David Anderson: ‘Novel-seeming goods’: RE-READING SALMAN RUSHDIE’S ‘MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN’ AND PATRICK SÜSKIND’S ‘DAS PARFUM’ 40 YEARS LATER

In a 1984 essay, the American critic Fredric Jameson famously diagnosed postmodernism to be ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism’. Among its distinguishing features was a new mode of ‘aesthetic populism’ grounded in an

effacement […] of the older (essentially high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture, and the emergence of new kinds of texts infused with the forms, categories and contents of that very Culture Industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the modern.[1]

A new alignment between the twin spheres of culture and the marketplace meant that ‘aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally’. Wherever one looked, one saw ‘the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater waves of turnover’ (Jameson, p. 56). „David Anderson: ‘Novel-seeming goods’: RE-READING SALMAN RUSHDIE’S ‘MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN’ AND PATRICK SÜSKIND’S ‘DAS PARFUM’ 40 YEARS LATER“ weiterlesen