The Stuttgart Seminar showed to what extent the actual pre-sence of the writer can thematize the aesthetics of postmodemism precisely at a point in time that may signal its approaching end, signalling as well the need for new directions in contemporary art.
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".
