In the epilogue to the 2002 reprint of her influential study The Politics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon remarks that" the postmodern may well be a twentieth-century phenomenon, that is, a thing of the past. Now fully institutionalized, it has its canonized texts, its anthologies, primers and readers, its dictionaries and its histories"(165). Hutcheon's claim about the pastness of postmodernism has gained support in the years since she made it, as a body of criticism has emerged which takes a determinedly revisionist and historicist perspective on many of the ca-nonical postmodernist texts to which she alludes. Novels such as Thomas Pynchons The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985), now monuments in the American postmodern landscape, have produced a spate of recent readings in this vein. Aspects of these texts that can seem peripheral on a first reading-such as the role of Mexico in Pynchon's novel, or the impact of the Vietnamese and Iranian conflicts in DeLillo's-have been alighted upon as offering an underappreciated historical situatedness to the poetics of postmodernism. 1 In addition, the previously submerged role played by various institutions and class interests in the historical formation of postmodernist styles and forms has become the focus of important interventions in the field. 2 Much of this critical work retains the analytic and taxonomie category of the postmodern, even as the accepted dominance in the texts being read of traditionally postmodern themes and aesthetics is often questioned (whether from a descriptive or political viewpoint). 3 In other work," postmodernism" itself is undermined as a useful critical designation, in favor of terms such as" long modernism" or" technomodernism." 4 In her short essay" On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary," something of a manifesto for the recendy-formed Post-45 group of literary critics who are carrying out