Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor (1985)

Peter Ackroyd Hawksmoor (1985) Postmodernism

Historiographic metafiction • coined by literary theorist Linda Hutcheon (defined in "A Poetics of Postmodernism„) • works both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also laying claim to historical events and personages. • Historiographic metafiction is a quintessentially postmodern art form • a reliance upon textual play, parody and historical re-conceptualization

Historiographic quality • Sir Christopher Wren (1632 – 1723) (e.g. St Paul’s Cathedral) → real figure → architect • Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661 – 1736) → real figure → architect → fictitious character → detective/20th century plot of Hawksmoor • Nicholas Dyer → fictitious character → architect → personifying Nicholas Hawksmoor the actual architect of, for instance, Christ Church in Spitalfields, London

Christ Church, Spitalfields, London (1714-1729) designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor

Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)

Postmodernism [. . .] ceaselessly reshuffles the fragments of preexistent texts, the building blocks of older cultural and social production, in some new and heightened bricolage: metabooks which cannibalize other books, metatexts which collate bits of other texts-such is the logic of postmodernism in general. (96)

Ihab Hassan, “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism” (in The Postmodern Turn; 1987) MODERNISM •

Romanticism/Symbolism

POSTMODERNISM •

Pataphysics/Dadaism

• Form (conjunctive, closed) •

Purpose

• Antiform (disjunctive, open) •

Play

• • • •

Design Hierarchy Mastery/Logos Art Object/Finished Work

Chance Anarchy Exhaustion/Silence Process/Performance/Happening

•

Distance

• • • • •

Participation

• • • • •

Creation/Totalisation Synthesis Presence Centering Genre/Boundary

• • • • •

Decreation/Deconstruction Antithesis Absence Dispersal Text/Intertext

• • •

Semantics Paradigm Hypotaxis

• • •

Rhetoric Syntagm Parataxis

Ihab Hassan, “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism” (in The Postmodern Turn; 1987) • MODERNISM • •

Metaphor Selection

• Root/Depth • Interpretation/Reading • Signified •

Lisible (Readerly) ~ Roland Barthes

• Narrative/Grande Histoire • • •

Master Code Symptom Type

• Genital/Phallic •

Paranoia

• Origin/Cause • •

God the Father Metaphysics

• Determinancy •

Transcendence

• •

POSTMODERNISM

Metonymy Combination

• Rhizome/Surface

• Against Interpretation/Misreading

• Signifier •

Scriptible (Writerly) ~ Roland Barthes

• Anti-narrative/Petite Histoire • • •

Idiolect Desire Mutant

• Polymorphous/Androgynous •

Schizophrenia

• Difference-Différance/Trace ~ • •

Jacques Derrida The Holy Ghost Irony

• Indeterminancy •

Immanence