Provincializing Modernism; or, Criticism After the End of Aesthetic History

Abstract: This essay argues that understanding the current situation of the aesthetic, about which Fredric Jameson was as right in 1984 as he would be were he to publish the "postmodernism" essay again today, requires scholars to let go of the forms of historiographical expectation and valuation that they have inherited from previous periods. Among the most persistent of these is a generalized modernism, which, this essay argues, characterizes not only the literary critical thinking of those who work in that specific area, but the entire discipline of literary studies itself. Letting go of this inheritance is therefore an important step in, first, a correct understanding of the current situation of the aesthetic, and, second, a broad reformation of the epistemological practices of the critical disciplines.