Alan Liu, Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database

摘要

If you are always operating with beginnings, you steadily lose sense of how these beginnings began. This is often the case with those who continually emphasize new frontiers, believe in uniquely contemporary conditions, or become dazzled by the adjectival headlamp of post. The past in the light of the post is reduced to the very recent, the latest of whatever we do or whatever has just come to us. All that counts is innovation. This is what characterizes postmodern historicism, and this is what Alan Liu seeks to critically assess in this collection of essays. As he puts it, 'we do not have history, but we have historicism'.