SOURCE: "What Is Living and What Is Dead in American Postmodernism: Establishing the Contemporaneity of Some American Poetry," in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 22, No. 4, Summer, 1996, pp. 764-89.

In the following essay, Altieri finds that contemporary American poetry has to a significant extent divested itself from the stylistic and thematic traits of postmodern critical theory.

I think postmodernism is now dead as a theoretical concept and, more important, as a way of developing cultural frameworks influencing how we shape theoretical concepts. With its basic enabling arguments now sloganized and its efforts to escape binaries binarized, it is unlikely to generate much significant new work.¹ On this I suspect most critics would agree. But that then raises the more troubling question of whether the notion of postmodernism has any more vitality as a rubric capable of sponsoring significant new work in the arts. Perhaps now that the theory has lost much...