Review by Choice Review
The Canadian Linda Hutcheon, already known for her A Theory of Parody (CH, Dec '85), here addresses readers and writers who are simultaneously "both inside and outside a culturally different and dominant context." She doggedly and self-consciously avoids totalizing the "irreconcilable incompatibilities" of postmodernism by rejecting the reductive strategies of the ideological avant garde. On almost every page she reasserts that "complicitous" postmodernists deliberately install and imbed "events" (meaningless in themselves) into conceptual matrixes in order to contest, problematize, and subvert the resulting "facts" of reference, history, subjectivity, and textuality. She illustrates her arguments primarily with literary examples ranging from the works of Ishmael Reed and E.L. Doctorow to D.M. Thomas's The White Hotel (1981) and Salman Rushdie's Midnight Children (CH, Jul '81). This book is a positive next step in amplifying the paralogical investigations of the critic Ihab Hassan, the architect Charles Jencks, and the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard and serves as an antidote to detractors of postmodernism like Charles Newman and Terry Eagleton. An index and a first-rate international bibliography enhance the considerable value of this seminal work for adventurous academics of all ages. P. D. Hertz-Ohmes SUNY College at Oswego
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
