Transcending Postmodernism: Performatism 2.0 is an ambitious attempt to expand and deepen the theory of performatism. Its main thesis is that, beginning in the mid-1990s, the strategies and norms of postmodernism have been displaced by ones that force readers or viewers to experience effects of aesthetically mediated transcendence.

Transcending Postmodernism (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

Literature & Fiction

Eshelman, Raoul

History & Criticism

Routledge

There is a widespread feeling that postmodernism is on its way out. However, up to now there has been no attempt to define what the epoch after it would look like. Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism is the first book to offer a systematic theory of culture after postmodernism. The book maintains that we have entered a new, monist epoch in which aesthetically imposed belief replaces endless irony as the dominant force in culture. This new cultural dominant, which I call performatism, works by artificially "framing" readers or viewers in such a way that they have no choice but to accept the external givens of a work and identify with the characters within it. In short, they are forcibly made to believe-if only within an particular aesthetic context. This basic procedure can be shown to operate not only in narrative genres like film and literature, but also in visual ones like art and architecture. This new aesthetic is documented in well-known films and novels such as American Beauty, The Celebration, Life of Pi, Middlesex, and The God of Small Things as well as in the work of major architects and artists such as Sir Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, Andreas Gursky, Neo Rauch, and Vanessa Beecroft.

Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

The Davies Group, Publishers

Nikolaj Gumilev occupies a paradoxical place within the history of Russian modernism. Although he is well known as the founder of Acmeism and is regarded as an important poet and critic, much of his work is difficult to reconcile with prevailing concepts of modernism. The present study seeks to explain this marginal position by reinterpreting Gumilev's work within the broader context of a modernist aesthetic of order, or «neo-classical modernism.» The term refers to an aesthetic line within modernism that sought to reconcile certain features of traditional rhetoric - in particular the triadic style system - with modernist strategies of innovation. Although primarily devoted to Gumilev, the study also touches on Russian and French writers adhering to comparable aesthetic values, among them Annenskij, Kuzmin, Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, Valéry and Gide.

Nikolaj Gumilev and Neoclassical Modernism: The Metaphysics of Style (Slavische Literaturen)

Reference

Peter Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften

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