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

defense of deconstruction against itself are misleading. Modernity is discussed as the critique of instrumental reason, where technology is interpreted as threatening the world with annihilation. Waugh states that following Foucault postmodernists refer to the 'iron cage' of rationalisation without reason as the violence of the logic of the same, viewing their activity as an attempt to preserve difference, reject universalisation, praise the local, the particular event, the specificity of the contingent. Analysing The Waste Land, Waugh reaches the conclusion that all experience and knowledge is absorbed into the process of the habitual capital and what Marx had called alienation is the normal condition of existence, in which the recommendation to 'only connect' is carried out to satisfy biological urges. Waugh states that although Eliot abandoned faith in reason as the instrument of knowledge, Eliot shores his fragments against his ruin, hoping to make them cohere through the discovery of a deep aesthetic logic expressing universal mind in some version of collective unconsciousness. If the lifeworld has become even more thoroughly instrumentally rationalised than the response of the postmodern to Eliot's idea of redemption through art is continued through postmodernist response to it, Waugh argues. Doris Lessing's Memoirs of a Survivor is used as an example of the fictional critique of Enlightenment, as the novel asserts our fundamental need for love, shelter, nuturance, our formation out of an interdependence with other human beings based on such needs. The novel's apocalypticism reveals how, in rationalising the lifeworld without due care for the range and complexity of these needs, we may have starved the human race altogether. The projected world of the semi-humans is born out of the failures of over-rationalised logic. The violence of instrumentality of the Enlightenment and Imperialism and the rationalist discourses of modern liberalism are explored by novels belonging to the modernist period, and Patricia Waugh analyses Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Virginia Woolf s To the Lighthouse in this context. In the chapter dedicated to feminism, Patricia Waugh argues that an examination of alternativ^ feminist models of identity can add further dimensions to the debates considered earlier about the construction of Modernism in terms of formal autonomy. She argues that the exclusion of gender from postmodern discussions has left its theorists largely blind to the possibilities of challenging autonomy through a relational concept of identity. Because women's sense of identity is more likely to consist of a more diffuse sense of the boundaries of the self and their notion of identity should be understood in relational and intersubjective terms, they are more representative of a sense of connections to others. The volume ends with a reading of T. S. Eliot on tradition and James Joyce's Ulysses. 194