SOURCE: "The Myth of the Postmodern Breakthrough," in Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society, The University of Chicago Press, 1979.

In the following essay, which was first published in slightly different form in 1973, Graff identifies postmodernism as both visionary and apocalyptic, and asserts that despite claims to the contrary, postmodernism derives from Romantic and modernist literary theory.

The postmodern tendency in literature and literary criticism has been characterized as a "breakthrough," a significant reversal of the dominant literary and sociocultural directions of the last two centuries. Literary critics such as Leslie Fiedler, Susan Sontag, George Steiner, Richard Poirier, and Ihab Hassan have written about this reversal, differing in their assessments of its implications but generally agreeing in their descriptions of what is taking place. What is taking place, these critics suggest, is the death of our traditional Western concept of art and literature, a concept which defined...