Tactical Readings: Feminist Postmodernism in the Novels of Kathy Acker and Angela Carter, and: Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960s Fiction, and: Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting in the Cold War Era and After (review)

These three studies continue the relatively recent project of articulating the historical and sociocultural import of postmodern writing. In light of critiques casting postmodern theory and fiction as capricious formalism in place of discernible politics, previously dominant anatomies of play and pastiche (themselves reflexively and contagiously playful) give way in studies such as these to reframings of the recent past and assessments of the relationship between postmodern discourse, political alternatives, and literary criticism. A fairly consistent theoretical canon works as an implicit methodology across these three critical texts; mainstays such as Fredric Jameson, Linda Hutcheon, David Harvey, and Donna Haraway are all quoted, prodded, and metaread with varying degrees of approving contestation—alongside a commitment to preserving postmodernism's avowed open-endedness through attention to less frequently studied writers.

Nicola Pitchford's Tactical Readings assesses the possibilities for feminist politics suggested by postmodern texts and the reading practices they engender. "When insistently historicized," writes Pitchford, "feminism and postmodernism can together produce a theory of reading as a historically attuned political action" (13). Following Michel de Certeau's notion of tactics, as any temporary set of "contingent, reactive, and resistant" practices, Pitchford finds intimations of agency in postmodern territory—a reliance on local, partial, and temporary methods of creation, such as scavenging and bricolage, suggested by the embedded reading practices of Kathy Acker's "blunt street-smart polemics" and Angela Carter's "intense aestheticism" (17). Pitchford demonstrates the importance of a more gender-savvy postmodernism with acute observations, such as her view of Acker's cityscapes as encoding an often overlooked difference between walking the streets and being a streetwalker (57) or her pungent credo for studying the discursively constructed self: to "treat bodies as always already dismembered" (61). Pitchford's final discussion of antiporn feminism and the sex wars leads her to the provocative creation of the "pornographic reader," who embodies her extension of the transfiguring logic of linguistic repetition that "entails revision," for "identity itself is always a matter of both repetition and continual revision" (178).

Amy Elias also isolates transformative iteration as a key conceptual operation of postmodern fiction. In this case, the "metahistorical romance" narrates a "compulsive, repetitive turning toward the past that is a ceaselessly deferred resolution to the question of historical agency that it poses" (xii). Sublime Desire describes the turbulent relations of postmodern fiction and history as registering controversy within the discipline of historiography itself. By Elias's account, although postmodernism has most often been discussed as "a social phenomenon, as an aesthetic, as an epistemology, and as a political philosophy . . . the specter of history haunts postmodern borderlands" (3). At the intersection of two significant postmodern concerns—"border discourse" and the "historical/ahistorical paradox"—Elias theorizes, following Hayden White, the ascendance of narrative and empirical history as enabled by a repression of "sublime" history (5). The "metahistorical romance" is then the return of traumatic consciousness in unruly and performative revolt against entrenched "stadial" models of historical narration, a postmodern subgenre that emerges from a double-barreled reading of Walter Scott's historical romances and postmodern novels by writers including Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, Jeanette Winterson, Charles Johnson, William Vollman, Steve Erikson, and Simon Schama. Elias argues that postmodern techniques of representing the historical past enact not a repudiation of history but a rehabilitation of "metahistory, the ability to theorize and ironically desire history rather than access it...