Unlikely Modernism, Unlikely Postmodernism: Stein's Tender Buttons
| Autor: | Nicola Pitchford |
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| Rok vydání: | 1999 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | American Literary History. 11:642-667 |
| ISSN: | 1468-4365 0896-7148 |
| DOI: | 10.1093/alh/11.4.642 |
| Popis: | Formalist distinctions between modernist and postmodernist writing tend to fall into the trap of constructing, in order to highlight differences, a monolithic modernism in contrast to an equally monolithic postmodernism. Any attempt to write a more inclusive literary history confronts the question of how to draw useful distinctions between historical moments without repressing the diversity of writing within each period. How can a text be theorized both as a product of its moment and as an intervention in that moment, resisting the literary-and perhaps political-norms of its day? This article seeks to draw a distinction between modernism and postmodernism in a way that would be both historically satisfying and politically exciting, if not "for everybody" then for those readers who wish to emphasize, as I do, the links between writing and changing visions of the political landscape. While I intend to develop this model of periodization primarily by talking about modernism-and particularly by reviewing modernists' responses to Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons (1914)-I hope it will also provide a critical apparatus for examining some major continuities and discontinuities between modernism and postmodernism. I should emphasize that the following discussion is not about modernism "itself" (if such a thing can be isolated) but about the ways in which literary critics and theorists have talked about modernism, the visions of modernism they/we have created. Discourses of modernism, both contemporaneous and subsequent, have shaped critical interpretations-both the available |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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