POSTMODERNISM FOOTNOTES
1. David Antin, "Modernism and Postmodernism: Approaching the Present in American Poetry," boundary 2: a journal of postmodern literature, 1, 1 (Fall 1972): 98-133, see pp. 98-99, 109-12. Subsequently cited in the text as DA.2. Charles Altieri, "From Symbolist Thought to Immanence: The Ground of Postmodern American Poetics," boundary 2, 1, 3 (1973): 605-41.
3. See Altieri, Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1979); James. E. B. Breslin, From Modern to Contemporary : American Poetry, 1945-65 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
4. Ihab Hassan, "POSTmodernISM: A Paracritical Bibliography," New Literary History, 3, no. 1 (Fall 1971); rpt. Paracriticisms: Seven Speculations of the Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), and The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987), pp. 25-45. All subsequent references are to this collection, cited IHPT. Hassan lists 7 rather than 9 categories because three (elitism, irony, abstraction) are subsumed under "Dehumanization." For purposes of clarity, I have thought it best to break this unit up, since the subsections get as much attention as the other sections.
A related essay, "The New Gnosticism: Speculations on an Aspect of the Postmodern Mind" appears in boundary 2, 1, no. 3 (Spring 1973): 547-69.
5. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. from the French by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. xxiv-xxv, 3-8, and esp. 31-37. Interestingly, the blurb for the Minnesota edition was written by Ihab Hassan.
6. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 2. Subsequently cited as FJ.
7. See Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture: Postmodernism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986); Rosalind Krauss, October 56 (Spring 1991): 3-4.
But cf. Stephen Connor, Postmodern Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). Connor puts his finger on the difficulty of making definitive statements about postmodernism, which is supposedly so undefined and open. Referring to Foucault's account in The Order of Things of Borges's Chinese encyclopedia as a"structure of radical incommensurability" or "heterotopia," Connor comments: "The obvious problem ... which Foucault does not here confront, is that, once such a heterotopia has been named, and, more especially, once it has been cited and re-cited, it is no longer this conceptual monstrosity which it once was, for its incommensurability has been in some sense bound, controlled and predictively interpreted, given a centre and illustrative function." In this sense, postmodern theory regularly "names and correspondingly closes off the very world of cultural difference and plurality which it allegedly brings to visibility. What is striking is precisely the degree of consensus in postmodernist discourse that there is no longer any possibility of consensus, the authoritative announcements of the disappearance of final authority, and the promotion and recirculation of a total and comprehensive narrative of a cultural condition in which totality is no longer thinkable" (pp. 9-10).
8. For the printed version of the performance piece, in which the voiceover becomes a caption, see Laurie Anderson, United States (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), Part One, unpaginated. Craig Owens's reference is to the earlier version in Americans On the Move, in which the wording is slightly different. See Owens, "The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism" in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), p. 60; subsequently cited in the text as AA.
9. Herman Rappaport, "'Can You say Hello?': Laurie Anderson's United States," Theatre Journal, 38, no. 3 (October 1986): 339-54, p. 340.
10. When Owens does briefly mention Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Monrelay, he refers to their work as "the writing of women influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis" (AA 63).
11. Brenda K. Marshall, Teaching the Postmodern: Fiction and Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 1992). Subsequently cited as BM.
12. David Harvey, "Looking Back on Postmodernism," Architectural Digest (1990): 12. Harvey is rethinking some of the notions in The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
13. Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 4. Subsequently cited in the text as CB.
14. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Goodbye, Columbus? Notes on the Culture of Criticism," American Literary History, 3, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 716.
15. Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Calendar of Dust (Seattle: Broken Moon Press, 1991), p.
16. Lyn Hejinian, Oxota: A Short Russian Novel (Great Barrington, MA.: The Figures, 1991), p. 135.
17. I discuss this poem at length in a review- essay called "How Russian Is It," in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, 18 (Winter 1993):
18. Steve McCaffery, Theory of Sediment (Vancouver: Talon Books, 1991), pp. 38-39. A related poetic text The Black Debt is discussed in my Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), Chapter 4 passim. See also my "'Innter Tension / In Attention': Steve McCaffery's Book Art," Visible Language, 25, 2/3 (1992): The Artist's Book: The Text and its Rivals, ed. Renée Riese Hubert, pp. 173-91.
19. Interestingly, Steve McCaffery has himself criticized Olson's "projective verse" model (though he makes a strong case for Olson's later "Proprioception" as a radical poetics), in "Charles Olson's Art of Language: The Mayan Stratum in Projective Verse," fragmente 4 (1991): 48-59.