Welcome to PoMo Month at Jacket Copy

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Is James Joyce the grandfather of postmodernism? Is Jacques Derrida its patron saint? Where are the women in the postmodern landscape? Is postmodernism something dense and unapproachable, or can it be fun? How much have postmodern ideas and techniques infiltrated our present moment, anyway?

These are some of the questions we’ll be contemplating -- in the fractured, intermittent way a blog allows questions to be mulled as it also continues doing its everyday blog thing -- over the next 30 days. There will be guest posts and interviews and perhaps a few arguments. We’re calling it PoMo Month.

We picked today to begin because, as you know, June 16 is Bloomsday, the day that James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ takes place. Postmodernism wouldn’t have taken form at quite the same time, in quite the same way, without Joyce’s challenging narrative, which bends and breaks traditional fictional forms.

Bloomsday is now widely celebrated, with revelers drinking in Dublin, actors reading at New York’s symphonyspace, readers rambling in Pittsburgh, a symposium in Buffalo, a chapter on Twitter; even the Vatican is lending an ear. Does any other work of experimental fiction have so much reach?

It must be a sign of something. Or a signifier.

Maybe Joyce wasn’t a harbinger of postmodernism; maybe he was a straight-up modernist. Like many genres, the exact origins are murky, and up for debate. And as for the endings -- did Derrida’s death in 2004 coincide with postmodernism’s decline? Or is it still going? By embarking on PoMo Month, we’re asking: Does it have a future?

-- Carolyn Kellogg