ABSTRACT
That said, however, Jameson does not so much proceed to define postmodernism as to assail it for its lacks. Both the enemies of the postmodern (including Eagleton 1985 and Newman 1985) and its supporters (Caramello 1983) have refused to define precisely what they mean by their usage of the term, some (as we have seen) because they admit to assuming a tacit definition, others because they find too many annoying contradictions in its use. Somehow neither seems an acceptable excuse for the vagueness and
confusion that result. Clearly for these theorists and critics, among others (see, earlier, Spanos 1972; Graff 1973; Fiedler 1975), postmodernism is an evaluative designation to be used in relation to modernism. Whichever of the two is deemed the positive, the other is made into a “straw-man” adversary; in other words, necessary and important distinctions are reduced and flattened out. However, there has also been other work on postmodernism, as Susan Suleiman (1986) has pointed out, that has been either diagnostic or classificatory/analytic, and I would hope that this chapter falls into the latter category.
