Books, Arts & Manners: Brother, Can You Spare a Stamp?

The Post-Modern Aura: The Act of Fiction in an Age of Inflation, by Charles Newman (Northwestern, 203 pp., $18.95)

Charles Newman is track-lighting a useful, if unwelcome, conceit here: in short, that art and the dollar have undergone brutal, pernicious inflation together. Post-Modernism is characterized not by style or particular intent, but by pure velocity. Michael Jackson to Prince to Madonna since day before yesterday. “Chronic excess demand fosters irrational consumption; all goods, intellectual as well as material, become nondurable, buying and selling take precedence over production and investment.” With mass media we could probably go through both Renaissance and Elizabethan Age in half a decade. Moreover, each historical mode is available for recycling today. You can write a Pamela, V, Little Dorrit, Howards End, whatever. Yet nothing much is new in fiction. After all, High Modernism (the great canon of Pound, Joyce, Hemingway) sounds rather final —especially since Futurism was used up by 1920. The one movement in Post-Modern writing is movement itself.

DK

About the Author

D. Keith Mano

D. Keith Mano was a TV screenwriter and author of ten books, including Take 5, recipient of the 1987 Literary Lion award, and columnist at National Review magazine for 17 years.

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The Post-Modern Aura: The Act of Fiction in an Age of Inflation, by Charles Newman (Northwestern, 203 pp., $18.95)

Charles Newman is track-lighting a useful, if unwelcome, conceit here: in short, that art and the dollar have undergone brutal, pernicious inflation together. Post-Modernism is characterized not by style or particular intent, but by pure velocity. Michael Jackson to Prince to Madonna since day before yesterday. “Chronic excess demand fosters irrational consumption; all goods, intellectual as well as material, become nondurable, buying and selling take precedence over production and investment.” With mass media we could probably go through both Renaissance and Elizabethan Age in half a decade. Moreover, each historical mode is available for recycling today. You can write a Pamela, V, Little Dorrit, Howards End, whatever. Yet nothing much is new in fiction. After all, High Modernism (the great canon of Pound, Joyce, Hemingway) sounds rather final —especially since Futurism was used up by 1920. The one movement in Post-Modern writing is movement itself.

DK

About the Author

D. Keith Mano

D. Keith Mano was a TV screenwriter and author of ten books, including Take 5, recipient of the 1987 Literary Lion award, and columnist at National Review magazine for 17 years.