Moving Beyond the Great Story

Post Modern Possibilities, Postmodern Problems

Bibliographic Data

ID2978705
AuthorsSaul Cornell (corresponding author)
Year1998
Volume50
Issue2
Pages349-357
Publication date1998-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-0678 • E-ISSN: 1080-6490
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/aq.1998.0018
OpenAlexW2067159057
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited7

Moving Beyond the Great Story: Post Modern Possibilities, Postmodern Problems Saul Cornell (bio) Text When a future generation of intellectual historians evaluates the impact of postmodernism on the writing of American history and American Studies, Robert Berkhofer’s Beyond the Great Story, will undoubtedly occupy a central place in their story. 1 Proponents and critics of postmodern theory will profit from Berkhofer’s thoughtful summary of this exceedingly complex and often contradictory body of literature. Indeed, given the tensions within postmodernism, articulating a coherent vision of what postmodern history might look like is itself an impressive achievement. Postmodern history challenges the metanarratives that have defined [End Page 349] historical inquiry. As Berkhofer cogently observes, “no longer can any single master interpretive code be privileged over another as if one were somehow more correspondent to the (a?) ‘real’ past than another.” 2 The critique of metanarrative is dependent on five interpretative principles derived from poststructuralist thought: 1. Denaturalization: The recognition that categories once thought to be natural: race, sex, ethnicity are complex cultural constructions. (One might add sexual orientation to Berkhofer’s list.) The substitution of the cultural category of gender for the biological category of sex is an example of recent scholarship’s efforts at denaturalization. 2. Demystification: Revealing the role which socially constructed systems of structured inequality shape all levels of human interactions and all types of cultural production. Demonstrating how universal qualities such as reason are often rendered in terms that use white male middle-class values as a normative standard is a good example of process of demystification. 3. Dehierarchization: Exposing how systems of structured inequality establish hierarchical systems of classification that reinforce asymmetrical power relations within particular cultures. Studies of popular culture [End Page 350] that challenge the privileged status of elite culture are the most obvious example of the application of this insight. 4. Dereferentialism: Among the most controversial claims of postmodernism, dereferentialism challenges the claim that language provides an unmediated access to an external reality. The notion that all history is inescapably textual, that we can never reach an actual lived past except through the mediation of texts, has been a defining characteristic of New Historicist literary criticism. 5. Deconstruction: The final move in the postmodern critique is deconstruction. Not only is there nothing outside of the text, but the meaning of the text is indeterminate. Stable meanings are an illusion created by ideologies that effectively work to obscure and conceal the tensions within texts. When all of these strains of postmodern thought are brought to bear on historical inquiry the result is the emergence of a new rhetorical understanding of history. The rhetorical turn moves well beyond the linguistic turn that informs recent work in both intellectual history and the new cultural history. Scholarship informed by the linguistic turn accepts the proposition that all human experience is filtered through the lens of language, which is itself a complex cultural [End Page 351] construction. 3 At an epistemological level denaturalization, demystification, and dehierarchization are perfectly compatible with the linguistic turn. While these poststructuralist ideas have usually been associated with a multiculturalist political agenda, cultural historians would find nothing theoretically problematic about these interpretive strategies. Dereferentialism and deconstruction, however, do fundamentally challenge the linguistic turn by textualizing both history and experience. The rhetorical turn suggested by postmodernism not only renders problematic the historians claim to be able to access the “experience of the past,” but argues that history itself is a rhetorical construction. In effect, history does not provide the lens or prism through which we see the past, it is the rhetorical device by which we create the past. Most historians would accept the ocular metaphors of a prism or a lens. For most historians the imperfections and distortions associated which specific interpretive frameworks do not call into question the goal of trying to see the past as clearly as possible. Many historians would also accept that history is dependent on rhetorical constructions and that these can sometimes obscure as much as they illuminate the past. Both of these concessions, [End Page 352] however, fall far short of the more radical claims associated with the new rhetorical turn. For supporters of the rhetorical turn

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Political science · Postmodern theatre · Postmodernism · Scholarship · Sociology · Law · Philosophy · Political and Economic history of UK and US

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