Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Review
Author(s): Martin Melaver
Review by: Martin Melaver
Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 12, No. 4, National Literatures/Social Spaces (Winter, 1991), pp.
817-818
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1772722
Accessed: 27-06-2016 10:55 UTC

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 New Books at a Glance 817

Neil Larsen, Modernism and Hegemony: A Materialist Critique of Aesthetic Agen-

cies. Foreword by Jaime Concha. Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 71. Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. xlvi + 125 pp.
Julian Pefanis, Heterology and the Postmodern: Bataille, Baudrillard, and Lyotard.
Post-Contemporary Interventions series. Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 1991. 170 pp.
Henry Sussman, Afterimages of Modernity: Structure and Indifference in Twen-
tieth-Century Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. xv +
227 pp.

Three approaches-Marxist, deconstructionist, intellectual history-to the

borderlines between modernism and postmodernism; three different uses of
fields other than literature; three different agendas are represented by this
trio of books.

For Sussman, modernism is linked to experiments in style and organization,

postmodernism to the obliteration of structure. Using structures rooted in a
philosophical tradition, modernism both celebrates the structures it uncovers
and evinces an anxiety toward them. Postmodernism transgresses structure
but, at the same time, is indifferent to what it effaces. Modern characters em-
body subjects, for whom such themes as sexuality become a privileged ground
of Being. In the postmodern, characters perform functions, and sexuality has
no inherent meaning. Onto this dichotomy Sussman traces the writings of
Joyce, Kafka, Wittgenstein, Beckett, Adorno, and Bernhard, distinctive artists
of the twentieth century whose writings, which both experiment with particu-
lar structures and explode them, straddle the divide between the two "isms."
There is, in Larsen's Marxist approach to cultural history, a certain corre-
spondence to Sussman's work. Larsen begins from the premise that modern-
ism can be defined as an aesthetics of pure representation, a definition com-
patible with Sussman's view of modernism as an aesthetics of structuration.
Moreover, Larsen shares with Sussman a certain sense of how postmodernism
serves as a critique of modernist aestheticism. Here, however, the similarity
stops, for whereas Sussman is largely concerned with the philosophical im-
plications of representation, Larsen is concerned with modernism as an ide-
ology. Moreover, Larsen is less certain than Sussman that the cultural legacy
of modernism has been fully displaced. Finally, his methodology is worlds
removed from Sussman's, focusing not on canonical literature but on intri-
guing (not to say, puzzling) pairings of texts, in the broadest sense of the
term. Thus, chapter one juxtaposes Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire with a frag-
ment from Adorno's Minima Moralia and questions the extent to which an
Adornian modernist aesthetics has moved away from realist representation. In
chapter two, Larsen critiques the status of Monet's The Execution of Maximilian
as an archetype of modernist indifference, largely by examining political as-
pects of the painting's history. In chapters three and four, Larsen's attention
shifts to the literary scene in Latin America and to what he terms "peripheral
modernism." The issue in both chapters centers on mediation, the extent to
which a modernist art form functions as an imaginary equivalent rather than
an allegorical representation of the space in which "the subject and object
of local history can meet face to face." In chapter three, Larsen focuses on

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818 Poetics Today 12:4

the "transculturation" aspect of the Mexican writer Juan Rolfo, that is, on his
efforts to synthesize urban antirationalism with rural prerationalization. In
chapter four, Larsen focuses on "consumptive production," particularly the
way in which the Brazilian cinema expropriates and consumes an imported
culture.

Where Larsen leaves off-considering the various unsuccessful attempts to

rectify the ideological inversions of modernism-is where Pefanis begins, that
is, with the genealogy of postmodernist ideology. Whereas Larsen attempts to
write a kind of history that reaches beyond the limitations of Hegelian totality
and yet remains Marxist in its approach, Pefanis is particularly interested in
how critical thought reconstitutes itself outside Marxism or any other totaliz-
ing historical or social scheme. The story Pefanis tells focuses on the French
appropriation of Hegel: from Alexandre Kojeve's lectures in the 1930s on
transgression, to Mauss's concept of the gift as transgression and surplus in
the political economy, to Bataille's reading of transgression as a loss of philo-
sophical and authorial sovereignty, to Baudrillard as a theorist of the third
order (the order of simulation, the model, and the hyperreal), and finally to
Lyotard's notion of all political economy as libidinal. The result is not so much
a linear history of postmodernism (although one can find a certain linear nar-
rativity here) as a group portrait of what Pefanis calls (after a Borges text) "the
mirror people": those concerned with myths of origin and the death drive,
with nonidentity and the critique of ego.
Martin Melaver

Louise Milot and Fernand Roy, La Litterarite. Centre de Recherche en Litt6rature

Qu6ebcoise, Sainte-Foy: Presses de I'Universit6 Laval, 1991. xi + 280 pp.

The elusive unsolved question of literariness seems to have entered center

stage again after two decades of being pushed to the margins of theoretical
discussions. Already by 1988 a group of researchers (Center for Research in
Quebecois Literature-cRELIQ) had assembled around this problematic theme
(at a time when such a theme was deemed esoteric, and when investigating the
concept of the literary seemed less than a plausible project, the literary, as well
as poetics at large, having been sidelined in favor of a more general theory of
discourse). Unifying a research group around the theme of literariness does
not, however, entail unifying the theme itself. Extant theories and method-
ologies addressing this topic range from those that proceed through internal
analysis to those adopting a contextual approach. The different positions ar-
range themselves according to whether they address the internal specificity
of certain texts (the problem of literariness), whether they address the socio-
historical specificity of these texts (the problem of the literary), or whether the
problem is that of an institutional framing (the problem of literature). Study-
ing the specificity of literary texts and formulating a definition of literariness
do not mean that the aim is to identify criteria for the inclusion or exclusion
of certain texts in the literary domain. The purpose is that of finding the in-
struments for a theoretical and methodological orientation that would clarify
the fundamental aspects of the literary: What does it mean to study a text
accepted as belonging to the literary?

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