Beyond Modernity

Abstract

Over the past few decades, philosophers and historians alike have strived to find a correspondence between “late” capitalist economy and contemporary literature and culture. In my commentary, I would like to situate Graciela Montaldo’s chapter within this ongoing debate and, more specifically, within the Latin American context. A useful starting point is Fredric Jameson’s remarks during the heyday of the modern/postmodern date in the 1980s. In his “Culture and Finance Capital” (1998; originally published in Critical Inquiry), Jameson proposes a correlation between productive capitalism and realism, finance capital and modernism, and deterritorialized capitalism and postmodernity. In this sequence, literature and the other arts responded with realism, abstraction, and fragmentation to the successive historical cycles of capitalism—thus considered, they are but various reactions to the changing face of modernity.

Translated by Martín Gaspar.