The ABCs of Pomo

Page 17 September–October 2008 B O O K R e V i e W S the ABCs of Pomo Marcel Cornis-Pope The material covered in this book is rich and wide-ranging, consolidating but not necessarily revising in essential ways our understanding of postmodernism. hisToriCal diCTionary oF posTmodernisT liTeraTUre and TheaTer Fran Mason The Scarecrow Press, Inc. http://www.scarecrowpress.com 405 pages; cloth, $85.00 Published in Scarecrow Press’s series of Historical Dictionaries of Literature and the Arts, the present volume assumes that postmodernism is a classifiable phenomenon, one that deserves a “historical dictionary” with a “chronology, which charts the milestones of the movement,” an introduction that “defines the movement and also highlights major features and contributors,” and “several hundred entries on authors and notable books, theoreticians, literary journals and groups, techniques, genres, and concepts” (foreword by Jon Woronoff, series editor). Still, the author of the present dictionary, Fran Mason, is careful to include more recent phenomena (“blank fiction,” avant-pop, new wave SF, “generation X literature ,” the French nouvelle génération de Minuit) in order to suggest “the persistence of postmodernist forms of writing.” The chronology of postmodernism starts in 1939, with Arnold Toynbee’s first use of the phrase “the Post-Modern Age” but also with the publication of two seminal texts that complicate/break up modernism, James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (1939) and Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropismes (1939). The rest of the chronology includes primarily North American, Central and Latin American, and Western European authors. With one exception, there is no mention in the chronology or introduction of possible connections between postmodernism and the historical avant-garde (Dadaism, surrealism, objectualism, etc.). This absence is particularly conspicuous in the treatment of neo-avant-gardist trends such as the Italian Gruppo 63 or the French and Italian OuLiPo group, both of which draw on elements of the historical avant-garde. Several later entries in the dictionary connect NoëlArnaud’s serial writing to the OuLiPo experiments or emphasizing anticipations of postmodernism in the work of Eugène Ionesco, Edmond Jabès, and others. On the whole, however, the author prefers to focus on the customary opposition modernism/postmodernism through the classical texts of postmodern theory (Brian McHale, Fredric Jameson, Ihab Hassan, Steven Best, and Douglas Kellner). Still, in an entry on “late-modernism,” Mason acknowledges the difficulty of labeling the fiction of John Barth, Italo Calvino, William H. Gass, and Raymond Federman; other entries point to the fluidity of demarcations in the case of late modernists /early postmodernists like Vladimir Nabokov or Jorge Luis Borges. The author’s mixed media interests (as director of film studies and of the master’s program in contemporary popular knowledges at the University of Winchester, UK) reflect in the occasional tracing of interartistic developments and in the dictionary’s title that promises an important focus on theater. However, fiction occupies the largest portion of the introduction and of the entries. Postmodernist poetry gets three pages in the introduction; theater two. In the body of the dictionary, one finds a significant number of entries on poets (primarily , American, British, and French). The playwrights are rarer: Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Eugène Ionesco, Elfriede Jelinek , Gert Jonke, Sarah Kane, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, and Peter Weiss. Their plays are treated as written texts, with minimal focus on their performance. The introduction (the section “Histories and Geographies of Postmodernist Literature”) points out correctly that most periodizations, especially those which view US postmodernism as the paradigmatic case, deemphasize earlier versions of postmodernism (French and LatinAmerican) and rarely mention works from Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. Mason rectifies in part this problem, foregrounding both in the introduction and in various entries the modeling role of Latin American and French postmodernist writing and theory. He also includes writers from other cultures: Dutch (Cees Nooteboom), Austrian (Bernhard, Handke, Jelinek, Jonke, Leo Perutz, Christoph Ransmayr), Asian and African (J. M. Coetzee, Haruki Murakami, Ben Okri). His treatment of British postmodernist writing, both in the 1960s and in its 1980s revival, covers various parts of the British Isles but also of the Commonwealth , decentering the concept of “Englishness.” US postmodernism itself is...