By Phillip Brian Harper
During this reassessment of postmodernism, the writer contends that the fragmentation thought of to be attribute of the postmodern age can in reality be traced to the prestige of marginalized American and Afro-American writers of the Thirties to Fifties, resembling West, Nin, Barnes, Allison and Brooks.
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Extra resources for Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture
Sample text
Miss Lonelyhearts's correspondents do not express themselves in a vacuum; they write, of course, to Miss Lonelyhearts. In this way, the distinction between them and the hapless Californians is recapitulated within Miss Lonelyhearts itself. For though Miss Lonelyhearts's readers write, they do so in order to be written to. A letter to Miss Lonelyhearts begs for a response, in anticipation of which his correspondents themselves become the inarticulate audience for his proclamation: "When he did speak," Miss Lonelyhearts thinks at one point, "it would have to be in the form of a message" (127).
To the extent that its "exteriority" to the central system of power bolsters the efficacy of the system itself, marginality is never really exterior at all, but bound in a network of elements that, together, constitute the entire social structure. This perspective throws a wrench into the idea that characters like West's Betty and Faye, who avoid the anguish of the search for meaningful signification, are, in their "self-sufficiency," exterior to the system in which such a search is founded. It embodies a tendency to totalization that allows for no "outsiders," for those whom we would class as such are actually inscribed within the structure they seem to escape precisely by virtue of their antagonistic relation to it.
A]s early as 1791 several million Jews were loosely confined by Catherine II within a Pale of Settlement in western Russia, chiefly to forward the policy of Russification. . [About seventy years later,] Alexander II .... issued a rescript allowing Jewish artisans and members of professions to settle outside the Pale. . (13) It was during the approximately twenty-year period of the easing of restrictions on Jews that West's maternal ancestors, the Wallensteins, made their fortune in the contracting and construction business; members of the Weinstein family, West's father Max among them, were employees of the Wallensteins' firm.
