The Genrification of Desire and Posthistorical Pastiche
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4387026 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jerry Herron (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1987 |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 45 |
| Publication date | 1987-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | SubStance (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0049-2426 • E-ISSN: 1527-2095 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3685384 |
| OpenAlex | W2335354652 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 9 |
There has come a time, in the life of signs, when signification alone is simply not enough-as if, in fact, it ever was. Consistency, after all, breeds contempt, teleologically speaking, and only the truly promiscuous can content themselves with merely arbitrary relations. If absence had a heart, that is to say, it surely wouldn't be a fond one. So much the worse for us, because absence is our current lot in life; about that there is perfect and best-selling agreement: We are living in the time of the parenthesis, the time between eras. It is as though we have bracketed off the present from both the past and the future, for we are neither here nor there.' Here, in the synchronic moment, history has grown suddenly, and endlessly, deferrable, at least in terms of narrative plotting, which has left us stranded-rather like Michel Foucault taking an epistemic holiday on Dover Beach. And given that fix, we have only desire to preserve us from asignificance, as anyone knows who has ever been caught between worlds: Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!2 But there's the rub, or lack of it, because even desire becomes subject to erasure in the posthistorical space of between-times: In short, the growing determination to live for the moment . .. appears to have established the preconditions of a new intimacy. ... This appearance is an illusion. ... Personal relations crumble under the emotional weight with which they are burdened.3 So much for love, and for the narrative selves formerly capable of precipitating its serviceable economy: and that is the way the world, or the betweenworlds, may end, not with a bang, obviously; probably-now-not even with a whimper. Thus the best minds of the age agree: the signs this time
Aesthetics · Art · Consistency (knowledge bases) · Contempt · Epistemology · Illusion · Joke · Literature · Narrative · Parenthesis · Pleasure · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Taste · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Mathematics · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |