theposteverythinggeneration.docVIP

The Posteverything Generation 后一切的一代 I never expected to gain any new insight into the nature of my generation, or the changing landscape of American colleges, in Lit Theory. Lit Theory is supposed to be the class where you sit at the back of the room with every other jaded sophomore wearing skinny jeans, thick-framed glasses, an ironic tee-shirt and over-sized retro headphones, just waiting for lecture to be over so you can light up a Turkish Gold and walk to lunch while listening to Wilco. That’s pretty much the way I spent the course, too: through structuralism, formalism, gender theory, and post-colonialism, I was far too busy shuffling through my Ipod to see what the patriarchal world order of capitalist oppression had to do with Ethan Frome. But when we began to study postmodernism, something struck a chord with me and made me sit up and look anew at the seemingly blasé college-aged literati of which I was so self-consciously one. 我从没指望通过文学理论课来了解我这一代人的特征，或者是了解美国的大学是如何发生变化的。文学理论这门课完全就是让你在课堂上装酷的——坐在教室后座，周围都是有着疲惫倦容的大二学生，戴着宽框眼镜和超大号的复古式耳机，身穿印着讽刺意味话语的T恤和紧身牛仔裤，就盼着早点下课，好让你一边点根土耳其金烟（ Turkish Gold）一边听着照办乐队（Wilco）的歌往食堂方向走。一边努力听着结构主义、形式主义、性别理论和后殖民主义等艰深话题，一边这就是我在课堂上消磨时间的方式。可是当我们开始学习后现代主义时，我突然咔嗒一声开了窍，使我为之一振，开始重新审视我乏味的大学生活——我身体里作为文人的自我觉醒了。 According to my textbook, the problem with defining postmodernism is that it’s impossible. The difficulty is that it is so...post. It defines itself so negatively against what came before it – naturalism, romanticism and the wild revolution of modernism – that it’s sometimes hard to see what it actually is. It denies that anything can be explained neatly or even at all. It is parodic, detached, strange, and sometimes menacing to traditionalists who do not understand it. Although it arose in the post-war west (the term was coined in 1949), the generation that has witnessed its ascendance has yet to come up with an explanation of what postmodern attitudes mean for the future of culture or society. The subject intrigued me because, in a cla