Academic confrontations at the end of high modernity

Abstract

Academic novel is by definition a cultural enterprise, but it can properly surprise the hostility of an extremely hierarchical environment. Concepts, ideas and archetypes are preserved and melted in the literary substance even with the help of irony and pastiche. Or, better said, irony and pastiche are means of avoiding the hostility of a milieu blocked in stereotypes and snobbery. Kingsley Amis’s novel ”Lucky Jim” absorbs modernist cultural ingredients in order to demythologize them in a postmodern fashion. Anyway, it seems that the process of demythization implies the subsequent process of re-mythization. The cultural heritage is unavoidable in the last phase of postmodernism. In 1975 we can hardly speak about cultural aphasia. The individual with a postmodernist Weltanschauung plays the satirical role of the knight errant in search of falsified (dragonized) modernist mentalities and cultural options. This paper will analyse the risks and methods of demythization and the reverse process in an attempt to understand the cultural logic of antimodernist approaches.