but rather the last
of the century's great modernists.

Stephen

--
Stephen Scobie Maureen Scobie