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Beyond Postmodern Blurring: Epistemic Precision in Writing about a Life

Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous claim that truth is a conceptual illusion that language-users have forgotten to see as provisional and evolving was one of the main ideas informing the major postmodern writings of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Sarah Kofman, and others from the 1960s and 1970s. The linguistic turn—with its emphasis on the necessary deceptions implicit in language, the relentless exposure of binary oppositions as reductive, the searing critique of naïve realism, and the perpetual uncovering of centralized but unquestioned power layered into discourse—had a staggering impact on the study of genres. If Georg Luk acs could so confidently (even dogmatically) define the historical novel in 1937, this was because he felt that there was a certain kind of epistemic justification for making objective distinctions between literary forms. Nietzsche’s work posed a major challenge to the foundation of Luk acs’ scholarly project, which, in part, explains why the Hungarian Marxist waged intellectual war against the € Ubermensch philologist until the end of his career. By the mid to late 1960s, with the academic legitimization of postmodernism and the rise of deconstruction, Luk acs and his work were effectively sidelined, even if some prominent scholars continued to take his side and deploy his methods. The academic result was that the scholarly practices of exposing genre distinctions as arbitrary, emphasizing overlap between literary forms, and foregrounding the porous borders of linguistic constructions came to dominate, thus rendering neat and tidy definitions of discrete genres as naïve and untenable. So, deconstructing generic distinctions became the craze, and it has dominated the academic study of literature for the last forty to fifty years. But there is growing evidence that scholars are starting to tire of the postmodern models of perpetual blurring. Moreover, there is a yearning for more stable but informed descriptions of literary forms. This is the core idea underwriting the essays in this issue.