Postmodern Culture and Literary Theory

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Postmodern Theory and Culture
Orientalism, Postmodern Culture and Literary theory
Conclusion
Works Cited

Introduction

Richard Rorty suggests that American literary criticism since World War II has increasingly compensated for the “professionalization” of philosophy and its withdrawal into purely technical and academic concerns, then contemporary “criticism” is not merely a professional discipline but a larger social phenomenon, supplanting history, philosophy,

or religion as the site of cultural and moral pedagogy par excellence. (Rorty, 60-71)The renaissance of “theory” in the American literary academy since the early seventies may, however, suggest a significantly different cultural prospect. The development of highly specialized languages of critical practice, assumptions about the inherent superiority of theory over immediate questions of textual interpretation, the particular combination of the prophetic tone with the desire for scientific rigor–all these point to a substantial change in the cultural role and function of contemporary literary criticism. Less a culturally effective discourse than a specialized set of language games, contemporary criticism may indeed resemble academic philosophy in its most technical modes, appealing to a trained coterie.

Harold Bloom stresses the responsibility the teacher of literature now has for a general moral pedagogy: “The teacher of literature now in America, far more than the teacher of history or philosophy or religion, is condemned to teach the presentness of the past, because history, philosophy and religion have withdrawn as agents from the Scene of Instruction” (cited in Rorty, p. 68). We may or may not respond to the plaintive tone of Bloom’s assertion, particularly in this passage, but it identifies a phenomenon both Rorty and Bloom describe in the same general terms.

From the outside, it is possible to lament this truncation of the public functions of criticism. Edward Said, whose career straddles both high theory and the popular cultural critical modes, has attacked much of contemporary theory on the grounds of its political ineffectuality. By implicit contrast to the very critics Rorty would identify as the previous generation’s culture heroes (including Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson), Said chides even Marxist critics for their apparent contentment with the discursive contexts of academic institutions. (Said, 158-79) For anyone concerned with the politics of culture, this is certainly a significant charge and needs to be thought through. There are institutional pressures toward insularity and irrelevance.

It is safer and more comfortable for an American cultural critic to write about theories of ideology than to analyze the hidden racist agenda of the state and its implications for immediate educational and cultural issues. But Said may be too hasty in assuming that critics such as Paul de Man and Harold Bloom are ineffectual angels, for the college literature classroom is often the register of fundamentally new aesthetic-cultural ideologies. The death of the author; the valorization of jouissance, not pleasure, the text, not the work; the play of mobile signifiers, not the search for determinable meaning: the slogans point to a basic systemic change that touches our discourses of society as well as of art. Such a phenomenon, then, requires at least an intrinsic theoretical critique, rather than a purely sociological diagnosis.

Literariness is revealed when we are dealing with the “autonomous potential” of language, when we move beyond naive representational conceptions of language that posit a natural and primordial link between sign and referent, the name and the thing named. The critique of reductionist views of language forms the basis of de Man’s thought; much of his work is intended to challenge our notions of reference or expression and their role in linguistic and literary processes. Hence de Man’s insistent emphasis on the tropological dimension, on language as unstable and (more important) self-deconstructing plays. Powerful and strategic as this view may be in contemporary literary-theoretical debates, this is only one view, and an E. D. Hirsch or an Edward Said may have considerable difficulty accepting it as the constitutive claim of contemporary theory.

Postmodern Theory and Culture

According to the social theorist Linda Nicholson, for instance, postmodernism not only reveals the oppositions of truth and falsehood, fact and superstition to be arbitrary, historically produced schemes for organizing what we study, it also claims that we do not need a theory of knowledge at all. (Linda, 1-16) This position is based on an epistemological relativism, the claim that in principle human thought cannot transcend its social moorings, that it can make no claims that are supposed to have transcultural or transhistorical validity.

Postmodernists have gone beyond earlier historicist claims about the inevitable “situatednesss” of human thought within culture to focus on the very criteria by which claims to knowledge are legitimized. The radical move in the postmodern turn was to claim that the very criteria demarcating the true and the false, as well as such related distinctions as science and myth or fact and superstition, were internal to the traditions of modernity and could not be legitimized outside of those traditions. Therefore the postmodern critique has come to focus on philosophy and the very idea of a possible theory of knowledge, justice, or beauty. The claim is that the pursuit itself of such theories rests upon the modernist conception of a transcendent reason, a reason able to separate itself from the body and from historical time and place. (Linda pp. 3-4)

The suspicion of “philosophy and the very idea of a possible theory of knowledge” is of course very general, and in order to examine the post-modernist case we need to make the claim much more precise. For one thing, it needs to be made clear whether the critique involves simply the rejection of epistemological foundationalism, the idea that once we have found an ideal ahistorical method or theory of knowledge it will ground our various sciences and permanently guide our different practices of inquiry. Understood as an antifoundationalist sentiment, postmodernism’s suspicion of a “possible theory of knowledge” can have much theoretical support, drawing on the work of Richard Rorty, among others. But antifoundationalism does not entail a relativistic rejection of “the very criteria demarcating the true and the false,” nor does it render irrelevant and unnecessary the search for a nonfoundationalist theory of knowledge, an empirically grounded philosophical account of the varieties of socially based truth and error, of the standards and criteria by which we justify knowledge claims or consider them erroneous.

In our “postmodern” world, history is no longer feasible; what we need to talk about, to pay attention to, are histories–in the plural. (Richard, 257-58) This position builds on the pervasive feeling in the human sciences these days that this grand narrative of history seems a little embarrassing; what we need to reclaim instead, as is often pointed out in cultural criticism and theory, is the plurality of our heterogeneous lives, the darker and unspoken meanings that are lived, fought, and imagined as various communities and peoples seek to retrace and reweave the historical text. In the history of criticism, encountering for the first time the challenge of alternative canons defined by feminist, black, third-world scholars and others, this is initially not only a valuable critical idea but also the basis for an energizing critical-political project.

After all, we have just been learning to speak of feminisms, instead of the singular form which implicitly hid the variety of women’s struggles along different racial and class vectors under the hegemonic self-image of the heterosexual white middle-class movement; we have learned to write “Marxism” without capitalizing the “m,” thereby pointing to the need to reconceive the relationship to some unitary originary source; we have, in effect, taught ourselves that if history was available to us, it was always as a text to be read and reread dialogically and to be rewritten in a form other than the monologue, no matter how consoling or noble its tone or import.

Post modernism is the ever evolving end result of the modern era. While in the modern era, new technologies were being learned, they have become commonplace. Opposition to hierarchies such as those of social status and value are more common due to the newfound power of the individual. While ballet and the theater were the “best” forms of art in the modern era, in the postmodern era society is becoming more and more reluctant to accept such narrow views. (Aamir, 95-125) Globalization is the norm. Products are shipped to us from all over the world, making the world a smaller place, and a more important aspect of our lives.

Orientalism, Postmodern Culture and Literary theory

To the many that have studied the foreign lands and their people, Orientalism has become a science. It is a discourse of knowledge of what the Orient is represented to be in the European mindset. Orientalism and its troubles are best explained by a contemporary Arabic Christian author Edward W. Said.

Sometimes it’s difficult to understand and it is often easy to misinterpret what exactly Orientalism stands for. It is not a mere study of what the Orient is about. Early orientalists dealt with the knowledge of the Orient that they thought to be exactly opposite of what the Occident meant to them. There was a sense of the “other”, something that is very different from “us”, the Europeans. Because everything that is not Europe is this “other”, Orientalism is a study that is very broad in its scope and geography. The lands, that Orientalism covers, stretch from the North African Coast of the Mediterranean all the way into the deep and vast Asia, including everything in between. Said details this broadness:

“…the range of published material of interest to Orientalist scholars is awesome. Arabic, innumerable Indian dialects, Hebrew, Pehlevi, Assyrian, Babylonian, Mongolian, Chinese, Burmese, Mesopotamian, Javanese: the list of philological works considered Orientalist is almost uncountable. Moreover, Orientalist studies apparently cover everything from the editing and translation of texts to numismatic, anthropological, archaeological, sociological, economic, historical, literary, and cultural studies in every known Asiatic and North African civilization, ancient and modern.” (Edward, 40-52)

The biggest historical problem with Orientalism is the misrepresentation of the true Orient. Early scholars were very ignorant towards the absolute truth and drew many of their conclusions about the Orient and its people based on isolated and sometimes irrelevant incidents that they perceived to be a characteristic of the people. Said states, “Orientalism is better grasped as a set of constraints upon and limitations of thought than it is simply as a positive doctrine.” (Edward, 40-52) A knowledge that an outsider of the Orient has is very limited and one that is all but objective. Because orientalists have perceived the Orient to be a complete opposite of the Occident, they made “logical” interpretations of their observations of Eastern customs based on these notions. They observed that Orientals were barbaric, that they were not capable of being sovereign, and that their whole culture was backwards.

Europeans had the notion that their superiority in the knowledge of all civilizations gave them the power to give a correct representation of all that is Oriental. In fact, as stated by Said, “Knowledge of the Orient, because generated out of strength, in a sense creates the Orient, the Oriental, and his world.” (Edward, 40-52)

Said makes a good point when he says “what gave the Oriental’s world its intelligibility and identity was not the result of his own efforts but rather the whole complex series of knowledgeable manipulations by which the Orient was identified by the West.”(Edward, 40-52) In this sense, the European Orientalist spoke for the Orient but represented it with biased knowledge. What now seem to be unintuitive observations were put into tomes of books and taken as fact by the readers of these scholarly manuscripts. These facts became ingrained into history as popular belief and many of these ignorant stereotypes persist even today.

One of the biggest reasons behind the bias of Orientalism and the general knowledge of the Orient stems from the medieval struggle of competition between the two biggest religions of the time, Islam and Christianity. Early twelfth century was the beginning of the First Crusades directly inspired by Pope Urban’s II speech to the Christian people. Certain chansons de geste (literal meaning – “songs of deeds”) were also used for inspiration of courage for the crusaders when they marched towards the east. However, as most could say, these chansons were propaganda pieces to spread misinformation about the Muslim people so that Christians would have even more reason to go fight the wars.

One of the more famous chansons de geste is The Song of Roland. The written version of this story, believed to have been composed in the eleventh century, is a retelling of a particular incident during the time of the wide empire of Charlemagne and his advance into Muslim Spain. The book is situated around a specific point in Charlemagne’s campaign where he deals with a traitor named Ganelon and the pagan king Marsille. The two plot the demise of Charlemagne’s right hand man and best warrior, Roland. While this poem is epic storytelling about chivalry and true heroism, interesting points can be derived from the way the story is told. This has directly to do with what the French Christian people knew about the Muslims and their religion, and bases itself on the study of Orientalism.

When reading The Song of Roland, one immediately senses that the story is one-sided. The most famous line of the poem, “Pagans are wrong, the Christian cause is right” (l. 1015), shows the dedication of the whole work to just one cause, Christendom. From the very beginning, the Christian Franks, led by Charlemagne, represent all that is good, while the Muslim Saracens, led by Marsille and later Baligant, represent the purest of all evil.

The author does however fall into conflict when he has to make the Saracens worthy opponents for the Franks. In many instances of the poem, vassals of Marsille are described as fierce and noble warriors, but still inferior to the Christians. This gives the Saracens a military validity and justifies that many can remain noble if only they would convert.

The other biggest thing that stands out is the author’s apparent lack of knowledge about the religion of Islam. He portrays the Saracens to be pagan idolaters worshiping Mohammed, Tervagant and Apollo, when in fact Islam is more monotheistic than Christianity itself. The description and naming of the gods occurs when the author uses the Orientalist concept of the “other” as being a total opposite of the Occidental. More specifically, the author “logically” compares what is known in the Christian faith as the Holy Trinity (the father, the son, and the holy ghost) to the Muslim faith. The author doesn’t care whether this fact is true or not, but he needs to fabricate this piece in order to present an “opposite” to the Holy Trinity that is absolutely evil. This gives the reader a sense of familiarity and eases his “understanding” of the Muslim faith. (Edward, 205-25)

The sense of the opposite in the “other” is seen in many other examples throughout the book. Besides the Trinity similarity, other parallels are seen when the warriors of both sides prepare for the battle, and the author’s description of these scenes. Marsille puts together twelve men to be his highest officers in battle. This is parallel to the Twelve Peers of Charlemagne. Similarities are also seen in Roland and Aelroth as being Charlemagne’s and Marsille’s respected nephews. The author give the reader a mirrored image of the two part in the struggle, the good and the evil.

Charlemagne and Marsille are also presented to be as opposites. Charlemagne is always portrayed as sitting on his throne in a solemn and quiet stature, always thinking before he speaks. Marsille, on the other hand, is seen as lazy and impatient. In the second laisse of the poem, the author describes the Saracen king as stretched out on a bench in a shadow of a tree in his orchard. Whenever he needs to make a decision, he doesn’t think for himself but immediately consults his advisors. His impatience is seen when Ganelon is sent as an ambassador and speaks boldly to the king. Marsille is infuriated by what Ganelon says and is immediate in his anger to kill the man. Thus the two kings are seen as complete opposites. One is superior – the other is inferior.

The author uses Orientalist inconsistencies to bash the Saracens even further. He portrays them as being dishonest, morally capable of sacrificing their first born to trick the enemy and to kill negotiators under a flag of truce, and also as showing cowardice on the battlefield and fighting for selfish reasons. What is distressing about the poem is not the fact that it states and portrays all these things, but the impact that it had upon the crusaders and the Christian people. These half-truths and stereotypes persisted through the centuries and became historical truth for most Europeans.

Orientalism in The Song of Roland is a tool that the author uses for the storytelling of an immense epic. Whether being actually right or wrong, it presents an effective piece of work and succeeds at what it is intended to do. But it would be wrong to call the poem a mere piece of propaganda because in fact it is much more. It is a part of European history and it is essential in understanding the mindsets of the people of the eleventh-twelfth centuries.

The attraction of “postmodernism” for a new generation writers and critics has its own historical and cultural implications. The “function of new theory,” in other words, is to constitute a forceful cultural critique in its own right. This is yet another way of defining the task of critical intervention, or “the act of insurgency.” The point, in the final analysis, is to critically uncover the complexity of political and ideological commitment and contradictions that underlies and simultaneously propels every instance of cultural imagination and production. As Edward Said puts it, “criticism belongs in that potential space inside civil society, acting on behalf of those alternative acts and alternative intentions whose advancement is a fundamental human and intellectual obligation.” (Said, 233-34)

The modern Orient was created only when it was attacked, conquered, and subjugated by the West. This is to say that only when the Orient became an object for the West did it enter modern times. The truth of modernity for the non-West, therefore, is its reaction to the West.” (Naoki, 496) The disadvantageous position of the non-West in this scheme was initially explored by Edward Said in Orientalism, and the set of issues surrounding the advent of Western discourses in the rest of the world has since, under the various rubrics of “postcolonial” and “subaltern” studies, gone on to become the fulcrum of one of the most important movements in contemporary criticism. (Robert, 186-90)

Unlike modernism, however, which was specifically Western and marked as an import, postmodernism in its very nature can be and always is home-grown, its pluralist celebration of difference constituting an immediate authorization of local cultural production over imports, whether from the outside or from the national power centers themselves. Nor can the theory of postmodernism be said to be Western exactly, for it arrived in Europe as an import in its own right and in the peripheral areas initially derived from the peripheral and hitherto un- and antitheoretical area of architecture. (Gauri, 45-49)

Since the preoccupying concern is to do away with the traditional critical vocabulary and catch up with the new trends, critics find themselves faced with two uneasy tasks in their writings: on the one Culture and individual identity are linked: though identity devolves to the person, it and the self are both cultural constructions. On one level, the self or the subject is a “natural” result of culture and one of the defining characteristics of humanity. In order for culture to be culture, there must be a reflexive subject; meaning must always be interpreted. On another level, the construction of self as a particular kind of entity is contingent upon the culture of the self. That is, the essence of the object that is constructed is determined by the category of the self that is culturally available; the self as a personal and social object has always existed, but the meaning of that social category has changed in response to modernizing and cultural processes (Edward, 88-94)

Conclusion

Of greater interest in the present context is the way in which the various ideologies of the postmodern have encouraged and enabled new reflections on subjectivity and have produced new debates on the subject debates that may themselves be obligatory or a required part of the general postmodern problematic but can scarcely be said to have frozen over into dogma or doxa. For every celebration of the decentered subject, there may be found an equally powerful celebration of identity. The question of subjectivity in the postmodern is therefore an immense playing field for dialectic in the Platonic sense.

If a now multifarious cultural life attracts various critical responses but also gives the unmistakable impression of vitality and creativity, an erratic theoretical discourse will only rub in its own superficiality and even incompetence. This is to a large extent what happened to New Theory. With all the different and more often than not conflicting theories introduced en masse, critics, anxious to try them all, write to produce a confusing hybrid of discourses. From New Criticism, Psychoanalysis, Structuralist Poetics, Semiotics, Reception Aesthetics, Reader’s Response, Hermeneutics, Archetypal Criticism, Deconstruction, and Poststructuralism, all the way to Feminist Theory, Western Marxism, and Postmodernist Cultural Critique, the entire course of literary criticism in the twentieth-century West and more is frantically crammed into scores of introductory essays, dozens of translated selections, all in a matter of a few years.

Works Cited

Aamir R. Mufti’s “Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture,” Critical Inquiry 25:1 (1998), 95–125.

Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1994). 88-94

Edward, Said. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. 40-52

Edward, Said 1989. “Representing the colonized: Anthropology and its interlocuters.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 205-25.

Edward, Said, W. “Reflections on American ‘Left’ Criticism,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 158-79

Gauri Viswanathan, Outside The Fold: Conversion, Modernity and Belief (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 45–49.

Linda Nicholson, Introduction to Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 1-16.

Naoki Sakai, “Modernity and Its Critique: The Problem of Universalism and Particularism,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 87:3 (Summer 1988), 496.

Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 257-258.

Robert Young’s White Mythologies: Writing History and the West ( London: Routledge, 1990). 186-90

Rorty, Richard “Professionalized Philosophy and Transcendentalist Culture,” in Consequences of Pragmatism ( Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 60-71.

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