Kitsch, modernism and literary tradition in an American retrofuture: aesthetic immediacies towards universal communion
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Abstract
In The Dream of Perpetual Motion (2010), American writer Dexter Palmer turns to retrofuturism as a means to fictionalize discourses on the ‘Great Divide’ between high and mass culture that have historically marked the debates of and on modernism. This essay analyzes the intertextual connections the novel establishes with this controversial conceptual framework. In an alternative twentieth century, kitsch provides a sense of universal communion in the midst of the growing Noise of the world. To this aim it simulates the ideal of a total communicational transparency (‘immediacy’) which can overcome the modern individual’s alienation. Between modernism morals and postmodern irony, a failed writer and a renowned inventor turn to literary tradition in search of a genuine ‘restoration’ of this idealized aesthetic horizon.
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