> Is Eliot's Waste Land, with all that fragmentation and polycentricity
> modern or postmodern? I can never get these things straight.
I'm no expert on peotry, but it's part of literary modernism, if that's what you mean -- defined as the culture of state-monopoly capitalism (1870 or so to 1950 or so). The text itself is situated in the Imperial forcefield between urban London (whose teeming masses are neatly exorcised as the parade of undead -- Eliot can be such a %&$@ Tory) and colonial India (the passing hint at the Ganges, whose unmentionable Third World collectivity is recoded as some vaguely threatening natural force, instead of the Gandhian resistance movement it indeed became).
Postmodern or multinational aesthetics has a very different structure: it draws its material directly from the various culture-industries, and accesses multinational class identities and conflicts (e.g. the lyric production of Jimi Hendrix, Cypress Hill and Dr. Octagon) -- first within the Pax Americana, and increasingly, nowadays, within the semi-autonomous spaces of the Eurostate and East Asia.
-- Dennis