English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

Pomo Emergent

Marianne DeKoven.  Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern.  Duke UP, 2004.  384 pp.  Paper, $23.95.

By Matthew Roberson, Central Michigan University

            Of the many good points that Marianne DeKoven makes in Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern, one of the finest responds to the notion that “we do not discuss postmodernity or postmodernism any more because those terms and ideas are dated or superseded . . . [and] there is no need for further work on these issues or nothing more to say about them” (9).  DeKoven claims instead that “because postmodernity is so well established as a cultural dominant, we are so entirely defined by it, it has become invisible” (9). 

            DeKoven’s point depends on the primary argument of Utopia Limited—that postmodernity emerged, mostly in America, in the sixties (which is when she assumes, like Huyssen and Jameson, it began in earnest) and has only begun to run its course.  And emerged is a key word in DeKoven’s argument.  Differing from those who see postmodernism as a period not only beginning in the sixties, but as its dominant paradigm, DeKoven proposes that the “sixties encompassed the shift in structure of feeling from dominant modernity to dominant postmodernity” (8).  The sixties were not, in other words, postmodern, but “represented the final, full flowering of modernism/modernity” as they “transformed into the ‘utopia limited’ of the postmodern.”

            DeKoven’s definitions of modernism and postmodernism feel familiar—as she acknowledges they will—because they draw heavily on well-known discussions of the periods. But they also manage to feel fresh when they synthesize key perceptions from these discussions without becoming bogged down in theoretically and ideologically opposed debates (on postmodernism, in particular)  that peaked a decade or more ago.  As DeKoven states, she tries to “move beyond the framework of debate altogether . . . taking the content and elaborations of these debates as read, and engaging into their aftermath without discarding the entire question of the modern and postmodern” (11).  Such an approach allows her to use Fredric Jameson’s “anti-postmodern, anti-capitalist” analysis, for example, alongside Linda Hutcheon’s positive view of postmodernism as the “locus of a progressive cultural politics” (10), and the picture that develops shows that the postmodern “ground we stand on offers many possibilities as well as difficulties for the egalitarian, popular, local, limited, marked, partial, affiliative, complicitous, embodied liberatory projects postmodernity affords” (289).

            Utopia Limited’s pragmatic and useful conceptions of the modern and postmodern become compelling when, in the book’s smart, careful, close readings of a range of “representative” sixties texts, they allow DeKoven to see “the simultaneity of the dominant modern and emergent postmodern” in that period’s cultural production  (115).  DeKoven’s readings focus upon Herbert Marcuse’s now oft-ignored One Dimensional Man, as well as Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, Tom Wolfe’s and Hunter Thompson’s works on Las Vegas, Godard’s films, Mick Jagger’s lyrics, the political manifestoes of Students for a Democratic Society (The Port Huron Statement), the experimental drama of The Living Theatre, William Burroughs’s cut and paste fictions, work on subject politics by Richard Poirer, R.D. Laing, Frances Fitzgerald (Fire in the Lake), Angela Davis, James Baldwin, and a variety of second-wave feminists, including Robin Morgan and Shulamith Firestone.  Not every figure or text mentioned here receives equal attention (much more attention, it’s surprising to see, gets paid to Marcuse than second-wave feminists) but none gets short shrift, and the scope of DeKoven’s study is remarkable.

            Especially welcome are the chapters that attend to important sixties texts and movements (The Port Huron Statement and the avant-garde theater renaissance that included The Living Theatre and its production of Paradise Now) that demonstrate the reach and pervasiveness of shifting paradigms.  They successfully travel across disciplines and genres, maintaining and illustrating the thread of Utopia Limited’s argument through varied texts while also attending to the significant distinctions of those texts in a manner that provides, for probably many readers, an instructive first glance at these artifacts.

            Only in the book’s final chapter does Utopia Limited seem to strike an odd note.  There, DeKoven moves from examining representative sixties texts to an analysis of what she calls postmodernist works of fiction—Toni Morrison’s Beloved and E.L. Doctorow’s Waterworks.  She says, “It may seem strange that I am writing about postmodern novels set in historically displaced versions of the post-utopian post-sixties, rather than novels written directly about the sixties or their aftermath,” and, yes, it does—but not only for the reason she mentions.

            DeKoven’s move from a lengthy study of emergent postmodernism to a very brief examination of contemporary postmodernisms feels unbalanced; the final chapter’s study of Morrison and Doctorow leaves one wanting more on both them and other literary and nonliterary postmodern texts.  More important, DeKoven’s definition of postmodern fiction opens a can of worms, categorizing the work of Barth, Barthelme, Brautigan, Coover, Elkin, Federman, Gass, Hawkes, Katz, Major, Reed, Sorrentino, and Sukenick (a list of writers she draws from Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction) as committed only to the “experimentalism of sixties avant-garde fiction, derived from the great fiction of modernism and the earlier twentieth-century and mid-century avant-gardes” (184).   The problem here lies not in DeKoven’s definition of postmodern fiction, which deals largely with how literary texts use popular culture sources without assimilating them, nor, one hopes, in its potential to create turf wars over what is truly postmodern fiction.  Rather, DeKoven’s abbreviated sense of Barth, et al, fails to recognize how their work—past and present—shares much in common with her definition of postmodernism and Morrison and Doctorow.

           In all, though, this final point of concern detracts hardly at all from the overall intelligence, care, and comprehensiveness of DeKoven’s study, which finally, also, benefits a great deal from the author’s (subtly described) personal investment in it as someone deeply affected by the sixties and deeply interested in how that period continues affecting the world.