Troping History: Modernist Residue in Fredric Jameson's Pastiche and Linda Hutcheon's Parody

• Published in: Style (University Park, PA) Vol. 33; no. 3; pp. 372 - 390
• Main Author: Duvall, John N.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: DeKalb Pennsylvania State University Press 22-09-1999; Penn State University Press
• Subjects: Aesthetics; Architecture; Criticism; Criticism and interpretation; Evaluation; Fiction; Historical text analysis; History; Hutcheon, Linda; Hutcheon, Linda (1947- ); Jameson, Fredic; Jameson, Fredric (1934-2024); Literary criticism; Literary postmodernism; Literature; Literature and history; Modernist art; Parody; Pastiche; Poetics; Postmodern aesthetics; Postmodern architecture; Postmodern art; Postmodernism; United States
• ISSN: 0039-4238; 2374-6629

The competing accounts of the relation between postmodernism and history given by Fredric Jameson and Linda Hutcheon turn crucially on their senses of pastiche and parody. For Jameson, postmodern narrative is ahistorical (and hence politically dangerous), playing only with pastiched images and aesthetic forms; for Hutcheon, postmodern fiction remains historical, precisely because it problematizes history through parody, and thus retains its potential for cultural critique. But what these therorists mean by postmodernism is not the same thing: Jameson's postmodernism focuses on the consumer, while Hutcheon's originates with the artist as producer. As a result, Jameson and Hutcheon in many instances speak past each other, describing different cultural phenomena. Although Jameson's focus on the consumer's response to pastiched images and Hutcheon's emphasis on the producer's parodied intentions remain a useful starting-point for thinking about contemporary representation, both theorists' investments in certain forms of modernism render problematic their very attempt to articulate the postmodern difference.