Diachronic Appropriate and (Post)modernist Poetics

Abstract

Here I compare a postcolonialist theoretical model with two other models of diachronic appropriation in which the dominant discourse also directly correlates with "history" or "the past." In Dirlik's (1994) model the heterogeneous cultural discourses can "appropriate" or subvert but not replace, as dominant discourse, the inter-language of (Eurocentric) theory; in DeJean's (1996) historicist model the ostensible hierarchy--discourse of late 17th-century "Ancients' (as dominant) above that of "Moderns"--collapeses into a model of horizontal interplay as cyclic repetition; in Altieri's (1996) model of (post)modernist poetics the ostensible hierarchy--modernist formalism above (a politicized) postmodernist poetics--collapses again into a model of horizontal interplay: a poetics which would steer between the commodified discourses of modernism and postmodernism. While this analysis suggests the subversive power of art to overcome "dominants," including that of "theory" itself, and while both DeJean and Altieri are in a sense calling for a fin de siecle return from theory and politics (both of which have "appropriated art") to art's motional expressiveness, they are also both aware that a mere reversal of the theory/art hierarchy leads to a new objectification or 'commodification' (as popular cultural discourse) of art; art becomes (again) virtually indistinguishable from (commodified) theory and politics. The challenge then is to keep both "art" and "theory' in a horizontal interplay with no dominant; the "inter-language' might then become that of art (poetry) and theory.