The Mourning After. Attending the Wake of Postmodernism

Neil BROOKS et Josh TOTH [dir.], The Mourning After. Attending the Wake of Postmodernism, Amsterdam / New York, Rodopi (Postmodern Studies), 2007, 306 p.
ISBN 978-90-420-2162-4


SUMMARY

Have we moved beyond postmodernism? Did postmodernism lose its oppositional value when it became a cultural dominant? While focusing on questions such as these, the articles in this collection consider the possibility that the death of a certain version of postmodernism marks a renewed attempt to re-negotiate and perhaps re-embrace many of the cultural, literary and theoretical assumptions that postmodernism seemly denied outright. Including contributions from some of the leading scholars in the field – N. Katherine Hayles, John D. Caputo, Paul Maltby, Jane Flax, among others – this collection ultimately comes together to perform a certain work of mourning. Through their explorations of this current epistemological shift in narrative and theoretical production, these articles work to “get over” postmodernism while simultaneously celebrating a certain postmodern inheritance, an inheritance that can offer us important avenues to understanding and affecting contemporary culture and society.


CONTENTS

Acknowledgements
Permissions and Illustrations
Arriving and Socializing at the Wake
Josh TOTH & Neil BROOKS: Introduction: A Wake and Renewed?
Paul MALTBY: Postmodernism in a Fundamentalist Arena
Robert MCLAUGHLIN: Postmodernism in the Age of Distracting Discourses
Jennifer GEDDES: Attending to Suffering in/at the Wake of Postmodernism
Jane FLAX: Soul Service: Foucault’s “Care of the Self” as Politics and Ethics
Viewing and Reading at the Wake
N. Katherine HAYLES & Todd GANNON: Mood Swings: The Aesthetics of Ambient Emergence
Gavin KEULKS: New York, Los Angeles, and Other Toxicities: Revisiting Postmodernism in Rushdie’s Fury and Shalimar the Clown
William G. LITTLE: Nothing to Write Home About: Impossible Reception in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves
Robert REBEIN: Turncoat: Why Jonathan Franzen Finally Said “No” to Po-Mo
Clayton DION: Serving Pi(e) at the Wake of Postmodernism: Mathematics and Mysticism at the End of the 20th Century
Mourning and Praying at the Wake
Dawne MCCANCE: Derrida and the Ethics of Mourning After
Clayton CROCKETT: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Belief: Neo-Realism vs. the Real
John D. CAPUTO: The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event
Contributors