ABSTRACT
A short-lived episode in the recent history of ideas, whatever else one might say about the present conjuncture, it seems increasingly implausible that one might define it as postmodern. Yet, the rapid aging of such a concept, and its consignment to what looks increasingly like a dead end of late twentieth-century intellectual history, evidently leaves in its wake a number of dilemmas. A contradictory temporality of permanent transition or transitoriness-the pivotal experience of a Baudelairean modernite, shrinks down or is internalized to an expansive and seemingly endless present. The search for "global modernisms" across a longer dureé of twentieth-century literary history has sought, to re-inscribe several non-European forms of the "realist" novel as various species of alternative modernisms. The new novel-the novel called realist-is criticized for a primacy of description over action. The primacy of description is in fact that of a form of the visible, which deprives action of its powers of intelligibility, of its powers of ordered distribution.
