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Cancer in the Neolithic?
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tiompan
tiompan
5758 posts

Re: Cancer in the Neolithic?
Jan 27, 2017, 16:27
Evergreen Dazed wrote:
tiompan wrote:
The book appeared at the height of pm but the qualities you referred to earlier are all modernist , not pm .

From a stylistic view surely it isn't " rejecting rigid genre distinctions, emphasizing pastiche, parody, bricolage, irony, and playfulness. "



I accept your first point but not necessarily your second. I would say pastiche, irony and playfulness are all there in that book. Perhaps i've got it wrong, i'd like to hear other opinions on this.

Would you agree that modernism is a more conservative construct, in terms of order/disorder and grand narratives, things which pomo seeks to reject?

I'm no expert (as you can tell) but i'm sure I detect elements of pomo thinking in copes work!


The style of the book seems to be a gazeteer with observations by the author , that in itself puts it into the frame of a grand narrative , particularly if there is a "message ".

Irony ,pastiche and playfullness etc are all found in pre pm stuff . Their presence alone isn't enough to characterise it as pm .
A pm tma might have been an 19 th C diary showing the perspective 12 year old apprentice(with the same name as the author ) to a engineer named Aubrey Stook who has been commissioned by a railway company to work on the feasability of building a railway line near ancient sites like Stonehenge . Alternate chapters would be about a 21 st C archivist who discovers Stook is actually in the pay of Napoleon 111 and the diarist was later imprisoned for selling for faked diaries of antiquaries . etc .[/quote]

George, I think we're talking about different things.
My thinking is that Cope has been personally influenced by postmodern thought and that some of the themes can be detected in his work, in this particular case the MA book.
You seem to be describing an author conciously adhering to certain rules in order to complete a piece of 'postmodern writing', which is not what I am talking about, at least.
I'm going to have to call halt as i'm trying to continue this conversation in snatched moments whilst working (as I was doing yesterday) and it's very difficult to switch satisfactorily between the two!
Perhaps we could continue another time. [/quote]

By all means .

Yes the hypothetical book was what you might expect from a PM writer ,
ludic , ironic etc.

PM has had an influence on us all but I can't see how it would be particularly noted in the ma book given it's overall grand narrative style .[/quote]

Ok, maybe I need to go away and find out what i'm trying to say as it's a bit feather in the wind at the moment.
Just a quick question to help me out (and i may not get back on here this afternoon) if we consider the movement or whatever it's best called of the 'new age', does that imply a category (modernist or postmodern) in terms of its broad themes, or is it dependent upon the individual aspects within, can there be a modernist and a postmodern approach to the same themes or ideas and beliefs which make up the collective movement?

I'm trying to understand where to draw lines, what would be good examples of modernist and postmodern thinking about feminism for example? [/quote]

It's a greyish area but fwiw .Pardon the blethering .

I wouldn't describe new age as modernist , at all .

Pm is slippy enough , there is the fact that we lived through post modernity whether we like it or not ,were influenced by it etc but didn't necessarily buy the philosophy .Pm crossed culture from architecture to literature , philosophy etc , the fact that it coincided with " new age " provides an association and led to "new age " being described as "pick 'n' mix ,all a bit pm " etc . None of the major figures in PM went near "new age " thinking but as pm was so relativist /anything goes /anti rationalist , the association stuck , unfairly for pm as I imagine most pm'ers would think . Manson was clearly a hippy in many respects but the vast majority of hippies were horrified with the association, but the association sticks .

Few of us are entirely modernist , pm ,hippy , punk , left wing , right wing , it tends to to be a bit of mixture .

Pm relationship with feminism is on much firmer ground , the association is hard wired through feminist philosophers who are also considered as post modern philosophers . Not something I have read (I have had enough of it and avoid it like the plague ) so only know the names see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Kristeva & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luce_Irigaray for early examples .
The first wave of feminism was modernist . The pm stuff may have a greater emphasis on language and power two fundamentals from the usual pm although I I'm not sure .
Hope I haven't sounded too pm , otherwise it will entirely bollocks .[/quote]

Brilliant!
[/quote]
ooops must say I have always enjoyed pomo novels .
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