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BOOK REVIEWS role which has been so imbedded in French institutions and ideals since the enlightenment. That work remains to be written. Paul Cohen Lawrence University Postmodernizing Yeats Leonard Orr, ed. Yeats and Postmodernism. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press 1991. vii + 204 pp. $24.95 ACCORDING TO A CONVENIENT progression perpetuated as academic folklore, during the 1890s W. B. Yeats only flirted with Decadence, aestheticism, Irish nationalism, and symbolisme, to emerge as a "true" High Modern in the terse lyrics of his 1914 Responsibilities volume, an often painful conversion achieved through the timely intervention of Ezra Pound's acerbic blue pencil. Now, like some "chanticleer of the new dawn," Yeats would go on to at once proclaim and exemplify the modern age in his own idiosyncratic edition of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), where Walter Pater's latinate periods are boldly repackaged as Mallarméan prose poem. But if Pound (beginning with Canto 4) and Joyce (with Finnegans Wake) both escape into something now tentatively termed "postmodernism," Yeats himself seems to have remained safely unreconstructed, caught in the polite literary fiction of "modernism ," which we are beginning to suspect may itself prove just one more dated, and ultimately inadequate, period-formula. With the essays collected in Yeats and Postmodernism, editor Leonard Orr seeks to amend such received stereotypes and by demythologizing the subcategories of modernism and postmodernism, to redefine the historical significance of Yeats's artistic career and poetic accomplishment . His overall ambition though is to inspire other longer poststructuralist historical and political studies of Yeats and the Revival after the precedent established by W. J. McCormarck in Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History from 1789 to 1939 (1985). Unfortunately despite some occasionally quite brilliant though widely scattered insights, these essays, which Orr intends "to be provocative but not hermetic, explorative and suggestive instead of definitive and closed" (11), also exhibit the same forced comparisons, convoluted technical vocabularies and self-reflexive name dropping associated with too many other exercises in post-New Critical thought. In an introductory survey of contemporary critical trends, Orr begins by chronicling the recent shift in the definitions of modernism and 533 ELT : VOLUME 35:4 1992 postmodernism, from the paired lists of antithetical formal characteristics composed by Ihab Hassan in the 1960s and 1970s, to the emerging intuition identifying postmodernism with poststructuralism. Here he argues that one reason the Irish poet appears to play so predictable a role in the accepted history of literary modernism is because Yeats in particular, unlike Pound, Joyce or even Henry James, "has been studied almost exclusively from within a modernist framework, using the critical techniques developed under modernist and premodernist aesthetics" (3). It is a rather naive acceptance then of an essentially modernist reading of postmodernism that Orr believes has created what he calls an "homogenizing, unconscious blindness" for alternative approaches that fall anywhere outside a "traditional framework" (1) constructed around Yeats by New Critics, Freudians, formalists, and positivist literary historians. With the aid of Richard Fallis, editor of the Irish Studies series at Syracuse, Orr has therefore solicited and assembled representative contributions from deconstructive, New Historicist, feminist , Freudian revisionist and reader-response critics to help launch what he assumes to be the inevitable process of postmodernizing Yeats and the entire Irish Literary Renaissance. Ronald Schleifer uses the theories of Derrida, Jameson, O'Hara and Jean-François Lyotard to demonstrate how some of the linguistic strategies used by Yeats during his early and middle periods, once stripped of their occult metaphysics, actually anticipate the nihilistic rhetoric of postmodernism. Steven Putzel borrows ideas from reception theory to reveal how Yeats's struggle to write into being an ideal aristocratic audience for an equally ideal antinaturalistic theatre was in fact modeled on a wishful misreading of the authentic N tradition, which instead emphasized, especially in the treatises of the N master Zeami, the responsibilities of the actor toward a popular audience comprised of all levels of fourteenth-century Japanese society. Kitty Carriker uses the Freudian concept of the uncanny and Umberto Eco's definition of the material icon, with its innate capacity to effect subject-object reversals, to examine the ambivalent psychological, epistemological and aesthetic implications of...

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