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Five Theses About Post-Modernism, JKR and the InklingsI was asked by John Granger about JK Rowling, the Inklings and post-modernism. This is my reply.1. Post-modernism shares with Pre-modernism an opposition to autonomous human reason as the key to human happiness. Therefore writers with a medievalist outlook (the Inklings, including JKR) will have more affinity with post-modern readers then writers with a modernist outlook. To both, the unbridled confidence in science and social reform come off as naïve or fake. 2. Post-modernism plays a useful role: It tests the foundations of things. It shakes the world so that the things which cannot be shaken will remain. 3. The scam of post-modernism is that it does not subject itself and its institutions to the same intense scrutiny. It asks tough questions of church, state, and corporation, but not of university, newspaper, or its own political parties. 4. Part of the conservative resurgence, politically and culturally, consists in doing to the post-modernists, what they’ve been doing to everyone else. Where Marx’s motives, were they economic? Freud? DeMan? Media is an institution which feeds off of the act of destroying the credibility of other institutions. 60 minute has stood, with a camera, in front of many business offices, but what happened when Bloggers did the same to them? Rita Skeeter feeds off (hence her name) the blood of other institutions. 5. Post-modernism was born out of a Christian impulse to search all things. To not place confidence in princes. Like many virtues, it ran amuck in the 20th Century. The Inklings, JKR included, are bringing it back into the fold. |