HI all. I thought the thesis from The Parameters of Postmodernism by Nicholas Zurbrugg might be of interest, in light of Evan's last post. Zurbrugg is considering the difference in the response by European critics of modernism and how American artists were able to overcome the paralysis of these critics in the face of the modern condition and actually create the postmodern.

So, what i've done below is clipped text from a pdf file that contained a review of Zurbrugg's book, pasted it into Microsoft OneNote and had that application read and copy the text from the pdf into regular text. So...this is what it looks like. I thought it would be an interesting technological experiment (I just discovered this tool...its kind of amazing), so this is how onenote read the pdf file:

Noting that European and American responses to the postmodcm condition have been differe nn,? Zurbrugg then separates what he calls the “B-effect”.- the negat tive definitions and reactions of European critics like Benjamin, Barthes. Burger, Baudrillard, Bonito-Oliva, Bourdieu, Belsev, and any others unlucky to be born with a B-name—from the more posit iiv? “c-e(iect”—the experimental avant-garde creative work of Ameriain artists like John Cage. is this like comparing apples and oranges? Is it a reductive noncomparison? It is both, in a sense, but that doesn't stop the polemic from being engagingly provocative at times. On the (bad) B-effect side, there is stagnant. musty old Eur opee? iull of apocalyptic, wailing critics; on the (creative) c-cffect side, there is the tnited States, full of “vital," “intelligent.” “flexib le”? (adiectives that are repeated often) multimedia artists who del ight? in the utopian. extrarational, technological possibilities of the postmodern. The fact that one of the most nesative of critics of the postmoclern is American (Fredric Jameson) is dealt with in its own section; the fact that there are European artists—Peter Maxwell Davies, Angela carter, Karlheinz stockhausen, Anseim Kiefer. and the list could go on— who might well count as c-effect sorts is not even considered, in the author's enthusiasm for things American. (There is also curiously but characteristically little said about the rest of the world, even the western world, which Amerocentric visions like this often ignore.)

HA! hope you enjoyed that