Andrew McCormick
ENGL 701: Graduate Methodology
Prof. Richter
18 October 2010
Assignment 4 (“Overwhelming Question”)
My Question(s)
Firstly, can seeds of what many critics nowadays think of as postmodernism (as an artistic and especially literary lens) be encountered in different works of the Great Depression? Can we, now several decades into a time in which the “postmodern” is rather a given, in retrospective find elements of it in some of the fiction that emerged from this rather dire chapter of U.S. history, the 1930’s? Secondly, stemming from this, if indeed we can identify elements of the proto-postmodern in some works of this time period, are we primarily limited to certain kinds of depression-era fiction? That is, would the elements of an early, pre-emergent or emerging postmodernism be primarily, or for that matter only, encountered in a particular corner or corners of the fiction that emerged from the American 30’s? Or, would this phenomenon be limited to works written, say, in the first-person? The third-person? Would it be limited to certain writers? To a particular time within the 1930’s? Also related to the first, originally posed question (as to whether we can find seeds of the postmodern in 30’s depression literature), what would be the function(s) of this emerging, early postmodernism in relation to the political ideologies and discourses of the time? In particular, how might it operate in the portrayal of some of the especially impoverished or generally disenfranchised? Then, circling back to broader, philosophical questions, does the presence of the postmodern in this time period and the aforementioned themes in question necessarily stand to undermine politically charged messages or readings? Or, can one who has claimed to have identified and explored seeds of postmodernism in 1930’s depression-era fiction that portrays the disenfranchised, still stand on firm ground in asserting that there are political messages in the work? Or has one negated this possibility by positing the presence of postmodern tropes in the works in question?
My interest in what would become these interrelated questions originated, as far as I can tell, with an examination of a 30’s short story by William Saroyan that I wrote a paper on a year or so ago. The criticism I read on the story, “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,” seemed preoccupied, among other things, with just how to classify the author; one critic argued that he was a Romantic Existentialist, another viewed his work as fundamentally more naturalistic than modernist, while others considered him a late modernist stretching the edges of the modernist envelope, so to speak. One particular critic, the most recently published I was able to find at the time, reflected back on Saroyan’s work as belonging to that bridge, or that “ critical point of least convenience between the first wave of Modernism […] and that new wave of Postmodernism—Kerouac, most obviously—that he is shown to have influenced” (Locklin NP). This critic goes on to point out that Saroyan can be seen as “our contemporary” (in the 1990’s, the time the critic was writing) given his way of “eras[ing] boundaries.” This particular encounter with the disputes about Saroyan prompted me to write that essay on a postmodern reading of the short story (“Daring Young Man…”). Exploring theoretical readings and introduction-to-theory type books on postmodernism, I became more interested in general in the postmodern lens, especially as it stands to deny a wholeness of identity or essence and deny or complicate meta-narratives, and moreover to embrace rather than flee from, the identity-blurring madness that is the modern condition (as opposed to modernism, which some critics I have read argue to be nostalgic for the pre-modernism time, where things were more neatly lined up[1]).
These were the seeds of my interest in the emergence of the proto-postmodern in earlier to mid-twentieth century literature (namely fiction), particularly that of the depression-era. Then, when I began searching databases this semester for publications on thirties, depression-era literature and modernism/postmodernism, the pivotal piece of scholarship I came across, which has thus far shaped, validated and given impetus to this interest, was T.V. Reed’s article arguing for the presence on “Postmodern Realism” in James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s interdisciplinary book on poor southern farmers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. As I discussed in the previous two assignments, Reed argues that although the term or concept of the postmodern, as we know it, was obviously not yet in usage in the 1930’s, much of what we now acknowledge as postmodern is undoubtedly at play in Agee’s prose and Evans’s photographs. So this article on Agee and Evans has definitely put me on my current path, which I have continued down by reading more about postmodernism itself. Along the way so far, I have consulted the two intro to theory books footnoted below, articles from Steven Connor’s Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, and begun putting together
[1] Mary Klages in Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed; also Peter Barry in Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory.
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