translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

set against the background of a main “force field” (Jameson, 1993: 6), the
writer and the work must be circumscribed to a primary tendency and a
cultural dominant.
But Bradbury also sees in “What Was Post-modernism?” a
smoother transition, an almost imperceptible transgression of features from
modernism to postmodernism claiming that the latter (at least at its
beginnings) even takes up and continues a lot of the characteristics of the
former:
The post-modernism of the years of postwar ‘reconstruction’ is both
modernism extended and developed onward into new times from
similar avant garde presumptions, and a transformation of experiment
and the avant garde itself in an age of historical change, rising Western
affluence, a growing mass consumer society, and a new attitude to
modernity. (1995: 767)
A moment of transition exists nevertheless and this is culturally
backgrounded in the struggles of the 1960s concerning the experiences of
the new social movements comprising a general feeling of emancipation
and the break away from an academia too much enclosed in abstract
thinking. This is precisely the atmosphere registered by Malcolm Bradbury
in Eating People Is Wrong (2000). It is a period announcing the advent of
Generation X with its nonconformism and its sense of disrootedness.
3. Conclusions
My analytical inquiry aimed at demonstrating that Malcolm
Bradbury was a man of two distinct worlds coexisting in a unitary whole
and that his work attempts to bridge the two universes: he was a critic of
modernism, but also a writer who experimented boldly with the
postmodern rules; he was an Englishman fascinated by America, where he
travelled to take fresh breaths of a new culture and of a new time; he was a
man of the present keeping up with the trends, the scientific and cultural
developments, but also a man who liked to turn towards the past and
cherished its cultural values; he was a man living in two millennia and
feeling the pressure that the chiliastic turn put upon all the strata of society;
he was a serious, objective analyst of the literary phenomenon almost all
the time projected against the social background, but also a restless playful
spirit that found an extreme pleasure in using a comic voice not only in
most of his novels (some of them focusing exclusively on linguistic,
structural or ideological games), but also in his criticism where the subtle
voice of the critic was spiced with commentaries that surpassed the
seriousness of the pipe-smoking analyst and reached the mouth-cornered
smile of the satirist.
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