Clarissa De Angelis's List: Língua Portuguesa

 

Anyone writing a novel…must have a clear and firm idea  as to what is good and bad in life. John Bayley

Like much contemporary literary theory, the  postmodernist novel puts into question that entire series of interconnected  concepts that have come to be associated with what we conveniently label as  liberal humanism: autonomy, transcendence, certainty, authority, unity,  totalization, system, universalization, center, continuity, teleology, closure,  hierarchy, homogeneity, uniqueness, origin. As I have tried to argue, however,  to put these concepts into question is not to deny them—only to interrogate  their relation to experience, without the kind of foreclosing assurance that the  epigraph suggests. The process by which this is done is a process of installing  and then withdrawing (or of using and abusing) those very contested notions.  Criticism does not necessarily imply destruction, and postmodern critique, in  particular, is a paradoxical and questioning beast. Charles Newman has stated,  rather polemically, that “Post-Modernism reflects not a radical uncertainty so  much as an unconsidered suspension of judgment” (1985, 201), but in being so  very categorical, he misses the point of the postmodern enterprise. It is  neither uncertain nor suspending of judgment: it questions the very bases of any  certainty (history, subjectivity, reference) and of any standards of judgment.  Who sets them? When? Where? Why? Postmodernism marks less a negative  “disintegration” of or “decline” in order and coherence (Kahler 1968), than a  challenging of the very concept upon which we judge order and coherence.