Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1998. Vol. 2. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Book reviews - Tibor Tóth: Patricia Waugh: Practising Postmodernism Reading Modernism

view of history as a progressive movement towards a redemptive moment out of time and one of epoch as constituted by revolutionary moment in time, still inhabit the notions of temporal crisis articulated within Postmodernism. Through the assessment of Kristeva, Lyotard, Foucault, Deluze and Bataille, Waugh states that the aesthetic remains the prime vehicle for the epiphanic moment of transgression and it explodes its logic of the other into the world of the logic of the Same. Positioning Romantic Irony in Shelley and T. S. Eliot against Postmodernism's parody of the earlier text, Waugh tackles the problems of pre-existing textuality and the matter of decreation. Patricia Waugh contradicts the definition of Postmodern apocalypticism as expressing absolute fragmentariness, stating that it is as much concerned with reconciliation and reintegration as it is with their impossibility. Starting from the idea that Postmodernism makes explicit a number of paradoxes which are rather more implicit in Romantic thought, she states that the idea of the autonomy of the artist is central to Schiller and Kant, and Postmodernism is often identified exclusively with such an aestheticist position, and in this respect it can be interpreted as late-Romanticism rather than simply a mode of counter-Enlightenment. Tradition and innovation are interpreted through Kant's and Schiller's idea of select autonomy, marking the Romantic shift from definition of freedom through reason to its definition through imagination. She discusses the transfer of autonomy from self entirely to the work of art itself conceived of as an internally coherent, self contained system that culminated in the New Critical construction of Modernism. Waugh concludes that Romanticism and Postmodernism both articulate a critique of Enlightenment faith in the purely rational. Writing on situatedness in Romanticism to Postmodernism, and radical fictionality, Waugh discusses Heidegger's and Nietzsche's views on the topic. Waugh connects the notion of situatedness with Gadamer's hermeneutics and the notion of tradition developed in the criticism of T. S. Eliot, and argues that the orientation of the Romantic connection should be conceived as Wordsworthian, finally stating that as it moves towards the Postmodern, there is an increased emphasis on situatedness in language. The other tendency discussed is towards a projective, radical fictionality, where the self exists in its ability to work within the fragments available to it and from them to project onto the world new fictions by which to live. Analysing Pynchon, Coleridge, and Nietzsche, Waugh directs our attention onto the postmodern self which for all the proclaimed absence of metaphysical ground is still recognisably Romantic in its form. She states that Heidegger's interpretation leads to an ethics of passivity and acceptance, while Nietzsche's interpretation of the self destroys both self and other in its 190