| In recent years, an increasing number of literary critics and theorists have announced, or simply assumed, the end of postmodernism. The critics who participate in this theorization of the end typically highlight a recent shift in contemporary cultural production that is marked by the growing dominance of a type of neo-(or, "dirty")-realism, and by an increased theoretical interest in the issue of community and ethical responsibility. My dissertation explores this shift in both contemporary American fiction and poststructural theory. While considering the various claims that this new period of cultural production is an overt rejection of postmodern nihilism, I demonstrate that a certain utopian spirit necessarily persisted within, and actually defined, the postmodern project. Following Derrida's reading of Marx in Specters of Marx (1994), I argue that this persistent utopian spirit needs to be understood as a type of essential promise, a specter of what is always still to come. While we might say that modernism was compelled by the idealistic belief that it could finally realize the apparent utopia beckoning on the horizon, postmodernism was compelled by the equally utopian ideal that it could finally reject the possibility of all such illusory ideals. Recent works of theory and narrative representing a break with postmodernism seem to acknowledge the fact that both positions became dogmatic and oppressive because they failed to accept the ironic nature of the "specter." That is, both modernism and postmodernism "failed" because they did not respect the fact that the specter is, and must remain, both possible and impossible. At the same time, though, I argue that even this new period of cultural production is necessarily contaminated by an utopian desire to deny the ironic nature of the specter. This seems to be implicit in the imperative that we must respect the specter. For to say this is to locate another final answer and thus to deny the impossibility of such a solution, the impossibility that the specter represents in the first place.; Keywords. postmodernism, specter, Derrida, American fiction, poststructuralism, ethics, nihilism, modernity, Enlightenment project... |
