Peter Ackroyd Hawksmoor (1985) Postmodernism

Historiographic metafiction coined by literary theorist Linda Hutcheon (defined in "A Poetics of Postmodernism„) works both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also laying claim to historical events and personages. Historiographic metafiction is a quintessentially postmodern art form a reliance upon textual play, parody and historical re-conceptualization

Historiographic quality Sir Christopher Wren (1632 – 1723) (e.g. St Paul’s Cathedral) → real figure → architect Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661 – 1736) → real figure → architect → fictitious character → detective/20th century plot of Hawksmoor Nicholas Dyer → fictitious character → architect → personifying Nicholas Hawksmoor the actual architect of, for instance, Christ Church in Spitalfields, London

Christ Church, Spitalfields, London ( ) designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor

Fredric Jameson in Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) Postmodernism [...] ceaselessly reshuffles the fragments of preexistent texts, the building blocks of older cultural and social production, in some new and heightened bricolage: metabooks which cannibalize other books, metatexts which collate bits of other texts-such is the logic of postmodernism in general. (96)

Ihab Hassan, “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism” (in The Postmodern Turn; 1987) MODERNISM Romanticism/ Symbolism Form (conjunctive, closed) Purpose Design Hierarchy Mastery /Logos Art Object/Finished Work Distance Creation/ Totalisation Synthesis Presence Centering Genre/ Boundary Semantics Paradigm Hypotaxis POSTMODERNISM Pataphysics/ Dadaism Antiform (disjunctive, open) Play Chance Anarchy Exhaustion /Silence Process/Performance/Happening Participation Decreation/ Deconstruction Antithesis Absence Dispersal Text/ Intertext Rhetoric Syntagm Parataxis

Ihab Hassan, “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism” (in The Postmodern Turn; 1987) MODERNISM Metaphor Selection Root/Depth Interpretation/Reading Signified Lisible (Readerly) ~ Roland Barthes Narrative/Grande Histoire Master Code Symptom Type Genital/Phallic Paranoia Origin/Cause God the Father Metaphysics Determinancy Transcendence POSTMODERNISM Metonymy Combination Rhizome/Surface Against Interpretation/Misreading Signifier Scriptible (Writerly) ~ Roland Barthes Anti-narrative/Petite Histoire Idiolect Desire Mutant Polymorphous/Androgynous Schizophrenia Difference -Différance/Trace ~ Jacques Derrida The Holy Ghost Irony Indeterminancy Immanence