And, in fact, any postmodernist who is letting a holocaust denier "get away with it" is doing their job wrong. The whole point of postmodernism (as taught here -- hey, maybe it's different elswhere, who knows) is to challenge beliefs or attitudes that are accepted or presented as fact.
The traditional view of criticism is that you are finding truths within a text through interpretation. The postmodern view posits instead that what are you are actually doing is taking a factual object (a text, a series of historical events) and applying a theory to produce an interpretation.
This can be done multiple times, with different theories (a feminist deconstruction and a marxist deconstruction of the events/text were the examples we used) and will produce different results.
As such is should force us to question how much of our interpretation of events/texts are based within ourselves rather than in an externally verifiable "truth".
(See, I'm using quotation marks! Just like a real post-modernist! I'll stop now. Hate them anyway.)
Many of the people who slap postmodernism upside the head are conservative (small c) types who wish to beleive (for their own reasons) that there are essential political, emotional, economic or social truths. But, to be able to question that truth, to look at it from several different viewpoints, is a key freedom of the modern mind.
So in doing so, they're actually aligning themselves with the revisionists, fundamentalists and others who wish to restrict other peoples' views to their narrow interpretation.
Of course, they may be happy to do that, providing that the interpretation is the nice broad one we can all comfortably agree with.
And I'd rather have them than the fundies/revisionists.
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chiming
hmmmm
Date: February 9th, 2004 06:31 am (UTC)From:And another bloody person who equates post-modernism and revisionism. Not the same thing. Sloppy to say so.
Re: hmmmm
Date: February 10th, 2004 03:00 am (UTC)From:semantics
Date: February 10th, 2004 04:12 am (UTC)From:The traditional view of criticism is that you are finding truths within a text through interpretation. The postmodern view posits instead that what are you are actually doing is taking a factual object (a text, a series of historical events) and applying a theory to produce an interpretation.
This can be done multiple times, with different theories (a feminist deconstruction and a marxist deconstruction of the events/text were the examples we used) and will produce different results.
As such is should force us to question how much of our interpretation of events/texts are based within ourselves rather than in an externally verifiable "truth".
(See, I'm using quotation marks! Just like a real post-modernist! I'll stop now. Hate them anyway.)
Many of the people who slap postmodernism upside the head are conservative (small c) types who wish to beleive (for their own reasons) that there are essential political, emotional, economic or social truths. But, to be able to question that truth, to look at it from several different viewpoints, is a key freedom of the modern mind.
So in doing so, they're actually aligning themselves with the revisionists, fundamentalists and others who wish to restrict other peoples' views to their narrow interpretation.
Of course, they may be happy to do that, providing that the interpretation is the nice broad one we can all comfortably agree with.
And I'd rather have them than the fundies/revisionists.
No no no
Date: February 9th, 2004 08:35 am (UTC)From:---
By the bye ... that Passion of Christ film has generated its own storm of controversy.
Here's a review article on the film
Date: February 9th, 2004 10:07 am (UTC)From:Their expecting another global mega-hit outside the boxoffice.