Postmodernisms now : essays on contemporaneity in the arts / Charles Altieri.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Altieri, Charles, 1942-

Series:

Literature and philosophy

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Postmodernism.

Physical Description:

viii, 316 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

University Park, Pa. : Pennsylvania State University Press, [1998]

Summary:

Postmodernism today is driven by a set of theoretical stances that grow increasingly problematic. But as the theoretical contradictions emerge, it becomes possible to contrast this theoretical discourse to the ambitions that initially led writers and artists to pursue their version of postmodern perspectives. So this book explores what remains viable and valuable in some representative versions of what these writers and artists created.

Altieri begins with an essay defining five basic contradictions in postmodern theory and outlining specific artistic strategies for dwelling with and within those contradictions. Part Two then sets the historical stage with two essays -- one focusing on the efforts to overthrow late modernism by Jasper Johns and John Ashbery, the other tracing the emergence of a logic of contingency in the poetics of Robert Creeley, Frank O'Hara, and Sylvia Plath. With Part Three the focus shifts to essays proposing different value frameworks for postmodern poets, frameworks that range from moral philosophy to the resources of the tradition of love poetry. Part Four turns to visual artists first engaging the efforts to politicize the postmodern in the 1980s, then showing how Frank Stella's work can be put in dialogue with that of Jacques Derrida. Finally, the book swallows its own tail by proposing an argument that the only version of the sublime that today does not collapse into self-congratulation is the sublime of self-disgust.

Contents:

I. Theoretical Discourses and the Arts in Postmodernism

1 What Is Living and What Is Dead in American Postmodernism: Establishing the Contemporaneity of Some American Poetry 23

II. Setting the Scene

2 John Ashbery and the Challenge of Postmodernism in the Visual Arts 53

3 Contingency as Compositional Principle in Fifties Poetics 82

III. Contemporary Poetries in Postmodern Culture

4 What Differences Can Contemporary Poetry Make in Our Moral Thinking? 109

5 Ann Lauterbach's "Still" and Why Stevens Still Matters 136

6 Ashbery as Love Poet 152

7 Some Problems About Agency in the Theories of Radical Poetics 166

IV. Visual Thinking in some Postmodern Artists

8 Frank Stella dn Jacques Derrida: Toward a Postmodern Ethics of Singularity 195

9 The Powers and the Limits of Oppositional Postmodernism 216

V. Concluding Parable for Critics

10 On the Sublime of Self-Disgust: Or How to Save the Sublime from Narcissistic Sublimation 257

Appendix The Four Discourses of Postmodernism 283.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [305]-311) and index.

ISBN:

0271018038

0271018046

OCLC:

38924394