SOURCE: “Tradition and the English Novel Today,” in Sewanee Review, Spring, 1994, pp. 326-33.

In the following excerpt, Davenport pans English Music for its condescending attitude and its contrived and unconvincing nature.

Is there life after postmodernism? We may soon find out, for signs of the end are everywhere: the architects of poststructuralist criticism are now speaking of their creation in the past tense; academic impresarios are busy organizing conferences with names like “The Ends of Postmodernism”; and that once hierophantic term itself has taken sluttishly to appearing in television commercials and other temporal contexts—for example, a currently available musical keyboard boasts among its many electronic voices one labeled postmodern. But to lament or celebrate just yet would be premature. For literary postmodernism in America, like no other intellectual, cultural, and artistic movement before it, has been academically systematized and methodically taught to legions of ambitious and professionally...