A thesis is emerging. Or an area of study at least.
In 1827 Goethe coined the phrase "world literature" to describe the increased availability of writing from other countries and in other languages. Marx and Engels picked it up and used it in describing characteristics of the bourgeois economy. Recently, David Damrosch has asked What Is World Literature? According to Wikipedia, Damrosch "define[s] world literature as a category of literary production, publication and circulation, rather than using the term evaluatively".
I'm wondering whether these ideas can be pulled into an essay about the relevance or usefulness of Bourriaud's altermodern theories (and other, non-literary theories of contemporary twenty-first globalization) to literature.
If I ask myself the question - are there any altermodern books? the first name that pops into my head is David Mitchell. Especially Cloud Atlas.
I await a reply from Bourriaud to the four questions I emailed him last week. Let's hope he illuminates this question for me a bit.
Showing posts with label postmodernism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label postmodernism. Show all posts
12.4.09
Benjamin H Brattan @ Postopolis
Dan Hill has posted the whole of Benjamin H Brattan's talk at the end of Postopolis on City of Sound.
It's a fascinating collection of musings on the economic crisis, the internet, design, space, politics; essentially a collation of thoughts on 'the now' from an avowed "out of the closet theorist".
Reading it, I found myself linking it to the things I've been reading recently about the altermodern, and low and behold!, Brattan mentions Bourriaud about half-way through the talk. Lucky then, as I was busy connecting thoughts and intuitions between them and creating new thesis ideas along the way.
There appears to be a considerable dialogue emerging - probably accelerated by the "credit crunch" - looking at the ways we live in the twenty-first century, about the possibilities and opportunities for change but also worries about not taking those opportunities. Do we have the right people in charge to take those opportunities? Does the concept of people in charge inherently damage a possibility for change?
All are in agreement about the growing out-dated-ness of postmodernism. It has reached saturation point, a moment in which postmodernism is becoming passé, washed up; irrelevant! Of course that doesn't mean we are in a post-postmodernism. It just means we are in a gap between post- and pre-. That is what Brattan's talk focussed on.
The main idea I've taken away from it, from a literature/art point of view, is an idea of the "afterimage". The designation "post" is used, Brattan notes, "to name a particular state of things that is somehow eclipsed but not entirely done with." We are in that moment now, a society creating afterimages. Afterimages of what, though? After postmodernism, after politics, after economics? No-one knows. Because we haven't entered a stage that can easily be called "an ism", we are left flailing in a limbo, using up yesterday's leftovers but not cooking a new dinner. Unsettling as this all may be, these sorts of conditions tend to be fertile ground for exciting art and ideas. This is emerging as the topic of my dissertation...
It's a fascinating collection of musings on the economic crisis, the internet, design, space, politics; essentially a collation of thoughts on 'the now' from an avowed "out of the closet theorist".
Reading it, I found myself linking it to the things I've been reading recently about the altermodern, and low and behold!, Brattan mentions Bourriaud about half-way through the talk. Lucky then, as I was busy connecting thoughts and intuitions between them and creating new thesis ideas along the way.
There appears to be a considerable dialogue emerging - probably accelerated by the "credit crunch" - looking at the ways we live in the twenty-first century, about the possibilities and opportunities for change but also worries about not taking those opportunities. Do we have the right people in charge to take those opportunities? Does the concept of people in charge inherently damage a possibility for change?
All are in agreement about the growing out-dated-ness of postmodernism. It has reached saturation point, a moment in which postmodernism is becoming passé, washed up; irrelevant! Of course that doesn't mean we are in a post-postmodernism. It just means we are in a gap between post- and pre-. That is what Brattan's talk focussed on.
The main idea I've taken away from it, from a literature/art point of view, is an idea of the "afterimage". The designation "post" is used, Brattan notes, "to name a particular state of things that is somehow eclipsed but not entirely done with." We are in that moment now, a society creating afterimages. Afterimages of what, though? After postmodernism, after politics, after economics? No-one knows. Because we haven't entered a stage that can easily be called "an ism", we are left flailing in a limbo, using up yesterday's leftovers but not cooking a new dinner. Unsettling as this all may be, these sorts of conditions tend to be fertile ground for exciting art and ideas. This is emerging as the topic of my dissertation...
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Me
- Mark
- I am writing a PhD at the University of Glasgow entitled "The Poetics of Time in Contemporary Literature". My writing has been published in Type Review, Dancehall, Puffin Review and TheState. I review books for Gutter and The List. I am also an editor and reviewer at the Glasgow Review of Books.