Revisiting Autonomies in the Wake of Postmodernism

In their recent books, Jennifer Ashton and Alan Gilbert consider both the dominance of the postmodern paradigm and its incoherence. As Donald Allen and George Butterick note in their anthology The Postmoderns: The New American Poetry Revised, postmodernism's "chief characteristic is its inclusiveness, its quick willingness to take advantage of all that had gone before" (12). It's precisely this indiscrimination Ashton and Gilbert read as vexed because it disavows difference. Ashton and Gilbert supply limits to the postmodern by bookending the epoch, with Ashton delineating the modern, and Gilbert suggesting that in the twenty-first century we are witnessing the beginnings of a new cultural and aesthetic movement.