translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

Translation Studies: Retrospective and Prospective Views ISSN 2065 - 3514
(2008) Year I, Issue 1
Galaţi University Press
Editors: Elena Croitoru and Floriana Popescu (First volume)
Proceedings of the Conference Translation Studies: Retrospective and Prospective Views
9 – 11 October 2008 “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, ROMANIA
pp. 104 - 116
MALCOLM BRADBURY BETWEEN MODERNISM AND
POSTMODERNISM
Andreia Irina Suciu
University of Bacău, Romania
1. The ‘history man’/ the chronicler and his transgressing ages
“Contradicting”, “dichotomous”, “self-invalidating” are just some of
the epithets which made this “portmanteau phenomenon” (Eagleton, 2007:
vii) thatt came to be called postmodernism one of the most debated literary
trends since it did not remain between the pages of fiction but it created a
new type of CNN – the contemporary network of negation. The negation of
the past (as a historical period or as the bearer of a certain mentality), the
discarding of old values, the rejection of classical precepts, the denial of old
positions, the dismissal of old codes, the discrediting of old roles, turned
postmodernism into one of the ‘whizz-kids’ of our times and one of the
‘prodigal sons’ of literature and literary criticism, and “everybody’s
favourite bête noire” (McRobbie, 1994: 1), a maelstrom of change or a breath
of fresh air as different from modernism’s reflexivity and seriousness as the
Lilliputians from the Brobdingnagians. It brought with it new, wellreceived
things (such as literary experiment) as well as controversies (such
as the celebratory promoting of the marginal and the minority). Language
becomes more sexual and sex becomes linguistically articulated in an
interplay which is supposed to introduce highly academic debates on such
topics as “Putting the anus back in Coriolanus” (Eagleton, 2007: 4) or “La
Fornication comme acte culturel” or “I LOVE DECONSTRUCTION”. 1
Pragmatism effecting pessimism, freshness resulting in or residing in
liberalism came from and then issued “the recalcitrance of power, the
frailty of the ego, the absorptive power of capital, the insatiability of power,
the inescapability of the metaphysical, the ineluctability of the Law, the
indeterminable effects of political action.” (Eagleton, 2007: 4) The
disclaiming of any form of authority (philosophically speaking, but why
not politically as well), the uncertainty of hierarchy in role attributing and
acquiring, the new power of currency, the permanent tendency to theorise,
the new imperatives of political correctness, the new global implications of
decision making have all turned postmodernism into “a cult of ambiguity
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