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
as characteristic aesthetic forms. Linda Hutcheon and Barthelme are discussed in details. Waugh concludes that fictionality becomes central and goes on to present this playfulness in novels like Salman Rushdie's Shame, Donald Barthelme's Snow White, Barth's Lost in the Funhouse. Waugh believes that instead of defending Postmodernism as an authentic response to the exhaustion of other modes of art or knowledge or attacking it as inauthentic capitulation to commercial culture, we should see it as an attempt to modify the past through reformulation of its modes in the light of present, in which recognition of the pervasiveness of consumer culture is not, necessarily, total capitulation to it. Reading Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Waugh sets out to prove that postmodern books do not necessarily involve an abandonment of traditional forms of thought or aesthetic expression, since although in the novel there are no fundamental disruptions of the physical laws of nature, there is no ludic or self-reflexive authorial voice, the novel is clearly informed by the mood of the postmodern. In the section tentatively entitled 'Rising the Dead,' Waugh is concerned with bringing back the author refuting the idea of the murder of the Author by Postmodernism. Reviewing Roland Barthes, Jorge Luis Borges, Georges Poulet and Julian Barnes, Waugh concludes that such postmodern texts do not annihilate subjectivity unless one is working with a reduced and restrictive concept of it. The final chapter of the theoretical section of Waugh's book discusses Postmodern as the 'Critique of Enlightenment'. Starting from Kant's essay 'An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment,' the problem of selfdetermination is interpreted as setting up impossible problems about selfdetermination, self-grounding and self-legitimation which can be seen to surface acutely in the self-referential obsession of much modem art. Waugh sees the postmodern critique of Enlightenment as an extension of insights provided by a philosopher generally regarded as its fullest embodiment and states that Postmodenism effectively extends the formal self-reflexivity of Kantian idealism to a limit where there can be no position outside the instrument of knowledge with which to offer a critique of them. The postmodernists tend to offer their critique of Enlightenment 'grand narratives' by showing that the concept of transcendent 'metanarrative' is a convenient fiction. To the question 'Is Deconstruction a Postmodernism,' Waugh's answer is that although the two are often conflated they should not be identified. The analysis of Derrida, Lyotard, Norris and Habermans concludes that both Haberman's reading of Derrida's 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Human Societies' in his The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity and Norris's 193
