Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern

Textxet: Studies in Comparative Literature

Volumn 30, Issue 6, 2000, Pages 189-207

  Hutcheon, Linda ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 85181872601     PISSN: 09275754     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book Series    
DOI: 10.1163/9789004488595_016     Document Type: Chapter

References (79)

1. Irony's Edge: The Theory and Politics ofIrony (London and New York: Routledge, 1995).
2. Toby Young and Tom Vanderbilt, "The End of Irony?", The Modern Review 1.14 (April·May 1994): 6-7.
3. See Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics ofPostmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 1987); The Politics ofPostmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1988); The Canadian Postmodern (Toronto: Oxford UP, 1998).
4. The list would be endless, but let me simply note the most cited opponent of the postmodern, Fredric Jameson, whose 1984 essay on "Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" in the New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-92 in many ways provoked my own work in the field.
5. See Charles Jencks, TIu! Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (London: Academy, 1977) and Post-Modern CllI3sicism: TIu! New Syntlu!sis (London: Academy, 1980).
6. See Manfredo Tafuri, Tlu!ories and History ofArchitecture (London: Granada, 1980), 52-9.
7. Andreas Huyssen, "Mapping the Postmodern," reprinted in Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon, eds., A Postmodern Reader (Albany: SUNY P, 1993), 112.
8. Of course in the 1960s Susan Sontag characterized camp in precisely these terms in her "Notes on 'Camp'" in Against Interpretation and otlu!r Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966),275-92.
9. See Sherry Lynne Rosenthal, "Four Essays on the Nostalgic Appeal ofPopular Fiction, Film, and Television: Hard Times, The Birth ofa Nation, The Grapes ofWrath, All in the Family." Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 1983.
10. See Peter Rist, "Nostalgia: Stars and Genres in American Pop Culture," Canadian Review of American Studies 20.1 (1989): 111-17.
11. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985),6.
12. See Christopher Lasch, "The Politics of Nostalgia," Harper's Magazine (November 1984),68; Lowenthal 29; Sandra Ernst Moriarty and Anthony F. McGann, "Nostalgia and Consumer Sentiment," Journalism Quarterly 60 (1983): 85 on the impact of nostalgic professional design magazine advertisements on the media.
13. George Steiner, Nostalgia for the Absolute, Massey Lectures, 14th series (Toronto: CBC, 1974), 50.
14. Robert Rubens, "The Backward GJance-A Contemporary Taste for Nostalgia," Contemporary Review (September 1981); 149.
15. Johannes Hofer, Dis.gertatio medica de nostalgia, oder Heimwehe (Basel, 1688), translated in The Bulletin ofthe Institute ofthe History ofMedicine 7 (1934); 379-91.
16. This is in spite of early medical attempts to universalize it into something felt by all beings-
17. See Jean Starobinski, "The Idea of Nostalgia," Diogenes 54 (1966): 81-103. The citations are from pages 90 and 87 respectively.
18. The medical meaning did see a revival, evidently, during the American Civil War. See J. Theodore Calhoun, "Nostalgia as a Disease of Field Service," Medical and Surgical Reporter 11 (27 February 1864); DeWitt C. Peters, "Remarks on the Evils of Youthful Enlistments and Nostalgia," American Medical Times (14 February 1863).
19. See Antonio Prete, "L'assedio della lontananza," in Antonio Prete, ed., Nostalgia: storia di un sentimento (Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 1992), 17.
20. See the discussion of, among others, Karl Jaspers' Heimweh und Verbrechen (1909) in Starobinski 99-101.
21. For more on the medical and psychological angle on nostalgia, see Willis H. McCann, "Nostalgia-A Review of the Literature," Psychological Bulletin 38 (1941): 165-82 and "Nostalgia: A Descriptive and Comparative Study," Journal ofGenetic Psychology 62 (1943): 97-104; George Rosen, "Nostalgia: A 'Forgotten' Psychological Disorder," Clio Medica 10.1 (1975): 28-51.
22. Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798). More recently, it has been argued that the appeal of the comic strip in French culture today is nostalgia for childhood. See !rIme Pennacchioni, La Nostalgie en images: une sociologie du recit dessine (Paris: Librairie des Meridiens, 1982).
23. See Vladimir Jank,Hevitch's meditation on this in L'Irreversible et la nostalgie (Paris: Flammarion, 1974).
24. James Phillips, "Distance, Absence, and Nostalgia," in Don Ihde and Hugh J. Silverman, eds., Descriptions (Albany: SUNYP, 1985),65.
25. M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981), 147. Thanks to Russell Kilbourn for calling this to my attention.
26. See Phillips 66.
27. Lowenthal 62; Douglas T. Miller and Marion Nowak, The Fifties: The Way We Really Were (New York: Doubleday, 1977).
28. But is this perhaps how nostalgia only "masquerades as memory," as one theorist puts it? See E.B. Daniels, "Nostalgia: Experiencing the Elusive," in Ihde and Silverman 84.
29. Lee Quinby,Anti-Apocalypse: Exercises in Genealogical Criticism (Minneapolis: U ofMinnesota P, 1994), xvi.
30. Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw, "The Dimensions ofNostalgia," in Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Cross, eds., The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia (Manchester and NY: Manchester UP, 1989) 4. Chase and Shaw also point out that the photograph is the "paradigm case of the moment of nostalgia" (9).
31. Lowenthal 30.
32. Starobinski 101-2.
33. See Jean-Fran,ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984).
34. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture ofAmnesia (New York and London: Routledge, 1995),253.
35. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narrative of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins U P, 1984), 23.
36. Stewart 23.
37. See, for instance, Roderick Peters, "Reflections on the Origin and Aim ofNostalgia," Journal of AnalyticPsychology30 (1985): 135-48;or NandorFodor, "Varieties ofNostalgia," Psychoanalytic Review 37 (1950): 25-38.
38. Laurence Lerner, The Uses ofNostalgia: Studies in Pastoral Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus, 1972),52.
39. Michael M. Mason, "The Cultivation of the Senses for Creative Nostalgia in the Essays ofW.H Hudson," Ariel 20.1 (1989): 23. It has also been called our "moral conscience" for it is said to let us know what values we hold most dear and help us fight "the sickness of despair." See Ralph Harper, Nostalgia: An Existential Exploration ofLonging and Fulfilment in the Modern Age (Cleveland: P of Western Reserve U, 1966),28.
40. Harper 21.
41. All nostalgia, then, would be what Fred Davis calls "interpreted nostalgia" wherein an analysis ofan experience, however briefor mistaken, comes to be fused with that primary experience and thus alters it. See Yearning for Yesterday:A SociologyofNostalgia (NewYork: Free P, 1979),25.
42. The Curriculum Advisor on Race Relations and Multiculturalism for the Toronto Board of Education, cited in "Analyzing Racism at ROM" in The Varsity (June 1990),4.
43. See Susan Bennett, Performing Nostalgia: Shifling Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past (London and New York: Routledge, 1996) 5; 161, n.4.
44. See Anthony Arblaster, Viva la liberta: Politics in Opera (London: Verso, 1992), 180.
45. Jean Baudrillard, "The Precession ofSimulacra," in Natoli and Hutcheon 361. He goes on to call nostalgia "the phastasmal parodic rehabilitation of all lost referentials" (372).
46. See Jankelevitch; Kathleen Parthe, "Village Prose: Chauvinism, Nationalism, or Nostalgia?" in Sheelagh Duffm Graham, ed., New Directions in Soviet Literature (London: Macmillan, 1992), 106·21.
47. See Richard Raspa, "Exotic Foods among Italian-Americans in Mormon Utah: Food as Nostalgic Enactment of Identity," in Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell, eds., Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States: The Performance ofGroup Identity (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1984), 185-94.
48. Michael M.J. Fischer, "Autobiographical Voices (1, 2, 3) and Mosaic Memory," in Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore, and Gerald Peters, eds., Autobiography and Postmodernism (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1994),92.
49. Teresa Maria Brown, "Rewriting the Nostalgic Story: Woman, Desire, Narrative," Ph.D. dissertation, University ofFlorida, 1989.
50. See Janice Doane and Devon Hodges, Nostalgia and Sexual Diffprence: The Resistance to Contemporary Feminism (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), xiii. See also Barbara Creed, "From Here to Modernity: Feminism and Postmodernism", Screen 28.2 (1987): 47-67 on film nostalgia and issues of gender which Fredric Jameson does NOT deal with. For a discussion of the condemnation of utopian "future nostalgia" by feminist writers, see Kathe Davis Finney, "The Days of Future Past or Utopians Lessing and LeGuin Fight Future Nostalgia," in Donald M. Hassler, ed., Patterns ofthe Fantastic (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1983),31-40. For a general critique of various kinds of utopian thinking, inc1udingnostalgic ones, see Vincent P.
51. Pecora, Households ofthe Soul (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996).
52. Lowenthal 121.
53. On Shakespeare's role in this kind ofnostalgia, see Bennett 145: "To reproduce a classic text of the European imperial archive is always to risk its willing and wistfully nostalgic assent to (re)claim its own authority. Those texts are simply so heavily overcoded, value laden, that the production and reception of the 'new' text necessarily becomes bound to the tradition that encompasses and promotes the old 'authentic' version. This remains the argument against the revival/rewriting of The Tempest or any other classical text: that containment is an inevitable effect."
54. Renato Rosando, CultureandTruth: The RemakingofSocialAnalysis (Boston: Beacon P, 1989), 68. Thanks to Monika Kaup for calling this to my attention.
55. Simon Simonse, "African Literature between Nostalgia and Utopia: African Novels since 1953 in the Light ofthe Modes-of-ProductionApproach," ResearchinAfricanLiterrUures 13.4 (1982): 451-87.
56. See len Ang, "Hegemony-in-Trouble: Nostalgia and the Ideology ofthe Impossible in European Cinema," in Duncan Petrie, ed., Screening Europe: Image and Identity in Contemporary European Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1992): 21-31.
57. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic ofLrUe Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke U P, 1991), 156.
58. Jameson, Postmodernism xvii and 19, respectively.
59. Fredric Jameson, SignaJures ofthe Visible (New York and London: Routledge, 1990),85 and 130 respectively.
60. Fredric Jameson, "Nostalgia for the Present," The South Atlantic Quarterly 88.2 (1989): 527.
61. Anne Friedberg, "Les Flaneurs du Mal(l): Cinema and the Postmodern Condition," PMLA 106.3 (1991): 419-31.
62. Derek Jarman, Queer Edward If (London: British Film Institute, 1991),86.
63. See, respectively, Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971-1986. Volume I: Situations ofTheory (Minneapolis: U ofMinnesota P, 1988), 110 and Postmodernism 156.
64. Jameson, Postmodernism 19 and 21, respectively.
65. John Frow, "Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia," October 57 (1991): 135.
66. Simon During, "Postmodernism or Post-colonialism Today," Textual Practice 1.1 (1987): 32-47.
67. See Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories ofLiterature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971),38. The phrase is used to describe Adorno's critique of theories of history organized around the covert hypothesis of such a "moment of plenitude" in the past or future.
68. Michael Berube, "Just the Fax, Ma'am, Or, Postmodernism's Journey to Decenter," Village Voice (October 1991), 14.
69. Timothy J. Reiss, "Critical Environments: Cultural Wilderness or Cultural History?" Canadian Review ofComparoJive LiteroJure 10.2 (June 1983): 193.
70. But it does so at a time when, as Andreas Huyssen has argued, Western culture's utopian imagination "is shifting from its futuristic pole toward the pole ofremembrance." See Huyssen, Twilight Memories 88.
71. See Allison Graham, "History, Nostalgia, and the Criminality of Popular Culture," Georgia Review 38.2 (1984): 348·64. See also Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London: Virago, 1985, on nostalgia in fashion as a "strangely unmotived appropriation ofthe past" (172).
72. Vanderbilt 7.
73. These are the terms of Arjun Appadurai, in his Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996),77·8.
74. This is one step beyond what has been called the ironic nostalgia of, say, post-Soviet artists who, according to Svetlana Boym, "reconfigure and preserve various kinds of imagined community and offer interesting cultural hybrids-ofSoviet kitsch and memories oftotalitarian childhood." See Svetlana Boym, "From the Russian Soul to Post-Communist Nostalgia," Representations 49 (Winter 1995): 151.
75. There may be analogies here with what Bennett calls "queer nostalgia" wherein "identity-forming discourses ofthe past are both confirmed and fractured at the moment ofperformance" (159).
76. See Chase and Shaw 7.
77. See Lowenthal 394·6.
78. Lowenthal 396.
79. Huyssen, Twilight Memories 5; see Lasch for contrastingview: "IfAmericans really card about the past, they would try to understand how it still shapes their ideas and actions. Instead they lock it up in museums or reduce it to another object of commercialized consumption" (69).