Posted: Jan 24, 2011 6:38 pm
Anyway, some random thoughts about the OP (don't have the time to read the article now, sorry) ...
I think that postmodernist literary criticism - which your article seems to be referring to - has produced some interesting observations of (part of) the literary production labelled as "postmodernist", but its descriptive power is limited even there. In particular, Lyotard's concept of the collapse of master narratives doesn't really seem like an adequate description of the contemporary world (this has nothing with P. becoming obsolete, I don't think it was ever true outside the academia
) I would say it has also been partly based on misreading certain non-Western literary phenomena (magical realism), and many of its themes are largely irrelevant for a lot (probably most) of non-Western production. Here it gets really messy, because there have been attempts to incorporate that as "liminal postmodernisms" ... personally, I prefer not to go down that road and avoid the term altogether. It makes my life much simpler 
I think that postmodernist literary criticism - which your article seems to be referring to - has produced some interesting observations of (part of) the literary production labelled as "postmodernist", but its descriptive power is limited even there. In particular, Lyotard's concept of the collapse of master narratives doesn't really seem like an adequate description of the contemporary world (this has nothing with P. becoming obsolete, I don't think it was ever true outside the academia
) I would say it has also been partly based on misreading certain non-Western literary phenomena (magical realism), and many of its themes are largely irrelevant for a lot (probably most) of non-Western production. Here it gets really messy, because there have been attempts to incorporate that as "liminal postmodernisms" ... personally, I prefer not to go down that road and avoid the term altogether. It makes my life much simpler