BABY, MEET BATHWATER:

Ghost of postmodernism haunts the corridors of literature yet: Pity the poor HSC students burdened with an intellectual fad (Richard Glover, October 26 2002, Sydney Morning Herald)

The creators of the new HSC English course are enormously keen that students understand that art is a by-product of a particular time and place. What a shame they've never come to the same realisation about their own postmodernism.

King Lear and Hamlet are still studied, but alongside Clueless, Blade Runner, a newspaper ad and a political website. A bus ticket is as valuable a text as Chaucer. And each and every one of them is a mere artefact of its time. [...]

Perhaps we need to establish more than one subject. In Practical Literacy students could study Blade Runner and Frontline, and practise writing letters to the editor and composing advertising copy.

Meanwhile, across the hall, there could be space for an obscure subject called English Literature, committed to the notion that some writers can clamber from the mud of their own time, sufficient to be heard centuries later. And that some readers - performing the same heroic struggle - can pretty much hear them. It would be a subject that understands that the play between history and human volition, between the artist and society, is more complex than intellectual fads might allow.

Since it first infected the universities, postmodernism has taken close to 30 years to finally work its way down to the school system. If the history of such movements is anything to go by, its grip on the campus must be nearly exhausted. Give it five years and it will be as daggy as positivism, Marxism, social Darwinism or any of the other trends which have swept through the academy in the past century or so.

But what's the bet the poor students, having got it 30 years late, will be left holding the corpse, years after everyone else has moved on?

While I yield to no one in my contempt for post-modernism, one wonders if Mr. Glover doesn't go too far here: Clueless and Blade Runner seem to be entirely appropriate subjects for study, provided that they aren't replacements for the classics, Emma and Frankenstein, from which they are derived. If nothing else, these modern versions show that the original authors are truly timeless and that, not only can a text communicate coherent and consistently accessible ideas in its own time, but can continue to do so for centuries. The ad and the website, on the other hand, have to go. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 29, 2002 1:15 PM