The Poetics of Postmodern Subversion: The Politics of Writing in William S. Burroughs's 'The Western Lands'
In: Contemporary Literature, Jg. 32 (1991), S. 534-534
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Zugriff:
Theorists of postmodernity have noted striking similarities between literary theory's deconstruction of "the Book" and what they perceive to be kindred strategies at work in such postwar American fiction as the novels of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and William S. Burroughs, among others. Both the theory and the fiction of the postwar period, as Charles Russell points out, eschew the modernist dream of inventing a radical alternative to the existing social order, and they share an awareness sometimes celebratory and sometimes critical, but rarely elegiac or nostalgic-that a writer in the late twentieth century no longer has recourse to a privileged standpoint from which to judge or transcend the existing order and its dominant cultural codes (29).' Like much literary theory of the past two decades, postmodern fiction cultivates a sensibility that, while critical of the established order, has abandoned the heroic oppositional impulses that drove a Pound or a Marx to project countercultures of their own and to posit the subjectivity of the artist or the theorist as a resource adequate to the threats posed by technology, the state, and mass culture. Literary theory and postmodern fiction are alike not only in their skepticism toward modernist claims about the transfigurative potential of literature; they also share a certain conception of the character of the critical strategies that remain possible and necessary after the demystification of modernism. Writers of postmodern fiction may harbor doubts about the possibility of a literary language that transcends the present, but many expend considerable effort unmasking the illusory plenitude of contemporary culture, exposing it as a locus of hidden forces and controls, a world whose dreary sameness of power
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The Poetics of Postmodern Subversion: The Politics of Writing in William S. Burroughs's 'The Western Lands'
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Autor/in / Beteiligte Person: | Bur, William S. |
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Zeitschrift: | Contemporary Literature, Jg. 32 (1991), S. 534-534 |
Veröffentlichung: | University of Wisconsin Press, 1991 |
Medientyp: | unknown |
ISSN: | 0010-7484 (print) |
DOI: | 10.2307/1208515 |
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