Postromantic irony in postmodernist times

Abstract

The predicament of modernity is its inherent irony. It is impossible to overcome the past in the name of life, because life as action, as an expression of immediacy, must still always be concerned with a future that will in turn relegate the meaning of the momentary present to the past. This ironic condition, taken as the diagnosis of every literary movement which - like literary modernism - lays claim to modernity, will become intensified when applied to a generation of writers who essentially view themselves as "post-modernist".