In Duvall, Chapter 1 of Productive Postmodernism, identify one example of intertextuality. Using Bazerman's article, what kind of intertextuality is being used? Why is the intertextual representation being used by the other? What is it's "meaning" in the article?
Productive Postmodernism Productive Postmodernism Consuming Histories and Cultural Studies Edited by John N. Duvall with an afterword by Linda Hutcheon State University of New York Press Published by State University of New York Press, Albany 2002 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207 Production by Dana Foote Marketing by Patrick Durocher Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Productive postmodernism : consuming histories and cultural studies / edited by John N. Duvall ; with an afterword by Linda Hutcheon. p. cm. — (The SUNY series in postmodern culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–7914–5193–3 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0–7914–5194–1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Postmodernism. 2. Arts, Modern—20th century. I. Duvall, John N. (John Noel), 1956– II. Series. NX456.5.P66 P763 2002 2001049575 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 v Contents List of Illustrations vii Preface ix 1. Troping History: Modernist Residue in Jameson’s Pastiche and Hutcheon’s Parody 1 John N. Duvall 2. Postmodernism and History: Complicitous Critique and the Political Unconscious 23 Thomas Carmichael Postmodernism, Fiction, History 3. A Mother (and a Son, and a Brother, and a Wife, et al.) in History: Stories Galore in Libra and the Warren Commission Report 43 Stacey Olster 4. Donald Barthelme and the President of the United States 61 Michael Zeitlin 5. “Postmodern Blackness”: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the End of History 75 Kimberly Chabot Davis 6. Historiographic Metafiction and the Celebration of Differences: Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo 93 W. Lawrence Hogue 7. Troping the Renaissance: Postmodern Historiography and Early Modern History 111 Paul Budra vi Contents Postmodernism, Architecture, History 8. Los Angeles, 2019: Two Tales of a City 123 Kevin R. McNamara 9. Postmodern Casinos 137 Shelton Waldrep 10. Postmodernism and Holocaust Memory: Productive Tensions in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum 167 Nancy J. Peterson Afterword “Acting from the Midst of Identities”: Questions from Linda Hutcheon 199 Works Cited 207 Contributors 219 Index 221 vii Illustrations 1.1 Nothing to Wear by Lou Brooks 18 1.2 Drowning Girl by Roy Lichtenstein 19 9.1 Exterior of the Sands Hotel 145 9.2–9.3 Exteriors of tropical-themed hotels 146 9.4–9.7 Exterior and interior of the Excalibur Hotel 148 9.8 Luxor sign 153 9.9 Exterior of the Luxor Hotel 154 9.10 Exterior of the MGM Grand Hotel 155 9.11 New York, New York Hotel under construction 157 9.12–9.14 The theme park at the MGM Grand Hotel 158 9.15 Petroglyphs 164 10.1 The Hall of Witness 171 10.2 Opaque window panes in the Hall of Remembrance 173 10.3 U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum 174 10.4 Ringelblum milk can 178 10.5 Identification card 183 10.6 The Tower of Faces 188 10.7 The Hall of Remembrance 190 ix Preface This volume grew out of a conference panel I chaired in 1996. My call for papers asked that panelists think not only about the relation between postmodernism and history but also about the possibili- ties suggested by Fredric Jameson’s focus on pastiche and Linda Hutcheon’s emphasis on parody as the defining tropes of postmod- ernism. But well prior to 1996, my own thinking about postmodern- ism had been shaped by Jameson and Hutcheon. During the 1983 NEH Summer Seminar, “Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,” at the University of Illinois, I heard Jameson lecture from his work on postmodernism and read in galley form the now famous essay “Post- modernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” which served as the starting point for his book of the same title. Later, as a teacher of postmodern fiction, I found in Hutcheon’s two books from the late 1980s—The Poetics of Postmodernism and The Politics of Postmodernism—a useful heuristic to introduce and categorize a number of contemporary cultural narratives. Until her work on post- modern fiction, when someone referred to the postmodern novel, a fairly small number of highly aestheticized texts, almost invariably written by white male authors, came to mind. Hutcheon’s concept “historiographic metafiction” clearly allowed one to include a num- ber of women and minority writers under the rubric “postmodern- ism” who had previously been excluded from the designation. Although I give students a number of theoretical perspectives on postmodernism, including those of Andreas Huyssen and David Harvey, for me, one of the biggest sticking points has always been how to approach Jameson’s and Hutcheon’s radically different per- spectives on the cultural work of contemporary narrative. The need to explore their differences seems all the more urgent given the shared intellectual assumptions of Hutcheon and Jameson, particu- larly their reliance on Louis Althusser’s sense of ideology as uncon- scious systems of representation. Brian McHale has argued that Hutcheon’s project “is fueled and animated by the anxiety of master narratives—that is by her desire not to be thought to have invoked, endorsed, or relied upon one or other totalizing master narrative in her account of postmodern poetics” (“Postmodernism” 18). For McHale, Hutcheon’s postmodernism fails for its unsuccessful incor- x Preface poration of the master narrative of feminism, as a secure site of social critique, into her claim to disavow master narratives. The Marxist Jameson, in McHale’s view, is more successful because as an “unre- constructed totalizer” (23), he is less anxious about Jean-François Lyotard’s critique of master narratives; the proof that Hutcheon is wrong about the consequences of “endorsing a master narrative” is that “Jameson’s is incontestably the more catholic of the two post- modernsims” (24). Despite McHale’s thoughtful attempt to articulate the Jameson- Hutcheon difference, the matter calls for further exploration since so much applied criticism on postmodern texts is underwritten by the exclusive authority of either Jameson or Hutcheon. So in part this volume is a response to the students in my graduate courses on post- modern American fiction whose questions have pushed me toward, if not the answers, perhaps a better description of the pertinent issues. My hope is that Productive Postmodernism will, if not synthesize, at least provide contexts for understanding the differences between Jameson’s and Hutcheon’s competing versions of postmodernism. In the work that follows, three Canadian and seven American critics investigate first-world narratives and cultural texts. If our focus is largely on North American texts it is because postmodernism most often has been identified as a first-world phenomenon, and certainly from the perspective of Jean Baudrillard, America epito- mizes such first-world culture. Moreover, the kinds of cultural texts that Jameson deploys in his work suggest the extent to which North American cultural texts can serve as a metonymy for first-world cul- ture. However, by bringing Hutcheon’s more multicultural sense of postmodernism to bear on these first-world texts, the chapters in a number of instances are able to frame questions about Jameson’s em- phasis on America. Following my opening chapter, which lays out what I see as key differences between Jameson’s and Hutcheon’s postmodernism, Thomas Carmichael’s “Postmodernism and History: Complicitous Critique and the Political Unconscious” serves as an alternative over- view. While my sense of the two theorists underscores their differing emphases on production and consumption, Carmichael instead reads their positions in a more complementary fashion, seeing points of intersection between Hutcheon’s compromised politics of post- modernism and Jameson’s political unconscious. After these two overviews, the remaining seven chapters fall into two clusters— “Postmodernism, Fiction, History” and “Postmodernism, Architec- xiPreface ture, History”—a division readily suggested by the importance of narrative and architecture to both theorists. “Postmodernism, Fiction, History” begins with Stacey Olster’s “A Mother (and a Son, and a Brother, and a Wife, et al.) in History: Stories Galore in Libra and the Warren Commission Report.” This essay reads Don DeLillo’s novel against the Warren Commission Re- port and texts by and about Lee Harvey Oswald’s friends and rela- tives. Examining this matrix, Olster maintains that Libra provides a point of confluence for various theories of historical production. Next, Michael Zeitlin’s “Donald Barthelme and the President of the United States” argues that psychoanalysis’ investment in the subject still provides a useful purchase on postmodernity that may allow for an oppositional perspective on the totality. Beginning from a the- oretical investigation into the persistence of authoritarianism and the father-imago (and linking this to President Clinton’s ongoing oedipal wreckage), Zeitlin turns to Donald Barthelme’s 1964 story, “The Pres- ident,” to suggest the ways that this fiction explores and challenges protofascist impulses in American culture precisely by keeping alive the possibility of individual psychology. Turning to African American literature, Kimberly Chabot Davis examines the hybrid enactment of time and history in Toni Mor- rison’s Beloved in order to shed a different light on the Jameson- Hutcheon debate. For Davis, Morrison’s novel operates in the space between postmodern skepticism toward master narratives and a modernist politics still invested in a coherent historical memory. In “Postmodern Blackness,” Davis argues that the power of Morrison’s fiction emerges from the productive tension between the traditions of postmodernism and African American social protest. W. Lawrence Hogue approaches the issue of critical purchase through deconstruc- tion. In “Historiographic Metafiction and the Celebration of Differ- ences: Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo,” Hogue sees parallels between Reed’s aesthetic practice and Jacques Derrida’s project. For Hogue, Reed’s fictional undermining of hierarchized binaries confirms Hutcheon’s sense of historiographic metafiction while questioning Jameson’s version of postmodernism. The first section concludes with Paul Budra’s “Troping the Re- naissance: Postmodern Historiography and Early Modern History.” He believes that New Historicism’s and cultural materialism’s focus on the Renaissance, the period in which the nascent narratives of modernity were formed, has trickled down to popular representa- tions of the early modern period. Taking up two texts published in xii Preface 1992 that represent Elizabethan England, Charles Nicholl’s history, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, and Patricia Finney’s novel, Firedrake’s Eye, Budra argues that the conjunction of postmodern historiography and early modern history has resulted in the paradoxical entrenchment of teleology-driven historical narra- tive. The result is a substitution of postmodern paranoia for early modern providence. The remaining three chapters form the second section, “Post- modernism, Architecture, History.” It opens with Kevin McNamara’s “Los Angeles, 2019: Two Tales of a City,” which serves as a hinge between the first and second sections, inasmuch as his piece is con- cerned with narrative representations of architecture in a future dystopian cityscape. On the one hand, the Los Angeles of 2019 in Blade Runner serves as the quintessential depthless landscape that Jameson delineates in his work on postmodern architecture; that is, the city is