The Passing of Postmodernism

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The Passing of Postmodernism
A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary

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Josh Toth - Author

SUNY series in Postmodern Culture

Price: $75.00
Hardcover - 210 pages

Release Date: April 2010

ISBN10: 1-4384-3035-3
ISBN13: 978-1-4384-3035-5

Price: $26.95
Paperback - 210 pages

Release Date: January 2011

ISBN10: 1-4384-3036-1
ISBN13: 978-1-4384-3036-2

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Summary

Examines the increasingly prevalent assumption that postmodernism is over and that literature and film are once again engaging sincerely with issues of ethics and politics.

The Passing of Postmodernism addresses the increasingly prevalent assumption that a period marked by poststructuralism and metafiction has passed and that literature and film are once again engaging sincerely with issues of ethics and politics. In discussions of various twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers, directors, and theorists—from Michel Foucault and Slavoj Žižek to Thomas Pynchon and David Lynch—Josh Toth demonstrates that a certain utopian spirit persisted within, and actually defined, the postmodern project. Just as modernism was animated by an idealistic belief that it could finally realize the utopia beckoning on the horizon, postmodernism was compelled by an equally utopian belief that it could finally reject the possibility of all such illusory ideals. Toth argues that this specter of an impossible future is and must remain both possible and impossible, a ghostly promise of what is always still to come.

“Toth has done a great job with this book; although it is complex, and assumes that the reader knows quite a bit about the theoretical history of institutional postmodernism, it is still worth the read at a number of levels; not the least of all the way Toth situates the historical problem of postmodernism against the ongoing malaise of postmodernism’s institutional aporia.” — M/C Reviews

Josh Toth teaches literature and critical theory at Grant MacEwan University and is coeditor (with Neil Brooks) of The Mourning After: Attending the Wake of Postmodernism.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

1.The Phantom Project Returning: The Passing (On) of the Still Incomplete Project of Modernity

Introduction
Ruptures and Specters
Exorcisms Without End
The (Phantom) Project Still Incomplete

2. Spectral Circumventions (of the Specter): Poststructuralism, Derrida, and the Project Renewed

Poststructuralism and/as Postmodernism
Private Irony All the Way Down?
The Force of Derrida’s Indecision

3. Writing of the Ghost (Again): The Failure of Postmodern

Metafiction and the Narrative of Renewalism
Neither Logocentric nor Logo Centric
From an Ethics of Perversity to an Ethics of Indecision
Metafiction’s Failure and the Rise of Neo-Realism
The Project of Renewalism
A Conclusion . . . Perhaps

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Related Subjects

American Literature
Literary Theory
Postmodernism

49627/29628(JP/CC/AV)

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