John Baker’s Blog

At the Electronic Book Review Brian McHale has a new essay on postmodernism. He extracts quotations from Raymond Federman’s novel, Aunt Rachel’s Fur, of which the following is one.

So you find my novel too postmodern, wrong again Gaston, you’ve arrived too late, we are already beyond postmodernism, it’s dead, dead and gone, don’t you know, it’s been buried, where have you been, and that’s precisely the problem for literature today, now that postmodernism is dead, writers don’t know how to replace it, the disappearance of postmodernism was devastating for the writers, but it was not surprising, it was expected to happen for some time, the last gasp happened the day Samuel Beckett changed tense and joined the angels, I can give you an exact date if you want to, postmodernism died because Godot never came…

The essay leaves one with much to think about.

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