translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

Thus, we can say that, instead of simply designating a period after
modernism, postmodernism seems to have rather grown out of it especially
because, culturally speaking, it appears to mark a historical period, but
philosophically speaking, it seems to have manifested for a long time. In
Brian McHale’s words, postmodernism “follows from modernism […] more
than it follows after modernism.” (2001: 5) The same opinion is held by
Jean-François Lyotard who paradoxically posits that “a work can become
modern only if it is postmodern” and thus postmodernism is regarded “not
as modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.”
(2005: 79) Postmodernism is not an age, a chronological event through
which we can say farewell to modernism and welcome to the
postmodernist predicament. Some would say that it merely signals the
“awakening from the nightmare of modernity with its manipulative reason
and fetish of the totality” and the shift to “the laid-back pluralism and the
heterogeneous range of life styles and language games which has
renounced the nostalgic urge to totalize and legitimize itself.” (Eagleton in
Harvey, 2007: 9) Seen from a more or less pessimistic perspective, this is
also Bradbury’s view of modernism – as a tradition, a precursor that only
“helped to bring into currency the term ‘post-modernism’.” (1995: 763) The
dilemma may seem to arise when establishing and defining what comes
after postmodernism. Bradbury wonders whether this is a postpostmodernism
because, after going through more stages of its own, even
this period reached a new, positively different status.
Other critical theories concerned with the same dilemma regard
postmodernism as “modernism in its self-critical phase”, “in its reformist
and reflective mode” or view it as “Critical Modernism” (Jencks, 2007: 46).
That is why postmodernism is regarded more likely as a mode of critique
of what modernism stood for, and, on the other hand, as a trend that seems
to have permeated any age as a mode of human understanding. In Brian
McHale’s words,
modernism and postmodernism are not period styles at all, one of
them current and the other one outdated, but more like alternative
stylistic options between which contemporary writers are free to
choose without that choice necessarily identifying them as either
“avant-garde” or “arrière-garde.” (2001: 9)
Thus, we cannot speak in the case of the shift from Mo to Po-Mo about
registering two successive stages taking readers from one less advanced
obsolete practice to a more advanced contemporary one. However, this
cannot mean that a writer is modern and postmodern at the same time. One
can have elements of the two, but because both writer and creation are
culturally determined, because the cultural impulses that one feels must be
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