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| | Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern, by Linda Hutcheon |
 | | And nostalgia too is transideological, despite the fact that many would argue that, whether used by the right or the left, nostalgia is fundamentally conservative in its praxis, for it wants to keep things as they were--or, more accurately, as they are imagined to have been. |
 | | But, this nostalgia puts us, as viewers, into the same position as the very agents of empire, for they too have documented at length their paradoxical nostalgia for the cultures they had colonized--in other words, the ones they had intentionally and forcefully altered. |
 | | This is a complicated (and postmodernly paradoxical) move that is both an ironizing of nostalgia itself, of the very urge to look backward for authenticity, and, at the same moment, a sometimes shameless invoking of the visceral power that attends the fulfilment of that urge. |
| www.library.utoronto.ca /utel/criticism/hutchinp.html (6684 words) |
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