Linda Hutcheon and Postmodernism

Linda Hutcheon's A Poetics of Postmodernism argues that postmodernism is a contradictory, historical, and political set of aesthetic practices. She attempts to carve out a middle path through the wildly disparate versions of postmodernism and its implications. Postmodernism is neither the revolutionary dissolution of metanarrative truths, nor is it a complicitous conservativism that serves consumer capitalism. It's primary feature, according to Hutcheon, is its ability to both establish and problematize truth. Postmodern works challenge the prevailing order while recognizing their own historical development from that order. So, for example, postmodernism's tendency to complicate the subject, or in fact dissolve the subject, never fully succeeds because the attempt dissolution requires an understanding of its cultural foundations. But these very foundations give rise to the problematized subject. Postmodern cultural texts, such as the historiographic metafiction upon which Hutcheon focuses, are always involved in what they contest. The primary tone of this involvement is ironic or parodic. If Hutcheon's "poetics" could be distilled into a single feature, it would be postmodernism's parodic treatment of a past from which it cannot escape but which it is determined to challenge.