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ISSN 0258–0802. LITERATÛRA 2007 49(5)

FROM THE POSTMODERN TO THE PRE-MODERN:MORE RECENT CHANGES INLITERATURE, ART AND THEORY

Herbert Grabes

Proffesor, Justus-Liebig-Universität

That literature, art and theory have changedconsiderably since the early and more spectacularphase of postmodernity in the nineteen-sixties andseventies is too obvious to be overlooked. Thesechanges raise questions regarding their actual extentand quality, their presumable causes and their alreadydiscernible consequences – three aspects to whichI will be directing your attention in the followingremarks.

First, then, the extent and quality of thechanges that can be observed in the domainsof literature, art and theory: in order to let youshare my observations, I will have to draw atleast a rough sketch of the situation then andnow: that is, of the state of play in thenineteen-sixties and seventies as against thesituation obtaining from the nineteen-eightiesonwards.

In retrospect, the difference between thenew works of art and literature from thenineteen-sixties and those of the nineteen-fiftiesseems so great that it is no wonder observerssoon began speaking of a ‘postmodernism’,in the sense that ‘modernism’ seemed to beover. I would like to begin with the advent ofpostmodernism in the domain of the visualarts because it was especially here that thephenomenon was so unmistakably visible – no

accident, then, I might add, that the very term‘postmodernism’ should have enteredawareness via Charles Jencks’s lucubrationson contemporary architecture, an essentiallyvisual domain. Too great was the contrastbetween the stylish late modernist ColourField paintings of American AbstractExpressionism and the new presentation ofbanal objects of everyday use, such as JasperJohns’s “Two Beer Cans” (1960) or AndyWarhol’s “Brillo Box” (1964) as well as theforegrounding of the nature of such objectsas mass products of consumer culture inWarhol’s famously iconic “200 CampbellSoup Cans” (1962). What soon came to becalled “Pop Art” further included theintegration of the sexy images of advertising,as in the paintings of Tom Wesselman, thelarge-scale stylized imitations of comic-bookor cartoon-strip figures and objects andspeech- or thought-balloons as representedby Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg’smagnified plastic reproductions of icons ofeveryday consumable or utilitarian culture(just think of his “Two Cheeseburgers withEverything” from 1962).

At the same time, the techniques of re-presentation were largely influenced by the use

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and imitation of mechanical reproduction.Warhol, for instance, used acrylic paint and oilpaint to create the impression of silkscreen printsor newspaper reproductions of photographs,Rauschenberg imitated the look of TV images,Lichtenstein the raster screen appearance ofcomic-book frames as quotations from massculture, but they all emphasized the distancebetween that culture and their art by analienation effect that was achieved via theextreme magnification involved in their verylarge canvases. What nevertheless wassurprising was how well the ubiquitous andbanal images of mass culture were suited assujets for works of art.

The literary equivalent to Pop Art was theintegration and refinement of the structuralpatterns of popular genre literature and the wideuse of the clichés of everyday speech. Muchof the latter can be found, for instance, inworks like Donald Barthelme’s Snow White(1967), Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing inAmerica (1967), or Stanley Elkin’s The DickGibson Show (1971), while the preferred genresranged from science fiction (as in KurtVonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963) and fantasy(as in Richard Brautigan’s In WatermelonSugar, 1968) to the detective novel [eher:conspiracy thriller] (as in Thomas Pynchon’sThe Crying of Lot 49, 1966) and crime fictionor ‘faction’ (Truman Capote, In Cold Blood,1966) as well as the western and the horrorstory (Richard Brautigan, The HawklineMonster, 1974). And I should not forget tomention that the popular pattern of the horrorstory was used in feminist works like MargaretAtwood’s Lady Oracle (1976), Angela Carter’sThe Passion of New Eve (1977), and incombination with science fiction in, forinstance, Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand ofDarkness (1975) and Marge Piercy’s Womanon the Edge of Time (1976).

While in the domain of postmodern art andliterature Pop Art seemed so spectacular in itsmove beyond the previous limits of aesthetictaste that it appeared as another avant-gardemovement, in the domain of theory the re-placement of structuralism by poststructuralistideas and deconstruction meant a similarlyradical break with the previously dominanttrend. After 1977, when Jacques Derrida’s Dela Grammatologie (1967) appeared in Englishtranslation, deconstruction became the neworthodoxy. Yet even if poststructuralist thoughtlooked like the theoretical base of postmodernliterature and art, it has to be said that artistsand writers had become postmodern evenearlier, or at least at the same time as thetheorists.

This is borne out by works from thenineteen-sixties like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22(1961), Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962),and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying Lot of 49(1966), novels with a clearly anti-foundationalist stance. And as to the free playof signifiers, where could one study it betterthan in Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing inAmerica from 1967, a novel in whicharbitrariness reigns supreme? The exhibition ofarbitrariness was quite obviously also one of theobjectives of the artists of the time, as canbe gathered from the ‘combines’ of RobertRauschenberg (for instance, his “Monogram”from 1959), the ‘environments’ of ClaesOldenburg (“Four Environments”, 1963) or the‘assemblages’ of James Rosenquist (“MixedMedia”, 1963), from ‘Earthworks’ and ‘LandArt’ like Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” orWalter de Maria’s “Lightning Field”, and, aboveall, from most of the works belonging to‘Concept Art’ – for instance, the series of randomphotographs by Vito Acconci or John Dribbet.

The radical relativization of validity stressedin poststructuralist theory is also a strong

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feature of earlier postmodern literature and art,where it takes the shape of irony and self-irony,parody, or travesty. I would just like to recallJohn Barth’s parody of Ebenezer Cooke’sverse satire The Sot-Weed Factor (1708) inhis novel with the same title from 1960, orDonald Barthelme’s satirical travesty SnowWhite (1967).

That a relativizing ironical stance was alsoshared by postmodern artists is shown by theprovocative celebration of the banal and thecorresponding trivialization of the lofty anddignified, as in many of the paintings of SandroChia, Enzo Cucchi and Francesco Clemente,or the treatment of important German historicalmyths by Anselm Kiefer.

As is well known, the integration of a self-ironical critical discourse in narrative becamesuch a typical feature of some postmodernfiction that one soon spoke of ‘metafiction’ asa new subgenre. Typical specimens are JohnBarth’s novel Lost in the Funhouse and manyof the postmodern short stories and tales ofDonald Barthelme, Gilbert Sorrentino andRobert Coover.

Metafiction was, however, only oneparticular kind of the mixing of discourses,styles and genre patterns that stood inabsolute contrast to late modernist purism.Other examples include Kurt Vonnegut’sSlaughterhouse-Five (1969) with its combinationof historical war novel and science fiction andNorman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night(1968) with its blending of documentary proseand novelistic narration.

* * *

All these reminders of earlier postmodern artand literature are meant only to help us seemore clearly how much different was mostof what came after.

One of the most astounding events in thedomain of art was the appearance of the various“Neo”-movements from the late nineteen-seventies onwards. Starting with the neo-expressionist painting of the “Neue Wilde”, theresoon reappeared an abstract geometrical artunder the name of “Neo-Geo”, which in turnwas soon followed by “Neo-Conceptualism”.Such an open declaration of ‘new’ work as avariation and renovation of something alreadyexisting had been utterly impossible duringmodernism and actually been barred sinceabsolute novelty became a decisive criterionof aesthetic quality with the eighteenth-centuryconception of the original genius. Suddenly theminimal difference of mere variation becamenot only acceptable, but – with its obvious déja-vu effect – even desirable. It is, for instance,hard, when contemplating Roni Horn’spresentation of two parts of a severed beam(“Parted Mass”) from 1985 to tell it apart fromthe works of Carl Andre in the nineteen-sixties,and frequently we also find ‘quotations’ ofearlier styles, as when Gerhard Richter’s“Strich (auf Rot)” from 1980 alludes to theart informel of the 1950s, or even of particularworks, for instance of Edvard Munch’s “TheScream” (1893) in Enzo Cucchi’s “PaesaggioBarbaro” (1983).

What became visible in the nineteen-ninetieswas already the bewildering diversity of stylesthat still prevails to this day. There were somespectacular events like the covering of theReichstag in Berlin by Christo and Jeanne-Claude in 1995, and a predilection for spatialarrangements showed also in the great varietyof ‘installations’. Regarding painting, newabstract art (to which even someone likeGeorg Baselitz contributed) competed with‘naive’ realism and the various other kinds of‘realism’ that could be found, for instance, in

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the exhibition “Radical Realism After Picabia”that was in 2002 first shown in the CentrePompidou and then in the Kunsthalle in Vienna.

In the domain of literature, the changesthat occurred in the late nineteen-seventiesand nineteen-eighties were just as significant.The most remarkable new development wasthe return of more or less ‘realistic’ story-telling, something observable on an inter-national scale, although I will take my examplesfrom British and American literature. In theUnited States, ‘mainstream American realism’never stopped flowing even during the heydayof postmodernism (as, for instance, thesuccessful series of John Updike’s “Rabbit”-novels that began in 1960 testifies). Yet withthe ‘minimalist’, ‘dirty’ or ‘new’ realism ofRaymond Carver (What We Talk About When WeTalk About Love, 1981) and Frederick Barthelme(Moon Deluxe, 1983), comparatively ‘straight’storytelling became more widespread again.

In quite a few cases the postmodern ‘crisisof representation’ still left its traces insofar asthe rendering of reality is made to appeardoubtful by various means. In novels like PaulAuster’s The New York Trilogy (1985–86) orE.L. Doctorow’s World’s Fair (1986), theaccount of the past is made to appearostensibly imperfect. As Gerhard Hoffmannhas pointed out in his recent study FromModernism to Postmodernism (2005), in manyAmerican novels from the eighties and ninetiesthe reality presented is marked by suddendisruptions of continuity that take the form ofa mystery. While this may seem understandablein the works of an African-American writerlike Toni Morrison (for instance, in Beloved,1987, and in Paradise, 1997) and those of anative American writer like Louise Erdrich (forinstance, in The Beet Queen, 1986, or inGardens in the Dunes, 1999), it surprises innovels like Infinite Jest (1996) by David Foster

Wallace, Middlesex (2002) by JeffreyEugenides, or The Corrections (2001) byJonathan Franzen.

The novels of Morrison and Erdrich arespecimens of the so-called “hyphenatedliteratures” to which belong, besides African-American and Native-American, also Hispano-American literature (for instance, the successfulnovel Hunger of Memory (1982) by RichardRodriguez), or Asian-American literature (forinstance, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The WomanWarrior, 1977).

The revival of realistic narration in theUnited States meant also a reintroduction ofsocial problems and social criticism such aswe find it in Franzen’s The Corrections, PhilipRoth’s The Human Stain (2000) and RichardPowers’ The Time of Our Singing (2003).

The fact that in the nineties there was stillroom for what Hoffmann has called “Strategiesof Excess”, strategies at work in the 835 pagesof Harold Brodkey’s epic adventure inconsciousness called Runaway Soul (1991)and in the 1079 pages of David FosterWallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) with theirextreme multi-modality and excessive languagegames proves, however, how wide the rangeof recent writing is.

In Britain, where the postmodern excesseswere never as massive as in American literature,the nineteen-eighties brought a revival of thehistorical novel that included works with ametahistorical stance aptly called historio-graphic metafiction. Among them were suchsuccessful novels as Salman Rushdie’sMidnight’s Children (1981), and GrahamSwift’s Waterland (1983), as well as JulianBarnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot (1983) and NigelWilliams’ Witchcraft (1987). And it is importantto see that in the nineteen-eighties, feministcritique of society was also expressed inhistoriographic metafiction like Maureen

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Duffy’s Illuminations: A Fable (1991) andPenelope Lively’s Moon Tiger (1987).

The revival of the historical novel comprised,however, also a considerable amount of moretraditional storytelling, which began already withJ.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973)and continued with J.G. Ballard’s Empire ofThe Sun (1984), Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’sArk (1982) as well as Barry Unsworth’s SacredHunger (1992) and Morality Play (1995) andLouise de Bernière’s Birds Without Wings(2004).

More or less straight storytelling has alsocontinued through this whole period in thenovels of Ian McEwan (from The CementGarden, 1978, to Atonement, 2001) and MartinAmis (from The Rachel Papers, 1974, toYellow Dog, 2003). And it has to be noted thatthe British equivalents to the American novelsbelonging to the “hyphenated literatures”, thevery successful works of the so-called British‘diaspora’ writers Kazuo Ishiguro (TheRemains of the Day, 1989) and Hanif Kureishi(The Buddha of Suburbia, 1990), also relyabove all on the persuasiveness of more orless realistic storytelling.

What we find not only in recent art butalso in recent literature is an aesthetic ofminimal and often subtle variation of well-known themes and kinds of presentation, andas such an aesthetic was the dominant onefrom the Renaissance of the twelfth centuryto the end of Neo-Classicism in the lateeighteenth century – it may – of course withsome reservations – be called ‘pre-modern’.

In the domain of theory, the influence ofDerrida remained strong, yet with Gilles Deleuzeanother important figure and theoretical positionbecame very influential in the late seventies andeighties after the works he had publishedtogether with Félix Guattari, L’Anti-Oedipe:capitalisme et schizophrénie I (1972) and

Mille Plateaux: capitalisme et schizophrénieII (1980) appeared in English translations(Anti-Oedipus, 1977, and Thousand Plateaus:Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1980). And in thelate nineteen-eighties it showed that after the heydayof a-historical deconstruction the time was ripe fora return to history not only in the novel but also inthe field of theory. In Britain, with investigations ofthe early modern construction of the subject andthe legitimizing of power as in Catherine Belsey’sThe Subject of Tragedy. Identity and Difference inRenaissance Drama (1985) the turn becamequite visible, and with Jonathan Dollimore’sand Alan Sinfield’s critical anthology PoliticalShakespeare. New Essays in Cultural Materialism(1985) the new movement – which was ‘néo-marxisant’ – also was named. In the UnitedStates, Stephen Greenblatt with his influentialstudy Renaissance Self-Fashioning. FromMore to Shakespeare (1980) had already a fewyears earlier initiated a new critical movementwith similar aims, yet an even wider inclusionof cultural history, a movement that in theintroduction to the periodical Genre form 1980he called “New Historicism” and that showedits appeal to a great number of critics whenH. Aram Veeser by the end of the decadebrought out some of their essays under thesame title. And though this historical turn wasnew regarding its particular aims andmethodology, it was pre-modern in the sensethat a similar tendency can neither be found inthe period of modernism nor in earlierpostmodernism with its slogan (adopted fromHenry Ford) ‘history is bunk’.

The nineteen-eighties were also the timewhen the earlier feminist Women’s Studieswere completed and replaced by GenderStudies with its basic differentiation betweenbiological sex and cultural gender. Theincreased interest in the cultural constructionof gender difference fitted well into the wider

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frame of the most comprehensive and influentialtheoretical movements after the end of de-construction: cultural studies and culturalhistory.

For with respect to the situation generallyobtaining in the humanities, there seems to beno question that the ‘cultural turn’ has prevailedfor some time now. Already in 1994 thesociologist David Charney stated:

In the second half of the 20th century the themeof ‘culture’ has dominated the human sciences.Concepts of culture have generated perspectivesand methodologies that have challengedorthodoxies and attracted the energeticenthusiasm of young scholars.1

With the increasing sophistication of thetheoretical base and the growth of practicalexperience, this trend has become evenstronger in the meantime. English philology hasturned into a kind of super-discipline by takingover, at least in part, the work of sociology,history, psychology and philosophy, not tomention media and gender studies. The rangeof possible objects of investigation under thelabel of ‘culture’ has become almost unlimited.For that reason it seems advisable to limit theperspective under which the various featuresand aspects of culture are approached. Andbecause English Studies as an academicdiscipline is language-based, and language isthe most elaborate sign-system we have, theexpertise gained in dealing with language,language texts and literature appears to be anexcellent qualification especially for a semioticapproach to culture. Such an approach, thetreatment of culture as an “ensemble oftexts”2, an entanglement of sign-systems waswidely disseminated in the 1970s by Clifford

Geertz and the new American anthropology.Suddenly those who were experts in textualinterpretation saw themselves as beingparticularly qualified to interpret not onlyliterature but also culture.

As I endeavoured to show in the 2001volume of REAL on Literary History / CulturalHistory: Force-Fields and Tensions,3 thenotions of ‘culture’ in recent and currentresearch are nevertheless anything but uniform,and this is also demonstrated, for instance, bythe many relevant entries in the Metzler LexikonKultur der Gegenwart4 and in the quite recentmonograph by Doris Bachmann-Medick calledCultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in denKulturwissenschaften. There is, however, asubstantial ensemble of conceptions that arewidely shared despite considerable differences.Culture by now is seen as an historical formationthat, despite the hegemonic power structuresalready pointed out by Gramsci,5 encompassesmultiple forces and positions,6 as a site offorms of ideological and political contestationin which – to use the terms introduced byRaymond Williams – dominant, residual andemergent forces coexist.7 This view has led toa closer investigation of how cultural formationsare stabilized – and I refer to the relevant studiesof Pierre Bourdieu8, Michel de Certeau9, LouisAlthusser10, Alan Sinfield11, and CatherineBelsey12 – as well as to an intensive search forpossible and effective counter-measures.

1 The Cultural Turn, i.2 See Geertz, “Deep Play.”

3 In“Literary History and Cultural History: Relationsand Difference.”

4 Ed. Ralf Schnell.5 Cf. Selections from the Prison Notebooks.6 Cf. Greenblatt, Shakespearian Negotiations.7 Cf. Culture and Society.8 Cf. The Logic of Practice.9 Cf The Practice of Everyday Life.10 Cf. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.”11 Cf. Faultlines.12 Cf. “Reading Cultural History.”

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Culture – though materially manifested andlinked to institutions – comes to be investigatedin a signifying approach primarily as animmaterial construct, a web of meanings. Inthis sense it had already been made the subjectof the histoire de mentalités13 with its inquiryinto collective sense-making, and it is alsofound in Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological focuson “habitus”14 and symbolic exchange15 aswell as in Catherine Belsey’s observation that“cultural history records meanings andvalues.”16

This is very close to my own view thatculture is above all an ensemble of values17

which, as Bourdieu has observed,18 formhierarchies and in this way make culturesspecial and differ from one another. Suchhierarchies of values only become culturallysignificant by having been collectivelyaccepted. It is therefore necessary toinvestigate a great number of documents fromvarious fields of discourse in order to discernthe recurrent validations. In this respect, thestudy of culture differs significantly from thestudy of literature, for what finally counts inthe latter is the singularity of a particular work,a singularity which even allows for a distancingfrom the prevailing hierarchy of values.

There are several fields within the domainof the study of culture that in the past twodecades have received more attention thanothers. That one of them is cultural memoryis not surprising after Benedict Anderson inhis Imagined Communities from 1983 and EricHobsbawm and Terence Ranger in their TheInvention of Tradition from the same year not

only pointed out the importance of this part ofculture but also its being largely a construction.Cultural memory then became a favourite fieldof research in Germany, beginning with somegroundbreaking works such as the criticalanthology Kultur und Gedächtnis (1988),edited by Jan Assmann and Tonio Hölscher,Mnemosyne: Formen und Funktionen derkulturellen Erinnerung (1991), edited by AleidaAssmann and Dietrich Harth, and JanAssmann’s Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift,Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühenHochkulturen (1992). Further investigationssuch as those undertaken on a large scale atmy own university made evident, however,that even regarding the same country at oneand the same historical moment it is moreappropriate to speak of cultures of memorythan of a single homogeneous culture ofmemory. Some of the results of the pertinentresearch have been published in the criticalanthologies Literatur, Erinnerung, Identität(2003), edited by Astrid Erll, Marion Gymnich,and Ansgar Nünning, Erinnerung, Gedächtnis,Wissen. Studien zur kulturwissenschaftlichenGedächtnisforschung (2005), edited by GünterOesterle, and Literature, Literary History, andCultural Memory which I myself brought outin 2005.

The strong historical interest that motivatessuch recent work is definitely pre-modernist,even if not pre-modern in respect to lateeighteenth century modernization. The samecan be said for the ethical turn that began whenHillis Miller published his deconstructionistEthics of Reading (1987) and such humanistcritics as Wayne C. Booth with The CompanyWe Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (1988), DavidParker with Ethics, Theory and the Novel(1994) and Leona Toker with Commitment inRflection: Essays in Literature and MoralPhilosophy, edited in 1994, began doing what

13 Cf. Le Goff, Histoire et mémoire.f.14 Cf. The Logic of Practice.15 Cf. “The Market of Symbolic Goods.”16 “Reading Cultural History”, 107.17 Cf. Grabes, “Culture – Semiotic System and Myth.”18 Cf. Outline of a Theory of Practice.

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philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre hadstarted with his widely acclaimed study AfterVirtue (1981) and what Charles Taylor with hisSources of the Self (1989), Richard Rorty withContingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989),Martha Nussbaum with Love’s Knowledge(1990) and Zygmunt Baumann with hisPostmodern Ethics (1993) continued. That inthe nineteen-nineties the ethical turn haddefinitely also taken place in the domain ofliterary criticism and theory can be derived fromthe appearance of such critical anthologies asEthics and Aesthetics: The Moral Turn ofPostmodernism (1996) or The Ethics ofLiterature (1999) as well as Andrew Gibson’sPostmodernity, Ethics and the Novel (1999).Since then there have been various attempts to provethat even postmodern metafiction has an ethicaldimension, and as the contributions to aconference in May 2006 at Giessen on “Ethicsin Culture: The Dissemination of Values throughLiterature and Other Media” showed,19 the moregeneral discussion of the topic has by no meanscome to an end.

A further field not much explored duringmodernism, neglected in the period of earlierpostmodernism, and revived in the nineteen-nineties in view of the threatening hegemonyof the study of culture, is the theory ofliterature. In surveying theoretical endeavoursto distinguish ‘literature’ in a narrower sensefrom other texts, one will find that some havefocused on textual features or markers andothers on the professed or assumed relationbetween text and the life-world. With regardto the latter, the most persuasive recent pleafor what has traditionally been called fictionalityhas, in my view, been presented by JacquesDerrida. In an interview from 1989 that was

published in 1992 in English translation underthe title “This Strange Institution CalledLiterature,” he argued that it is the “suspendedrelation to meaning and reference” that gives toliterature “in principle the power to sayeverything, to break free of the rules, to displacethem, and thereby to institute, to invent andeven suspect the traditional difference betweennature and institution, nature and conventionallaw, nature and history.”20 Literary discourse thusopens up, inhabits and circumscribes a free spacewithin culture, a space for that “free play” withinthe interaction between the fictive and theimaginary that Wolfgang Iser has shown to beone of the specific effects of literary texts.21

In 1992 Pierre Bourdieu in Les Règles del’art: genèse et structure du champ littérairehad sought to delimit what he called “the literaryfield in the field of power,” a field that is a“real challenge to all forms of economism”because it “presents itself as an invertedeconomic world: those who enter it have aninterest in disinterestedness.”22 And TimothyJ. Reiss, being convinced that “literature altersits role, its action, its forms of practice as theenvironment of which it is a part evolves,” inhis study The Meaning of Literature from thesame year attempted to delineate the genesis andfurther development of “what we have called‘literature’” (2–3) from the Renaissance to thelate nineteenth century.

Subsequently, the increasing dominance ofthe cultural paradigm seems to have calledforth further appeals in favour of literature. In1999 there appeared Peter Widdowson’sLiterature in the New Critical Idiom series, awork in which the author, though still using

19 They will soon be published under the same titlewith De Gruyter in Berlin.

20 “This Strange Institution Called Literature”, 48.21 Cf. “Interplay Between the Fictive and the

Imaginary.”22 Quoted from the English translation The Rules of

Art, 215–16.

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the term ‘literature’ in the title, replaces it withthe label “the literary,” a “working term forthe kind of written discourse I believe has someirreplaceable uses in our society” (92). As thedistinguishing features of literary discourse heregards “its own sense of being of the literary,”its “making ‘poetic realities’,” and – quotingAlthusser – its capacity to achieve “a retreat,an internal distancing”23 from the ideologywithin which it is held.

To demonstrate the value of what heconsiders as an endangered species, J. HillisMiller in 2002 published his On Literature. Heholds that, owing to “the creation or discoveryof a new, supplementary world, a metaworld,a hyper-reality,” “all literary works can beusefully thought of as a species of magic” (20–21) – a species by which the beliefs andbehaviour of readers can be changed.

Not too far away from this view is DerekAttridge’s definition of “the literary” as an eventin The Singularity of Literature, whichappeared in 2004. What he considers as thedistinctive feature of literary texts is a“reformulation of norms,” yet it “is only whenthe event of this reformulation is experiencedby the reader [...] as an event, an event whichopens up new possibilities of meaning andfeeling (understood as verbs), or, moreaccurately, the event of such opening, that wecan speak of the literary” (59).

In contrast to such focussing on theindividual impact of literary texts, CatherineBelsey in her essay on “The Possibility ofLiterary History” highlights their specificcultural function:

literature confronts the outer edges of language,and thereby the limits of the culture inscribed inlanguage. It thus marks the finitude of all culture,

and the relativity of all cultures, and in theprocess the finitude and relativity of the subjectthat is their effect, as well as pointing to arelation of difference between language andthe real that resides beyond the purview ofculture. (47)

What I have not found in any of these morerecent attempts to differentiate literature fromother discourses is the very important fact thatwhat we encounter in literature – in contrastto philosophy and other kinds of theoreticaldiscourse – is overwhelmingly particular andeven wholly individual: specific places,moments in time, characters with personalnames, idiosyncratic ways of speaking andacting, thinking and feeling. Literary discourserenders possible and motivates an imaginaryexperience of the particular in its outerphysicality or inner concreteness rather thanoffering general notions to the reasoning mind.The consequence of this presentation of theparticular is a confinement of the claim tovalidity of its statements, a validational modestywhich theoretical discourse, due to the generalnature of conceptual language, hardly everpossesses. And it is an even greater degree ofvalidational modesty that differentiates literaturefrom all narratives with a genuine truth claim,especially the otherwise similar narratives ofhistorical discourse or the more empirical kindof sociological and psychological discourse. Inthis respect, literature is ‘only literature’, butas the “suspension of reference” renders theaffirmative or negating statements in literarytexts merely quasi-statements from the pointof view of epistemology, literature is also farless bound by the cogency of religious, moral,juridical and other collective norms. And thisis, of course, an important precondition forthe ability of literature to make us aware ofthe limits of the culture of its origin andindirectly of the boundaries of every culture.

23 “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre” 204,quoted by Widdowson, Literature, 118.

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One could also say that the cultural value ofliterature resides in the function of theseemingly functionless.

Instead of operating with the dichotomy“Culture or Literature,” to me it makes muchmore sense to investigate and historically tracethe interaction between the wider and thenarrower sphere.24 As I see it, the study ofthe one cannot adequately be pursued withouttaking due cognizance of the other. We cannotrightfully claim for a literary work anyexcellence deriving from its transcendence ofthe limits of culture within it was producedwithout having obtained a wider knowledgeof that culture through the study of a varietyof other discourses. Nor can we fullyunderstand the way in which a culture, despitethe many control mechanisms operating tokeep it stable, may yet be changed from withinwithout giving due attention to its literature.

Yet in spite of this important functionliterature possesses for the development ofculture I think that Hillis Miller is right whenhe says that the current trend is towards thestudy of culture and away from the study ofliterature.25 This has not least to do with the factthat literature has been studied in detail for quitea while and that it takes some ingenuity to comeup with something really attractive and novel,while it looks as if in the field of the study ofculture there are plenty of new researchopportunities that do not demand so muchintellectual effort. And precisely because of thissituation I would implore you to take good careof literature. There are, after all, also otherdisciplines such as sociology and history in whichculture is studied, while literature in the academyis entirely at our mercy: it is our spirit, resolve,

solidarity and bare-knuckled criticism andanalysis (not to forget, however, the persistentenergy of the writers themselves and themanipulative genius of the marketplace) thathelp keep its singular quality and function incollective memory.

While the topic of the relationship betweenculture and literature can be considered as beingalso pre-modern if one brackets the differencesin vocabulary, what has to be admitted is thatthere are also quite important fields of morerecent theory that are definitely not pre-modern.What I am referring to are especially the theoryof gender and the theoretical reflection impliedin such fast-growing research areas asTranslation Studies, Media Studies andIntermediality. Yet though one is easily drawninto one of these areas, they do not fall into theframe of my present topic.

It will have been noticed, I assume, that asin the domains of art and literature, there is tobe found in our time no hegemony of aparticular school, method or aspect of attentionin the domain of theory. We have largely givenup what Lyotard has called grands récits,overarching stories that comprise all andeverything. Instead, one operates with theoriesof a medium level of abstraction which arecloser to the area of the phenomena to beexplained and therefore probably more helpful.There is, however, one general assumption tobe found in almost all current theories ofculture or domains of culture, and that is thatculture is a construct. For epistemologicalreasons I would even go one step further andsay that we can consider this as a goodoperative principle and leave open the questionwhether this is ‘really’ so. As research practiceshows, this assumption encourages the searchnot only for the specificity of a particularculture but also for the political and historicalreasons why it is as it is.

24 Cf. Grabes, „Literary History and Cultural History.Relations and Difference.”

25 Cf. On Literature, 10.

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Althusser, Louis. “A Letter on Art in Reply to AndréDaspre.” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Transl.Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1971.

—. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.”Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Transl. BenBrewster. London: New Left Books, 1971.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities.London: Verso, 1983.

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—. The Subject of Tragedy. Identity and Difference

This means that our basic stance in thedomain of theory has remained postmodern –or even become more sceptical and pragmatistthan the strong belief in poststructuralist ideasto be found in the earlier phase of postmodernismreally implied. As in the domains of art andliterature, this allows also in the domain of theoryfor a multitude of competing views and models,and if our age is therefore perhaps plagued by a“Neue Unübersichtlichkeit”26, a lack of clear

orientation, as a healing grace it is certainly notboring and also less compulsive than earlier ages– at least in the West. Let us try to make use ofthe chances offered by this situation and defendit if and wherever necessary.

26 Under this title Jürgen Habermas in 1985published his attack on the postmodern abandonmentof the “project of modernity.”

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Authors’s address:

Justus-Liebig-UniversitätOtto Behaghel-Strasse 10, 6300 Giessen, Germany

E-mail: Herbert.grabes@anglistik.uni-giessen.de