Spring Break
The Saint of Unbelief
Shrike, Epistemology, and Postmodernism
Michael DiBardino
Issue date: 5/1/09 Section: Spring 2009
designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse… making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative" (72). In somewhat reductionist terms, if the Enlightenment project developed the quite precarious paradigm of the historical world view-or the troubling term a "universal history"-and was subsequently taken up as the raison d'être of the German idealists (with Hegel as its avatar), then what they also (maybe unknowingly) developed was a Knowledge appropriated as a type of epic-epistemology-a sweeping narrative of politics, philosophy and aesthetics which told the story of Progress via their chosen collective, or even singular hero (as Napoleon was for Hegel). The metanarrative, throughout the modern era, became the dominant means of, not only disseminating knowledge, but reifying the knowledge as Knowledge as it was circulated, absorbed, and re-circulated through the generations of specific cultures.
The twentieth-century Modernist movement can itself be seen as a type of fissure,
a self-conscious break from this metanarrative tradition in both subtle and radical instances. Examples that range from T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" to Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase portray a generation with a latent self-awareness
to history's influence on consciousness; that the metanarratives that have driven and sustained culture for, at minimum, the previous 300 years have now seemingly been redacted upon themselves. Whereas in pre-Modernism history, knowledge and consciousness were entwined in a rather circuitous relationship, in the Modernist movement there is an undoubted gap between history and knowledge on one side, and consciousness on the other. The tale of the "universal history" had come to an emphatic halt where epistemology seemed to be looking back on its own construction. As a rebuttal to Lyotard, there is Jurgen Habermas who, in "Modernity versus Postmodernity" affirms this venerated break
The twentieth-century Modernist movement can itself be seen as a type of fissure,
a self-conscious break from this metanarrative tradition in both subtle and radical instances. Examples that range from T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" to Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase portray a generation with a latent self-awareness
to history's influence on consciousness; that the metanarratives that have driven and sustained culture for, at minimum, the previous 300 years have now seemingly been redacted upon themselves. Whereas in pre-Modernism history, knowledge and consciousness were entwined in a rather circuitous relationship, in the Modernist movement there is an undoubted gap between history and knowledge on one side, and consciousness on the other. The tale of the "universal history" had come to an emphatic halt where epistemology seemed to be looking back on its own construction. As a rebuttal to Lyotard, there is Jurgen Habermas who, in "Modernity versus Postmodernity" affirms this venerated break
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Gabriel Smith
posted 12/21/09 @ 10:38 AM EST
This is a very interesting article, although some generalizations could (and should), be fixed. Shrike as a personfied pineal gland is quite an innovative way of reading the novel. (Continued…)
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