Succeeding Postmodernism: Language and Humanism in Contemporary American Literature

by Mary K. Holland

While critics collect around the question of what comes "after postmodernism," this book asks something different about recent American fiction: what if we are seeing not the end of postmodernism but its belated success? Succeeding Postmodernism examines how novels by DeLillo, Wallace, Danielewski, Foer and others conceptualize threats to individuals and communities posed by a poststructural culture of mediation and simulation, and possible ways of resisting the disaffected solipsism bred by that culture. Ultimately it finds that twenty-first century American fiction sets aside the postmodern problem of how language does or does not mean in order to raise the reassuringly retro question of what it can and does mean: it finds that novels today offer language as solution to the problem of language. Thus it suggests a new way of reading "antihumanist" late postmodern fiction, and a framework for understanding postmodern and twenty-first century fiction as participating in a long and newly enlivened tradition of humanism and realism in literature.

Genres: Literary Criticism

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[E. C. Koch · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t owe Mary Holland money. Mary Holland does not possess an illicit photograph of me. I’ve never met Mary Holland. Mary Holland’s book, Succeeding Postmodernism, is the best representation of postmodern literature (in a very crowded field of books attempting to represent postmodern literature) I’ve ever read. It’s not the best because it was provocative (though it was provocative) or because it made me think differently about the works she discusses (though it did that too); any number of really good books about postmodernism can, after all, provoke and offer counterintuitive readings of novels. It’s the best because Holland – first, to my understanding, to make this claim – reads postmodernism as an extension of (as the praxis half of) poststructural language theory. I think maybe because the shine of poststructuralism has tarnished and perhaps too because critical attention is now so focused on neo-liberalism, accounts of postmodern literature written today forget just how influential poststructural language theory was and how much of our current thinking about language is conditioned by those theories. Holland recognizes this significance, and, in writing about various themes that run through works of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, addresses why postmodern texts became obsessed with language and signification and representation and superficiality. Then Holland makes the next cognitive step that bridges accounts of postmodern literature with the contemporary by arguing that poststructuralism has a pro-humanities aspect. This claim counters all of the received wisdom about poststructuralism, and, so, is bold, bordering on radical. It also is the only way to reconcile the logocentrism of current literature with that literature’s turn toward earnestness, faith, and human relationships. Holland sees what, apparently, no one else does, that literature today doesn’t ignore the implications of poststructuralism, but, instead confronts them directly in order to advance the Enlightenment project of advancing truth. And truth here, as Holland also points out, is not the pre-postmodern universal truth that Lyotard, for one, skewered to absolute grisly death, but the lowercase-t truths available still within literature composed by subjects aware A. of the limitations of their subjectivity, and B. that limited subjectivity is all that’s available to us. This version of self-aware literature is qualitatively different than the meta-fiction popularized by postmodernism via poststructuralism and is what I would call New Sincerity literature and what Holland calls the next phase of postmodernism (that which succeeds the last phase, hence Succeeding Postmodernism). Now, I think Holland is wrong about this. I think Sincerity functions as a better thesis than this new phase of postmodernism that Holland explicates in her book. And I think that this difference amounts to very little.