AFTER POSTMODERNISM
CfP for volume 6 (2011) of Germanistik in Ireland. Jahrbuch der / Yearbook of the Association of Third-Level Teachers of German in Ireland
If we are now ‘over’ postmodernism, as López and Potter already suggested back in 2001, then the time has come for a retrospective on that era, if only to articulate, by that backward glance, our hopes and fears for a coming age. Postmodernism is an epoch that can be defined in terms of multiculturalism, hybridity, lack of political commitment, political extremism, terrorism, relativism, an anything-goes mentality, the ironic turn, the cultural turn, game-playing (in every sense), globalization, late Capitalism, or, most recently, financial crisis. We might be forgiven, then, for supposing that post-postmodernism should entail some re-evaluation or overturning of these values and their replacement with something new. However, defining the post-postmodern over and against the postmodern transpires to be a particularly difficult act of epochalization. As Brenda Marshall puts it in Teaching the Postmodern, while suggesting a clearly defined era, albeit one of multiplicity, postmodernism is a deceptive term, “[t]he ‘ism’ suggest[ing] that here is something complete, unified, totalized. … [P]ostmodernism … does not refer to a period or a ‘movement’. It isn’t really an ‘ism’; it isn’t really a thing. It’s a moment, but more a moment in logic than in time. Temporally, it’s a space.” How then do we move forward from a space that is not a period? Is postmodernism an era without an afterwards or an end? And how has and can this afterwards be conceived? At the close of the first decade of the twenty-first century, marked at one end by the 9/11 attacks, and at the other by financial meltdown, what possibilities does the category post-postmodern offer?
The editorial team of Germanistik in Ireland invite contributions in English or in German on any aspect of the debate about post-postmodernism, particularly from people working within the broad discipline of Germanistik, but also from academics in related fields (philosophy, cultural studies, comparative literature). We also welcome, as usual, contributions on current research and trends in the discipline of German Studies for the non-thematic section of the Yearbook, as well as book reviews and conference reports. Please indicate your interest in contributing in a short email (title, one-paragraph synopsis) to both editors by December 30. The deadline for submitting completed articles is 31 March 2011. Articles should not exceed 6,000 words. Guidelines on the preparation of manuscripts can be found online at:
http://germaninireland.org/pdfs/yearbook_policy.pdf
Germanistik in Ireland is a peer-reviewed journal, indexed in the MLA International Bibliography and listed in the Directory of Periodicals.
Dr. Rachel MagShamhráin ([log in to unmask]) Dr. Sabine Strümper-Krobb ([log in to unmask])
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