A readable analysis of postmodernity that provides a cultural context for its rise.

Though the term “postmodern” looms large on our cultural landscape, rarely do we find a systematic and impartial discussion of the circumstances of its ascendance. Identity Crises offers just such an accounting. In this book, Robert G. Dunn situates the intellectual currency of “the postmodern” within the larger context of social and cultural change shaping the movement over the past several decades. Along the way, he offers a necessary corrective to both the sociological and historical shortcomings of cultural criticism and the cultural myopia of social science in considering the postmodern world.

Dunn explains contemporary culture and contemporary cultural criticism as part of a distinct historical moment, one that entails new social relations as a consequence of new means of production. In place of prevailing cultural and political constructions, Dunn proposes a “social relational” approach that explicitly recognizes the structural and situational contexts of identity formation. He conceptualizes issues of identity and difference in terms of social, cultural, and political transformations in the transition from modern to postmodern society. This provides a socio-historical perspective through which to consider the impact of consumption, mass media, globalization, and new social movements on identity-forming processes. Unique to this undertaking and crucial to Dunn’s critique of poststructuralist and postmodern theories is his application of the theory of George Herbert Mead as a more effective means of theorizing identity and difference. Dunn’s focus on postmodernity as opposed to postmodernism serves to ground the analysis of identity and difference materially and socially. Learned, evenhanded, and enlightening, Identity Crises is an essential demonstration of the connections between cultural theory and criticism, contemporary culture, and sociological analysis. ISBN 0-8166-3072-0 Cloth $49.95xxISBN 0-8166-3073-9 Paper $19.95x304 pages 5 7/8 x 9 MarchTranslation inquiries: University of Minnesota Press

For nearly three quarters of a century, the modernist way of reading has been the only way of reading James Joyce—useful, yes, and powerful but, like all frameworks, limited. This book takes a leap across those limits into postmodernism, where the pleasures and possibilities of an unsuspected Joyce are yet to be found.
    Kevin J. H. Dettmar begins by articulating a stylistics of postmodernism drawn from the key texts of Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Jean-François Lyotard. Read within this framework, Dubliners emerges from behind its modernist facade as the earliest product of Joyce’s proto-postmodernist sensibility. Dettmar exposes these stories as tales of mystery, not mastery, despite the modernist earmarks of plentiful symbols, allusions, and epiphanies. Ulysses, too, has been inadequately served by modernist critics. Where they have emphasized the work’s ingenious Homeric structure, Dettmar focuses instead upon its seams, those points at which the narrative willfully, joyfully overflows its self-imposed bounds. Finally, he reads A Portrait of the Artist and Finnegans Wake as less playful, less daring texts—the first constrained by the precious, would-be poet at its center, the last marking a surprising retreat from the constantly evolving, vertiginous experience of Ulysses.
    In short, The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism explores what happens when the extra-literary pronouncements of Eliot, Pound, and Joyce, as well as Joyce’s early critics, are set aside and a new, “unauthorized” Joyce is allowed to appear. This postmodern Joyce, more willful and less easily compartmentalized, stands as a counterpoint to the modernist Joyce who has perhaps become too familiar.