Memorious Discourse: Reprise and Representation in PostmodernismChristian Moraru
About the Author:
Educated at universities in Europe and the United States, Christian Moraru earned his PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Indiana University in 1998. He is currently an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where he teaches primarily contemporary American literature and literary-cultural theory, with a special focus on narrative, postmodernism, and the new dynamic of globalism and cosmopolitanism. He has published numerous articles and books. His latest monograph, Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning, came out in 2001.
Christian Moraru’s new book on postmodernism zeroes in on postmodern representation, which the critic seizes as a literary and cultural memor receptacle – as “memorious discourse.” He argues that, counter to the orthodoxies that have taken hold in postmodern studies, postmodernism is not ahistorical, without cultural memory, or politically apathetic. With a wink at Borges’s short story “Funes the Memorious,” he contends that this kind of representation cannot but operate digressively, and conspicuously so, through other representations, and is a picture that must latch onto other pictures to bring its object to life. While other types of discourse cover up, gloss over, or play down what they have borrowed – and therefore owe – the postmodern eagerly acknowledges its textual and cultural debt. Moreover, it turns this indebtedness into an unexpected source of creativity and originality. In his wide-ranging discussion of contemporary writers and theorists, Moraru notes that postmodernism characteristically re-presents. That is, it actively “remembers” and, to use a musical term, “reprises” former representations. Memorious Discourse is organized into a largely theoretical prologue, five chapters, and an epilogue. To guage the scope of memorious discourse, Moraru examines theoretical writers and critis. Thus, the author develops his argument no less “memoriously.” He assumes its derivation, its deliberate, tactical dérive (“drift” and “detour”) through others’ texts, through other fictional and theoretical representations, which he in turn represents critically by writing “in their margins.” Read a review about this title ISBN 0-8386-4086-9
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