Postmodern Classicism: A Practice-Based Investigation

This thesis establishes a critical framework for a grassroots literary genre, postmodern classicism (pomoclassicism), which was founded by myself and Stephen Spencer II circa 2010. Postmodernism here signifies the intellectual and cultural concerns which were tantamount at the latter half of the twentieth century, and by extension, classical writing simply refers to that which was apparently before the postmodern, in a heuristic sliding scale oriented around canonicity and nostalgia. A portfolio of creative writing accompanies critical efforts at engaging with and describing the foundational assumptions of the western canon, from which much of the creative work is appropriated. My research writing is grounded in a reformulation of the early modern notion of canonical literature (circa 1700): ‘eternal life’ through literary preservation, which is itself the paradoxical material upon which the ‘canon’ is founded. This theme is taken up in the oeuvre of Goethe. Goethe’s writing relies on the paradoxical reconciliation of opposites known to the author as ‘polarity, ’ and influences how Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Franz Kafka understand canonical literature itself. Goethe, Nietzsche, and Kafka’s use of appropriation has influenced my own creative work, which includes redaction writing, erasure, and other forms of narrative appropriation. Kafka will be shown to have taken up the theme of ‘polarity’ in his own literary writing, as examined by Benjamin and Deleuze and Guattari. Finally, I will draw upon the critical writing of Sabina Spielrein, whose concepts of simultaneous creation and destruction and erotic fusion are the conceptual core of my own poetic approach, and who provides a Nietzschean critique of the early modern notion of ‘eternity.’