SOURCE: Caserio, Robert L. “The Heat of the Day: Modernism and Narrative in Paul de Man and Elizabeth Bowen.” Modern Language Quarterly 54, no. 2 (June 1993): 263-84.

In the following essay, Caserio compares the writing styles of Paul de Man and Bowen, concluding that Bowen's works—particularly The Heat of the Day—more properly belong to the modernist movement rather than the postmodernist movement.

The last chapter of Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism has an attractively odd and expressive shape. Entitled “Secondary Elaborations,” it meanders for 123 pages—more than a quarter of the volume's length. Instead of concluding, therefore, the argument's main drift mainly drifts; conclusion itself becomes secondary. I take it that this dilation reinforces Jameson's admirable inconclusiveness throughout his book about whether postmodernism arises after modernism ends or is itself modernism's secondary elaboration. Even where and when Jameson can substantiate as well as hypothesize the divide between the isms, he...