Notes Chapter One: The Phantom Project Returning 1. I should note that the release of the second edition of Poetics coincides (to a certain extent) with Hutcheon’s publication of “Postmodern Afterthoughts ,” an earlier, more condensed, version of the epilogue. 2. A fact, of course, that Hutcheon herself admits: “For decades now, diagnosticians have been pronouncing on its health, if not its demise” (Politics 165). 3. For example: Neil Brooks and Josh Toth’s The Mourning After: Attending the Wake of Postmodernism; José López and Garry Potter’s After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical Realism; Robert Rebein’s Hicks, Tribes and Dirty Realists: American Fiction After Postmodernism; and Klaus Stierstorfer’s Beyond Postmodernism : Reassessments in Literature, Theory, and Culture. For the most part, these texts (along with the ones mentioned above) are discussed in detail in chapter 3. 4. Another useful example would be the fairly recent collection of essays, God, the Gift and Postmodernism, edited by John D. Caputo. Considered in some detail in the following chapter, this collection aims to examine the way in which recent theoretical shifts (those of Derrida included) have reopened the possibility of discussing religion and god as the ground for ethical reasoning. 5. To be clear: while I find these terms (i.e., “emergent,” “dominant,” “residual”) useful in articulating the dynamics of shifting epistemological con- figurations, I do not mean them in their strictest sense. That is, I do not use them in same way Williams, as a Marxist critic, does. Rather, I use them in a manner that is more in line with the way they are employed in Jameson’s Postmodernism or, better, Marianne DeKoven’s recent book, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of Postmodernism. Like DeKoven, I use these terms to “describe the shift or pivot to the postmodern” (18)—as well as, in my case, away from the postmodern—but I use them, as DeKoven does, “without the implications of progress from capitalism to socialism (or of any teleology) that inhere in Williams’ Marxist development of [them]” (18). 147 148 Notes to Chapter 1 6. That Olson wholly dissociates the postmodern from the vast period separating Homer and the end of modernism is, perhaps, worth noting. If such a broad period can be associated (however loosely) with the gradual formation and eventual dominance of an enlightenment sensibility, then the fact that Olson’s postmodern is overtly opposed to such a period suggests that it is far less removed from our current understanding of the term than we might initially expect. Olson’s apparent anticipation of our current sense of the term—an anticipation noted by both Jerome Mazzaro and Hans Bertens—is perhaps further exemplified in an earlier document, a letter to Robert Creeley (dated 9 August 1951). In this letter, Olson seems to suggest that the “post-modern” is the effect of a type of finally completed process of modernization, a type of pervasive globalization: “the post-modern world was projected by two earlier facts—(a) the voyages of the 15th and 16th Century making all the earth a known quantity (thus, geographical quantity absolute); and (b) 19th Century, the machine, leading to (1) the tripling of population and (2) the same maximal as the geographic in communication systems and the reproductive ones” (75). 7. Olson’s “post-modern,” although never clearly defined, appeared to be a description of a successful fusion of poetic innovation and revolutionary politics “linked to a prophetic history” (12), a form of artistic production akin to that of the prewar avant-garde. It is conceived of as a shift away from the rational humanism that haunted the modern movement, yet it remains, to a certain degree (as its similarity to a modernist/heroic avant-garde suggests), complicit with modernism, “with the original Stimmung of modernism, in an electric sense of the present as fraught with a momentous future” (Anderson 12). 8. In an attempt to be accurate, I should note that this quotation ends “. . . beginning around 1875.” Köhler is in fact arguing—and this is what Bertens is skeptical of—that Olson and Toynbee’s construction of postmodernism represents an epistemic shift beginning sometime in the late-nineteenth century. Of course, Bertens is right to suggest that the net has been cast too wide if the beginning of postmodernism is associated with an epistemic break that occurred in the late-nineteenth century. As we’ve already seen, though, Olson seems to construct the postmodern as a break...