About the Book
This ground-breaking work offers a challenging and positive view of postmodern culture. It draws on the author's extensive interviews with a number of leading postmodern artists, writers and performers, including: * Jean Baudrillard * Samuel Beckett * John Cage * Phillip Glass The Parameters of Postmodernism focuses on both the prevailing negative theories of postmodernism, and the more positive aspects of postmodern theory and practice. The negative aspect is exemplified by the work of writers like Brecht, Beckett, Barthes and Baudrillard, who emphasise the death of artistic innovation and the lack of a permanent reality. Zurbrugg highlights the contradictions in the arguments of these writers, and examines the later works in which they qualify their earlier, more infamous, statements. The positive aspect is characterised by artists such as Cage, Glass and Monk - who interweave the new postmodern media with confidence and invention, and Eco, Grass and Wolf - who revive mythological and folkloric traditions. The Parameters of Postmodernism argues that in each case - high-tech or revivalist - postmodern creativity culminates in a highly positive synthesis of past, present and futuristic materials.
Table of Contents:
Preface, Acknowledgments, Anti-Art or Ante-Art?, Monumental Art or Submonumental Art? , Eagleton and the Apocalyptic Fallacy, Introducing the B-Effect, Introducing the C-Effect, Deploring/Exploring Hyperspace: Jameson and Cage, Stupefaction or Enlivenment? , Benjamin and the Loss of Aura, Barthes, Belsey, and the Death of the Author, Bürger and the Death of the Avant-Garde, Bonito-Oliva, Baudrillard, and the Collapse of the New, Beckett, Brecht, and the Attractions of Antinarrative, Beckett’s Poetics of Failure/Brecht’s Poetics of Interrogation, Beckett, Brecht, and the Groan of the Text, Warhol and the Grin of the Text, Eagleton, Jameson, and Dehistoricized Culture, Cage, Kostelanetz, and Value Judgments, Jameson, Rauschenberg, and Premature Exasperation, Cage, Rauschenberg, and Ryman, Cage and Consumption, Collective Narrative and the Struggle with Simulacra, Depersonalized Culture or Repersonalized Culture?, Cage and the Antilogic of the Text, Beckett, Cage, and Nothing, Beckett, Cage, and Programmatic Composition, Purposeful Purposelessness or Nothing to Be Done?, Jameson, Bourdieu, and the Destruction of Art and Taste, Chion, Cage, and New Aesthetic Rationales, Postmodernism’s Purist Aesthetic, Postmodernism’s Hybrid Aesthetic, Feldman, Crazy Contradiction, and the Conceptual, Artistic Life, Pure “H”—Habermas and Communicative Rationality, Beuys, Adorno, and the Silence of Marcel Duchamp, Beuys, Cage, Buchloh, and the B-B-Effect, Jappe, Jameson, and the Concept of Utopia, Bense, Concrete Poetry, and the Dwindling of the Poetic Element, Chopin, Human Vitality, and Technological Civilization, Conz and the New Saints of the Avant-Garde, A Problem in Design: Lax and Mann, Postmodernism at Two Speeds: Hassan, Janco, and Seuphor, Rainer, Robbe-Grillet, Reich, and the Turn to Interobjectivity, Robbe-Grillet and the Re-turn to the Subjective Type of Writing, Rainer and the Re-turn to Identity, Reich and the Re-turn to Historical Realities, Multimedia Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Gaburo and Ashley, Monk and the Re-turn to Recurrence, Umberto Eco and the Re-turn to the Middle Ages, Grass and the Destruction of Mankind, Grass, Mann, and the Re-turn to Forbidden Literature, Ernst, Carrington, and the Re-turn of Surrealism, Carrington, Cage, Beuys, and the Poetics of Resistance, Cage, Carrington, Barthes, Burroughs, Bense: From Artha to Moksha, Cage, Wolf, and the Re-turn to the Third Alternative, Wolf, Mann, and the Authority of Literary Genres, Müller, Beuys, and the Elevation of the Berlin Wall, Müller, Brecht, and the Petrification of Hope, Müller, Wilson, and the Re-turn to the Classics, Huyssen and the Endgame of the Avant-Garde, Huyssen, Popper, and the Electrification of the Avant-Garde, Buñuel, Breton, Benjamin, Baudrillard, and the Myths of Mechanical Depersonalization, DeLillo, Müller, Lyotard, Kroker, and the Panic Sensibility, Ballard, The Kindness of Women, and Catharsis, Beyond the Disappearance of Value: Anderson and Acker, Toward Effective Communication: Kruger and Holzer, Appropriation, Neutralization, and Reconciliation: Tillers and Johnson, Independent Internationalism: Finlay and Lax, Anderson and American Active Freedom, Glass and Wilson: Alienation Effect or Empathy Effect?, Burroughs, Walker, and the Pattern of Chaos, Beckett, Warrilow, and the Clarity of Spirit, Considered in Diagrammatic Summary: The Phases of Postmodernism, The Modes of Modernism and Postmodernism, Baudrillard or Cage? Degeneration or Affirmation?, Burt, Wendt, and the Positive Parameters of Postmodernism, Index
Review :
`A fascinating book, like nothing else I've read over the past few years.' - Christopher Norris
