Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 19

Postmodernism Shanghaied,
Or, Tracking a Shibboleth
In presenting the award for Best Postmodern Video at the 1990 MTV
Awards, Sherilyn Fenn (then momentarily famous for portraying Audrey Horne in
David Lynch’s Twin Peaks) said, “Postmodernism is something none of us really
understands — but we all think it’s really interesting.” If MTV giving awards in
postmodernism is not a sign of the collapse of Western civilization, it is, at the very
least, a sign of pop-modem culture having finally and successfully cross-bred with
the impenetrable world of literary theory (perhaps best mentally visualized as
Bridget Jones caught in flagrante delicto with M. Charles Swann).
Bandied about for much of the twentieth century, “postmodernism,” for
the greater part of its etymological life, has been a term reserved for brooding
academicians. However, during the past decade or so, the term has been abducted,
hog-tied, and gleefully ravished by pop culturalists the world over; it has been bent
to their will, the word is theirs. It now abounds, appearing in anything from
Gentleman s Quarterly (referring to Tom Arnold as “the first postmodern fat per
son in Hollywood” Mar. 2000) to TV Guide (calling attention to Kevin Sarbo’s
“postmodern shag” Jan. 1996) to Newsweek (naming Bill James a “guru of
postmodern baseball statistics” Aug. 1995). The word, then, has become suddenly,
and perhaps irrevocably, a catch-all for any work avant-garde, for everything dif
ferent, for anything slightly misaligned with the status quo. It is a word stolen from
the highest of ivory towers, swiped by the bourgeois — and, so far, there has been
no ransom request.
The moment that Modernism was bom as a period, a term, an artistic
movement, so, too, was Postmodernism instantly created. English painter John
Watkins Chapman wrote of postmodern painting around 1870 (cited in Best and
Kellner). The OED, however, cites the earliest usage of the term in 1949 in Joseph
Hudnut’s Architecture and the Spirit o f Man: “He shall be a modem owner,” Hudnut
wrote, “a post-modem owner, if such a thing is conceivable” (119). Ihab Hassen,
the gum of all things literarily postmodern, notes earlier uses, namely by Frederico
de Onis in his Antologia de la poesia espanola e hispanoamericana in 1934, and
Dudley Fitts in his Anthology o f Contemporary Latin-American Poetry in 1942.
Arnold Toynbee, a British historian, used it in his Study o f History (1954) to define
a fourth stage, 1875 to the present, of Western history (“Toward a Concept of
Postmodernism” 85). At that point, the term having been lobbed from field to field
like some postmodern shuttlecock, the literary theorists grabbed hold of it, forever
yanking it into their confabulated worlds. Poached and plundered by academia,