ABSTRACT
All creative work in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries would, however, in postmodernist accounts necessarily come ‘afterwards’ because nothing new, nothing original, be it in the domain of art, music, film, or literature, is possible any more. We come too late to do anything unique. ‘After’ in this context becomes a signifier of reduced or debased value: ‘that is the best book on the subject after mine’. Those who attack the referential qualities of hip-hop music or
digital sampling, bemoan song covers in the popular music charts, or criticize literature’s inbuilt intertextualities on the grounds that it stifles individualism, find themselves expounding postmodernism. Those who attacked Graham Swift’s novel Last Orders, suggesting that it did not deserve literary prizes because it was allusive by nature, because it came ‘after Faulkner’, and indeed ‘after Chaucer’ and ‘after Powell and Pressburger’ as Chapter 2 demonstrates, were voicing comparable views.
