The Posteverything Generation

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 class otherwise consumed by dead-letter theories, postmodernism remained an open book, tempting to the young and curious. But it also intrigued me because the question of what postmodernism – what a movement so

post-everything, so reticent to define itself – is spoke to a larger question about the political and popular culture of today, of the other jaded sophomores sitting around me who had grown up in a postmodern world.

据我手上的教科书，从定义的角度上来讲，后现代主义几乎是无法下定义的，定义的难点在于——“后”一字，虽然它在西方战后首次出现（术语出现于1949年），但这个课题令我感到好奇，因为

In many ways, as a college-aged generation, we are also extremely post: post-Cold War, post-industrial, post-baby boom, post-9/11...at one point in his famous essay, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” literary critic Frederic Jameson even calls us “post-literate.” We are a generation that is riding on the tail-end of a century of war and revolution that toppled civilizations, overturned repressive social orders, and left us with more privilege and opportunity than any other society in history. Ours could be an era to accomplish anything.

作为正接受着高等教育的一代，我们在很多方面都被“后”化：后冷战、后工业时代、后婴儿潮、后911……文学评论家弗雷德里克·詹姆逊（Frederic Jameson）一度曾在他著名的一篇文章里提到，“深受后现代主义，或者说是晚期资本主义文化逻辑的影响”，我们是“后一代学子”，我们这一代人出生于所谓的短世纪末。而短世纪充满了大大小小的战争和革命，这些改变了人类文明，推翻了强权政府，给我们留下了非同寻常的机会和特权，这些特权和机会要比从前任何一代人都来得多。我们这一代，每个人都能思我所思，做我所做。

And yet do we take to the streets and the airwaves and say “here we are, and this is what we demand”? Do we plant our flag of youthful rebellion on the mall in Washington and say “we are not leaving until we see change! Our eyes have been opened by our education and our conception of what is possible has been expanded by our privilege and we demand a better world because it is our right”? It would seem we do the opposite. We go to war without so much as questioning the rationale, we sign away our civil liberties, we say nothing when the Supreme Court uses Brown v. Board of Education to outlaw desegregation, and we sit back to watch the carnage on the evening news.

然而我们要上街游行和用广播一遍又一遍地大声喊“我们就在这里！这才是我们的需求”吗？或者高举我们标榜着年轻反叛的旗帜在华盛顿广场叫喊着“不看到变化我们决不离开！教育开阔了我们的眼界，让我们明白了我们有着比前人更多的特权，我们渴望一个更美好的世界，而这也正是我们的权利”？不，我们正做着相反的事情：我们去参战却不