Searching for Roots: Surrealist Dimensions of Postmodern Fiction

Neophilologus, 1987

2019

Christianity and Literature, 2004

Beyond postmodernism"-one can almost hear a sigh of relief. Finally we can say out loud what a growing number of books admit: postmodernism as a movement of renewal has run its course. In literary studies it is not just the inclusion of postmodernism in encyclopedia entries but also its own evident inability to come up with engaging new readings that signal the end of postmodern literary theory. This does not mean that we have already reread the traditional literary canon in postmodern terms but rather that any such readings have become more or less predictable. Postmodern literary theory was born of a desire to liberate from the predictable, a desire for constant renewal and unexpected interpretations, but it has clearly exhausted this potential.

1988

Imbizo

In this essay I argue that affirmations of traces of the Enlightenment project are locatable in the itinerary of postmodernisms simultaneously as the erosive disavowal of certain features of Enlightenment is persistently played out. Seeded in postmodernism is the disruptive iconoclas­tic act of Enlightenment. Enlightenment dismantled the edifice of feudalism to impose its own iconography and taxonomical protocols. But unlike Enlightenment/modernity, postmodernism’s subversion lacks the teleology to install a new iconography. While the impetus of Enlightenment/modernity formulates metanarratives and venerates the deployment of rationalism in creating coherent historiographies, postmodernism refuses any totalising/universalising/homogenising ideological and scientific narratives, as it privileges the deferral of meaning. Yet the relentless decentring of meaning formations must be the desire to equip the reader with discursive tools to know how to interpret a multiplicity of contestin...

2015

The large body of critical work centred on modernism and postmodernism, which has seen the light of day in the twentieth century and the first years of the twentieth first, is simply impressive. What partly accounts for such extensive and ever proliferating critical responses to the two (cultural and aesthetic) movements may be connected, on one level at least, to the lack of consensus and the intense debate carried out among commentators with regard to their meaning and politics. As terms, modernism and postmodernism have infiltrated the professional idioms of a variety of disciplinary fields, from literature, art and philosophy to architecture, film and cultural analysis. They are, however, often interpreted multiply in their various contexts, decoded as they are in ways that address very specific, field-bound issues and problems. What is more, their definitional limits are further stretched by the ongoing revision to which they have been subjected since at least the 1970s, as new...

KUL Publishing House, 2016

This book investigates the phenomenon of contradiction in art and, above all, in the postmodern English-language novel, in the context of the cognitive theory of art − the theory which perceives art as a mode of cognition. Taking advantage of the treatment that contradiction has received in philosophy, especially in the classical and paraconsistent logics, the study tries to define artistic contradictions, and name their essential features, types, uses, cognitive value and criteria of aesthetic significance. Special attention is paid to contradictions which (seem to) violate the principle of non-contradiction. It is commonly assumed that such violation is undesirable in discourse and impossible in reality but can apparently take place and be welcome in artificial constructs, especially those which operate in the mode of fiction. The study also tries to consider the possible impact of contradictions inherent in a work of art on the process of its interpretation. The postmodern novel has been chosen as the primary object of the book’s analyses because of the privileged position that contradictions – often spectacular and thought-provoking – occupy there, after their relative absence from the pre-postmodern novel.

This essay interweaves Stefan Morawski's critique of postmodernism and Jean-François Lyotard's expression of the postmodern sublime as "the presentation of the unpresentable" in a wide-ranging appraisal of the culmination of the postmodern age. This juxtaposition finds expression in the concept of the two modes of a negative sublime: the negative dynamical sublime exemplified in the stockpiles of nuclear warheads scattered widely across the globe, and the negative mathematical sublime represented by the omniscient electronic informational web that increasingly entangles individuals and societies. KEY WORDS Lyotard, Morawski, negative sublime, popular culture, postmodern culture, postmodern episteme, postmodern sublime I Postmodernism refers to a phase in Western intellectual culture that became prominent during the final decades of the twentieth century. As a complex period with distinctive cognitive traits, it could be called, to use Foucault's language, an episteme. 2 A number of influential though disparate writers contributed to identifying a cultural trend they called postmodernism. They differed from one another so much that commentators named them as a group by their temporal period in intellectual history-after modernism-rather than by a shared principle or style. What seemed common to all was a skepticism toward the basic tenets of high modernism and a critique of its articles of faith. Postmodernist writers questioned, in particular, the social stabilities and values, primarily identified with rational order in material and cultural progress through science that had governed the post-World War II period. This was a time that saw the