Del postmoderno: Critica e cultura in America dall’alba del Duemila (review)

Peter Carravetta’s Del postmoderno is a titanic achievement, in several senses. The scope of the book is remarkably large, as it aims at describing and understanding the tenets of the postmodern era in its theoretical, critical, aesthetic, historical, and socioeconomic manifestations in the United States during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Carravetta’s description of what the postmodern entailed—and I here want to highlight the past tense—is also a constant and congruent reflection on what “postmodern” means. The book is in fact a historiographic reconstruction of the concept of the postmodern that the author considers to have died at the beginning of the twenty-first century. To this claim he adds in his prologue that “e biosgnerà vedere se valga la pena di accudirlo [il postmoderno], quand’anche comatoso, nella segreta speranza di un suo risveglio e rilancio” (16) (“and it remains to be seen whether taking care of it [the postmodern], be it only comatose, would be worth the effort, in the secret hope that it can be revived and relaunched”).

“Il libro si autodefinisce metacritico” (19) (“This book defines itself as metacritical”), Carravetta states when he explains that Del postmoderno wants to be a historiographic presentation of the main theoretical positions of and on the postmodern. The text focuses on theories of the postmodern as they developed in the United States. When the book refers to seminal works of philosophy or criticism written in other countries, it does so taking into consideration the interpretations that have been given of those works in the American academy.

The hypothesis to be demonstrated, Carravetta writes, is that whatever is meant by the term “postmodern age” and whatever theoretical positions that label represented today bear little or no connection to reality (7). These theoretical positions are laid out in the first part of the book; further along, Carravetta proposes an interpretation and a critical understanding of these themes, facts, and ideas as he has presented them.

A second remarkable aspect of this book is the critical and organizational coherence with which topics of a very different nature are held together. Given that the field he is taking under consideration is so vast, Carravetta begins his book with brief descriptions of the most representative theories on the postmodern from the 1970s to the end of last century (part 1, “Topica dell’età postmoderna” [Topoi of the Postmodern Age]).

The second part of the book is titled “I campi e le forze: Avanguardia e postmoderno” (The Fields and the Forces: Avant-gardes and the Postmodern). Here Carravetta analyzes the relationship between modernity and postmodernity, trying to understand what distinguished the two and what did not. As he himself explains, this part takes into account heterologous contexts, as it explores some of the theories laid out in the first part; the unifying principle of this section remains the general objective of the book: a historiographic reconstruction of the notion of the postmodern (20).

The book’s third section, “Ideorama degli anni novanta: Autocritica di una cultura” (“A View of the Ideas of the Nineties: A Culture’s Self-Criticism”), outlines the characteristic aspects of U.S. culture during the 1990s. The book’s major time marker in Carravetta’s exploration of what the postmodern was is 11 September 2001—keeping that in mind, titles of the subsections will give the reader an idea of what Carravetta is treating in this part of the text: “Potere e piacere” (“Power and Pleasure”), “In nome di Dio” (“In the Name of God”), “Arte, società e il ‘politicamente corretto’” (“Art, Society, and the Politically Correct”), “2002: La nuova oligarchia” (“2002: The New Oligarchy”).

Part 4, “Cartografie del crepuscolo: Versioni regionali” (“Cartographies of the Twilight: Regional Versions”), is devoted to some interdisciplinary theoretical contexts, including cultural studies, postcolonial studies, feminist and gender studies, globalization and the postmodern, and space and time from utopias to dystopias to atopias.

Part 5, “Modi e mondi del discorso: Letteratura...