depois da exaustão

"Interestingly enough, forty years after the publication of John Barth’s
seminal essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967), one is tempted to
diagnose the exhaustion of postmodernism. It is becoming increasingly
obvious that there are signs in contemporary British literature indicating
that postmodernism is past its heyday, that it is losing or has lost its shine,
fascination and attraction and that writers have been turning to the “old”
or pre-modern forms, practices and strategies. It seems to me that novels
with metahistorical dimension, the ethical component, the revival of realist
storytelling in the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Kate Atkinson,
Julian Barnes’s novel Arthur and George (2005) attest to the new mode
which reaches beyond postmodernism. Metafiction, postmodernist
experiment with narrative technique, attacks on mimetic referentiality,
delight in popular culture became mainstream, they lost their subversive
power and shock effect and no longer produce the effect of novelty; thus
to reach alterity the postmodernist and modernist novel are deconstructed:
old, pre-modern forms are used to achieve defamiliarization. David Lodge
predicted it already two decades ago: “Experiment can become so familiar
that it ceases to stimulate our powers of perception, and then more simple
daring”. At some later date, in the 1990’s, writing about the British novel
Malcolm Bradbury made a similar observation: “There was a general
feeling that Eighties experiments had become Nineties conventions, and
that serious young writers were becoming imitative clones of their
elders”.

It was Ihab Hassan, a distinguished American professor and scholar,
who started the critique of postmodernism; in his thought-provoking
article “Beyond Postmodernism: Toward an Aesthetic of Trust” he is
advocating for what he calls “a fiduciary realism”, “a postmodern realism”
based on believing there is truth and we have to be committed to it. It is
not, Hassan argues, “an absolute, transcendent, or foundational Truth”, it
is Truth which “rests on trust, personal, social, cognitive trust”, trust as
“the premise to realism” which “is no light matter” and which “refers us to
the enigma of representation, the conundrum of signs, the riddle of
language, the chimera of consciousness itself”. We have to believe there
is truth, because “if truth is dead, then everything is permitted”, asserts
Hassan, paraphrasing Dostoyevsky and challenging postmodern
relativism."

daqui, em word: "A Nostalgia for Tradition", Regina Rudaityté.