The Politics of British Postmodern Fiction
Authors: Dix, H.
Editors: Nicol, B.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Abstract:Studies of postmodernism often begin with Fredric Jameson’s famous suggestion that postmodernism embodies the cultural logic of late capitalism. The overall thrust of this suggestion has been that postmodernism is a movement that privileges aesthetic attributes and ludic qualities over serious forms of political and sociological commitment. For this reason, critics of postmodernism have seen it as a frivolous movement, lacking critical perspective. According to their thinking, postmodernism represents a stage in the history of cultural production during which the gap between consumerism and culture, or between capitalism and art, has been effectively diminished so that the capacity for art to provide critical commentary on capitalism is compromised and undermined.
It is significant that this argument was developed by Jameson in 1990, at a time when the Cold War was coming to an end and when division of the world into the spheres of influence of two global ideologies, capitalism and communism, was also ending. With the end of the Cold War, the latter disappeared so that capitalism started to have a truly global reach. With no competing ideology to restrain capitalism, the critical distance between politics and economics on the one hand, and art and culture on the other, disappeared and art instead became even more thoroughly implicated in capitalism and consumer culture than it ever had been: hence the Jamesonian argument that postmodernism is tantamount to the cultural logic of late capitalism.
That argument is not inaccurate, but it is incomplete in the case of British postmodern fiction, where writers were often more concerned with ethics than aesthetics so that their work retains an important critical dimension with regard to the dominant ideology. In other words, British postmodern fiction is not primarily defined by its formally experimental textual properties but by its capacity to generate critical perspectives with regard to postmodern society.
In fact British postmodernism unfolded in three phases: a gradual emergence characterised by slowly increasing textual experimentation in the 1960s and 1970s; a phase of genuinely critical postmodern writing characterised by a high level of fictional critique of the political and economic order in the 1980s and 1990s; and a third period up to about 2012, by which point both the techniques and ideas associated with postmodern literature had become so commonplace that they could no longer be considered radically oppositional.
Source: Manual