Speaker
Description
This study examines Donald Davie’s “Remembering the Thirties” and Philip Larkin’s “Church Going” as early poetic articulations of a postmodern crisis characterised by the waning of historicity and affect under late capitalism, which is a condition Fredric Jameson theorised in his seminal work Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). In the aftermath of the Second World War, historical consciousness in Britain appeared to dissolve into the hollow residues of belief and conviction, and Movement poetry emerged as a symptom of this cultural detachment at both personal and generational levels. In Davie’s poem, the younger generation fails to grasp the agony of the older people’s wartime experiences, especially during the 1930s, a period when the Spanish Civil War broke out between the two devastating world wars. Losing the political and affective consciousness of the past, Davie observes, “A neutral tone is nowadays preferred." Similarly, Larkin’s poem portrays this shift at a more personal level by depicting a speaker visiting a church that has survived materially but has lost its historical and spiritual significance, leaving the speaker ironically detached. Therefore, this study positions Davie and Larkin as early diagnosticians of this postmodern crisis, later identified by Jameson. In doing so, it further argues that this condition represents an epistemological crisis in the transmission of historical and affective inheritance, which reflects the postmodern hollowing of meaning.
| Keywords | the waning of historicity and affect, postmodern crisis, Donald Davie, Philip Larkin, Fredric Jameson |
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| elifdemir@cumhuriyet.edu.tr |