Linda Hutcheon

Linda Hutcheon, FRS, O.C. (born August 24, 1947) is a Canadian academic working in the fields of literary theory and criticism, opera, and Canadian studies. She is University Professor in the Department of English and of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, where she has taught since 1988. In 2000 she was elected the 117th President of the Modern Language Association, the third Canadian to hold this position, and the first Canadian woman. She is particularly known for her influential theories of postmodernism.

Hutcheon's publications reflect an interest in aesthetic micro-practices such as irony in Irony's Edge (Routledge, 1994), parody in A Theory of Parody (Meuthen, 1985), and adaptation in A Theory of Adaptation (Routledge, 2006). Hutcheon has also authored texts which synthesize and contextualize these practices with regard to broader debates about postmodernism, such as The Politics of Postmodernism (Routledge, 1989), A Poetics of Postmodernism (Routledge, 1988), and Rethinking Literary History (OUP, 2002). She also edited influential text on post-modernity, chief among them being A Postmodern Reader (SUNY, 1993), co-edited with Joseph P. Natoli.

Hutcheon's version of postmodernism is often contrasted with that of Fredric Jameson in North America: while the latter laments the lack of critical capacities to which postmodern subjects have access, and analyses present capitalist cultural production in terms of a dehistoricized spatial pastiche, Hutcheon highlights the ways in which postmodern modalities actually aid in the process of critique.

Specifically, Hutcheon suggests that postmodernism works through parody to "both legitimize and subvert that which it parodies" (Politics, 101). "Through a double process of installing and ironizing, parody signals how present representations come from past ones and what ideological consequences derive from both continuity and difference" (Politics, 93). Thus, far from dehistoricizing the present or organizing history into an incoherent and detached pastiche, postmodernism can rethink history and shed light on new critical capacities.

...
Wikipedia