I've never been that keen on the late modernism name game, partly 
because the term 'late' adjective installs all kinds of odd qualities of 
belatedness, late arrival, late capitalism etc. In one of those 
recursive anecdotes that keeps coming round, Frederic Jameson wrote that 
'Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world 
than to imagine the end of capitalism.' which puts capitalism on a 
strange clock.

The fate of modernism seems to me rather deeply bound up with the fate 
of capitalism and for all that these are loose umbrella categories, 
comfort food labels rather than sharp concepts, I think modernism 
remains continuous as an orientation associated with responses to 
modernity, along with reflexive awareness of cycles of innovation, 
avant-gardism and aesthetic disorientation in the face of capitalism 
across the arts.

I'm a neo-modernist, from an understanding that modernism itself was 
largely constituted through struggles to rework and recycle earlier 
modernisms, even to the extent of recycling modernist tendencies in 
romanticism or in pre-modern materials. Beckett reworks aspects of Joyce 
who reworked aspects of Flaubert... and not as anxious influences but as 
argued relations between older forms and emergent and concrete realities 
that demanded such reworking. But for nearly any concrete argument, it 
is the dynamics and qualities underlying the umbrella categories that 
matter, eg. epochal categories don't help much if you are trying to work 
out the history of collage, found material or compositional 
indeterminacy as working parameters. The game of saying that modernists 
do one thing, eg. collage and montage, where post-modernists do another, 
eg. juxtaposition and indeterminacy, tends to triviality. And 'post' 
rarely does much work as an adjective beyond revealing that it needs to 
be returned to sender, so that you end up enmeshed in debates about 
which version of modernism you are different from, and still essentially 
working within modernist terms.

Post-modernism makes more sense in the history of some media and art 
forms than others – post-modern architecture came out of a knowingly 
kitschy rejection of the international style, the turn against brutalism 
and so on, and had a marked preference for superficial neo-classicism. 
But you could take your pick whether Bernard Tschumi or Zaha Hadid were 
modernist post-structuralists, or whether they were signed up 
post-modernists. Post-structuralists with Marxisant tendencies were 
often trying to renew modernism under new flags. There was invariably a 
bit of Oedipal generation warfare going in. Poetical post-structuralists 
and most avowed post-modernists were against the critical and academic 
forms of institutionalised modernism, eg. Clement Greenberg, new 
criticism, the clerisy model of the lone male modernist as the bard of 
tradition preserving culture against the scions of popular culture 
etc... but those institutional forms of modernism were also 
anti-modernist in the sense that they misrepresented the history of 
modernism and reduced it to a few key blokes to be installed as 
religious touchstones. For me, the most important and most dynamic 
post-modern tendency, one that crosses over with post-structuralism, is 
the critique of modernist authoritarianism, the need to think 
differentially rather than via Olympian synopses, a.k.a. grand 
narratives, or what might be called the myths of modernism. But some 
short stories about modernism, such as this one, are attempts to reckon 
with the underlying needs embodied in strategic, provisional and 
conflictural name games, eg. avant-garde vs modernist, because sometimes 
if you throw out an umbrella term you end up ignoring the needs 
embodied, while installing the critical problem in some other term: eg. 
ecopoetics as neo-modernist ecological poetics in disguise?

I wrote an essay about all of this, entitled 'Neo-modernism and 
avant-garde orientations' in the Concise Companion to Postwar British 
and Irish Poetry, eds Alderman and Blanton, 
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781444310306.ch8/summary>.

Drew