It would be difficult to exaggerate the worldwide impact of postmodernism on the fields of cultural production and the social sciences over the last quarter century-even if the concept has been understood in various, even contradictory, ways. An interest in postmodernism and postmodernity has been especially strong in Canada, in part thanks to the country's non-monolithic approach to history and its multicultural understanding of nationalism, which seems to align with the decentralized, plural, and open-ended pursuit of truth as a multiple possibility as outlined by Jean-François Lyotard. In fact, long before Lyotard published his influential work The Postmodern Condition in 1979, Canadian writers and critics were employing the term to describe a new kind of writing.

 

RE: Reading the Postmodern marks a first cautious step toward a history of Canadian postmodernism, exploring the development of the idea of the postmodern and debates about its meaning and its applicability to various genres of Canadian writing, and charting its decline in recent years as a favoured critical trope.

Robert David Stacey is assistant professor of Canadian Literature in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa.

CONTENTS

Contributors

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Post-, Marked Canada -- Robert David Stacey

Part 1 / Retrospections

Boundary 2 and the Canadian Postmodern -- Robert Kroetsch

Canadian Postmodernisms: Misreadings and Non-readings -- Frank Davey

The Glories of Hindsight: What We Know Now -- Linda Hutcheon

Part 2 / En garde! Traditions, Counter-traditions, Anti-traditions

Postmodern Postmortem: Irony and Literary History in Linda Hutcheon's Poetics -- Adam Carter

Getting Ready to Have Been Postmodern -- Christian Bök

Feeling Ugly: Daniel Jones, Lynn Crosbie and Canadian Postmodernism's Second Wave -- Stephen Cain

Reconciling Regionalism: Spatial Epistemology, Robert Kroetsch and the Roots of Canadian Postmodern Fiction -- Alexander MacLeod

A Postmodern Decadence in Canadian Sound and Visual Poetry -- Gregory Betts

Part 3 / Historicities

Attack of the Latté-Drinking Relativists: Postmodernism, Historiography and Historical Fiction -- Herb Wyile

"The Postmodern Impasse" and Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy -- Jennifer Blair

Postmodern Realism and Photographic Subjectivity in The Stone Diaries -- Deborah Bowen

Re-performing Microhistories: Postmodern Metatheatricality in Canadian Millennial Drama -- Jenn Stephenson

F the Ineffable! The Allegorical Intention in Ghostmodernism -- Sylvia Söderlind

Part 4 / Publics

Bowering, Postmodernism and Canadian Nationalism: A Short Sad Book -- Jason Wiens

Re: Reading the Postmodern-'MESS IS LORE' -- Pauline Butling

Why Postmodernism Now? Toward a Poetry of Enactment -- Susan Rudy