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From: "Tony Ellis" <tony.ellis@futurenet.co.uk> Subject: (urth) postmodernism, OTism, continent-ism Date: Thu, 28 Oct 1999 10:27:49 Daniel Fusch wrote: > By the way, I'm MUCH more familiar with modernism than postmodernism, so if > anybody can clarify or correct my explanation here, I won't mind! > I suspect that there are as many explanations of postmodermism as there are postmodernists, but my own pet in-one-sentence definition is to say that postmodern art is self-aware art. It's art with a built-in awareness of its own artificiality. For modernists art was a way of trying to get as close as possible to the 'Truth' (eg: Joyce's epiphanies): the characters, the sensations, were all supposed to seem as real as possible, while the art that brought them to you remained transparent. In postmodernism the art itself is the subject of the art. Thus in Ben Marcus's fascinatingly bonkers 'The Age of Wire and String' you can have a chapter that begins: "Sky Destroys Dog. Air days, in the Western Worship Boxes, traditionally the Wednesday, Friday, and Half-Man Day following the first Sunday that a dog has suffocated the weather." You're not supposed to look beyond the words for some higher meaning, you stop at the words themselves and their arrangement. Alga wrote: > the stone town is Athens (and that when you go back a million years [say] at > that lattitude and longitude you find yourselves not in Greece but in South > America), > That is such an ingenious sleight-of-hand! But... but... if the stone town is Athens, how can Severian, the Cumaen and co. be sitting on the roof of Apu-Punchau's house, when that was built a million years ago in South America? "When the building was completed, I recognized the roof upon which Jolenta would die, and I knew I would be buried beneath it." TUOTNS, chapter L. *More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/