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Show 258 Deandra Lanier I AM: THE WAKE OF POSTPOSTMODERNISM Deandra Lanier (Andy Hoffmann) Department of English University of Utah honors college spring 2012 The goal of this "essay," a mashing together of the genres of fiction, poetry, and literary criti-cism, is to figure out where contemporary fiction is headed and what postmodernism might be leaving in its wake. This essay is an attempt to push critique through the lens of fiction. It seems that the progression and identity of contemporary writing, that is, the product of postmodern tenets and the reactions that result from them, needs to change the way it expresses itself in order to remain a vital discourse. I chose to write this study from the inside out: I am not writing necessarily on the identity of modern fiction, I am writing modern fiction that questions its own identity. At once this is theory and poetry: my poetics. Jung says there is nothing new; it has all been thought before… I want every person who reads this to come up with their own conclusion and ask questions. My poetics is an exploration and not a conclusion. Postmodernism opens the door to an all new identity crisis and "where we go from here" may not be the correct way to look at the situation. Rather, after thinking it through by means of this "essay," the concern is about what we have become. We are both and neither. We are within and not between anything. Our conceptualization of "self " is very much dependent upon and reflected within our conceptual-ization of our aesthetic. Further, that which we are producing, our books and our films and our ideas, has reached a radical moment in which it appears impossible to move on. Everything looks like stasis or the day of reckoning or nothing at all. This poetics will question postmodernism while celebrating it and suggest that something new and different does lie on the other side of this instant in our American post postindustrial post postmodern culture. Andy Hoffmann |
