Sixties texts are now dated precisely by straddling modern and postmodern paradigms
Evidence
It is the dominance of their modern paradigms, in such close proximity to incipient postmodern paradigms, that make them seem dated: they would have to be either more postmodern or more exclusively modern, and therefore of a different time, to remain current. Therefore, their near-disappearance off the intellectual-cultural map is part of what makes them interesting to me. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 89
Categorization
- QUESTION: A usable selection criterion for period studies — the works that became illegible are the diagnostic specimens. Could apply to treating contemporaneous artifacts of any transitional era.
- SEED: An essay angle: dating is evidence of straddling a historical pivot, so the most ‘dated’ cultural products of an era are its best primary documents.
- XREF: connects to: Barthes’s Mythologies embodies both modernist contempt and postmodern valorization at once. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 213; Wolfe inhabited the undecidable cusp between modern and postmodern — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 284; Burroughs’s work spans both modernist and postmodern positions simultaneously — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 607 (+5 more)
Broader Connections
- Modernist allusion and postmodern pastiche were indistinguishable in the sixties
#expands(0.82) — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 663 - Postmodernism’s case rests on a radical break dated to 1960
#qualifies(0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 35 - Modernist classics entering university curricula in the 1960s simultaneously canonized and defused them
#exemplifies(0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 684 - 1989 completed the sixties-era shift to postmodernity
#expands(0.72) — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 963