Pastiche Cultural Memory in Art, Film, Literature Ingeborg Hoesterey Traces the rise of the pastiche in the arts and popular culture. In the last two decades cultural theorists and artists have redefined a genre of artistic expression that for centuries was regarded as both elusive and notorious: the pastiche, or pasticcio. Today, highly engaging manifestations of the genre minor can be found in architecture, painting, and mixed media installations; in film, literature, and performance modes ranging from the operatic to rock event; and in supposedly trivial discourses such as advertising. Postmodern pastiche is about cultural memory as a history of seeing and writing. One of the markers that sets aesthetic postmodernism apart from modernism is artistic practice that borrows ostentatiously from the archive of Western culture, which modernism, in its search for the unperformed, tended to dismiss. Contemporary artists are re-examining traditions that modernism eclipsed in its pursuit of the "Shock of the New" or--in the case of architects--the functionalism of the International style. Ingeborg Hoesterey, Professor of Comparative Literature and Germanic Studies at Indiana University, is author of Verschlungene Schriftzeichen: Intertextualität von Literatur und Kunst in der Moderne/Postmoderne; editor of Zeitgeist in Babel: The Postmodernist Controversy; and co-editor of Intertextuality: German Literature and Visual Art from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century and Neverending Stories: Toward a Critical Narratology. March 2001 160 pages, 20 b&w photos, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4 cloth 0-253-33880-8 $45.95 L / £34.00 paper 0-253-21445-9 $19.95 s / £15.50 Contents A Discourse History of Pasticcio and Pastiche Pastiche in the Visual Arts Cinematic Pastiche Literary Pastiche Pastiche Culture beyond High and Low: Advertising Narratives, MTV, Performance Styles Coda

Scholars have often read the book of Revelation in a way that attempts to ascertain which Old Testament book it most resembles. Instead, we should read it as a combined and imitative text which actively engages the audience through signalling to multiple texts and multiple textual experiences: in short, it is an act of pastiche. Fletcher analyses the methods used to approach Revelation's relationship with Old Testament texts and shows that, although there is literature on Revelation's imitative and multi-vocal nature, these aspects of the text have not yet been explored in sufficient depth. Fletcher's analysis also incorporates an examination of Greco-Roman imitation and combination before providing a better way to understand the nature of the book of Revelation, as pastiche. Fletcher builds her case on four comparative case studies and uses a test case to ascertain how completely they fit with this assessment. These insights are then used to clarify how reading Revelation as imitative and combined pastiche can challenge previous scholarly assumptions, transforming the way we approach the text.

Proust, Pastiche, and the Postmodern, or Why Style Matters argues against the traditional view that Marcel Proust wrote pastiches, that is, texts that imitate the style of another author, to master his literary predecessors while sharpening his writerly quill. On the contrary, James F. Austin demonstrates that Proust’s oeuvre, and In Search of Lost Time in particular, deploy pastiche to other ends: Proust’s pastiches, in fact, “do things with words” to create powerful real-world effects. His works are indeed performative acts that forge social relationships, redefine our ideas of literature, and even work against oppressive political and economic discourses. Building on the “speech-act” theory of J.L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, and J. Hillis Miller, and on the postmodern theory of Fredric Jameson, this book not only elucidates the performative nature of pastiche, but also shows that the famous “Goncourt” pastiche from In Search of Lost Time has attracted so much attention because it already attained the postmodern; that is, it eliminated temporal depth and experience, transforming time itself into a nostalgic style of an era, and into the sort of aestheticized surface that came to define postmodernism decades later. To reflect this transformation of pastiche, this work rearticulates its history in France around Proust. Reconfiguring a scholastic, classically-inspired pedagogical tradition based on imitation, and breaking with the dominant satirical practice, Proust’s work opened up possibilities in the twentieth century for a new kind of pastiche: playful and performative in the literary field, and postmodern in a French cinema that, as with the Goncourt pastiche, represents time as the visual style of an era, whether unreflexively in “heritage” films such as Régis Wargnier’s Indochine, or discerningly in Eric Rohmer’s Lady and the Duke, which uses period pictorial and painterly conventions to illustrate how the representation of history onscreen typically flattens time into style.

Crime fiction is a popular target for literary pastiche in France. From the nouveau roman and the Oulipo group to the current avant-garde, writers have seized on the genre to exploit it for their own ends, toying with its traditional plots and characters, and exploring its preoccupations with perception, reason and truth. In the first full-length study of the phenomenon, Simon Kemp's investigation centres on four major writers of the twentieth century, Alain Robbe-Grillet (b. 1922), Michel Butor (b. 1926), Georges Perec (193682) and Jean Echenoz (b. 1947). Out of their varied encounters with the genre, from deconstruction of the classic detective story to homage to the roman noir, Kemp elucidates the complex relationship between the pasticheur and his target, which demands an entirely new assessment of pastiche as a literary form.

Pastiche, Fashion and Galanterie in Chardin’s Genre Subjects seeks to understand how Chardin’s genre subjects were composed and constructed to communicate certain things to the elites of Paris in the 1730s and 1740s. The book argues against the conventional view of Chardin as the transparent imitator of bourgeois life and values so ingrained in art history since the nineteenth century. Instead, it makes the case that these pictures were crafted to demonstrate the artist’s wit (esprit) and taste, traits linked to conventions of seventeenth-century galanterie. Early eighteenth-century Moderns like Jean-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779) embraced an aesthetic grounded upon a notion of beauty that could not be put into words—the je ne sais quoi. Despite its vagueness, this model of beauty was drawn from the present, departed from standards of formal beauty, and could only be known through the critical exercise of taste. Though selecting subjects from the present appears to be a simple matter, it was complicated by the fact that the modernizers expressed themselves through the vehicles of older, established forms. In Chardin’s case, he usually adapted the forms of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish genre painting in his genre subjects. This gambit required an audience familiar enough with the conventions of Lowlands art to grasp the play involved in a knowing imitation, or pastiche. Chardin’s first group of enthusiasts accordingly were collectors who bought works of living French artists as well as Dutch and Flemish masters from the previous century, notably aristocratic connoisseurs like the chevalier Antoine de la Roque and Count Carl-Gustaf Tessin. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Memories of Australian History at school often evoke images of hot classrooms and well-meaning teachers struggling to spin out a thin tale of colonial administration and land settlement, in which nothing 'really happened'. All that is changing. The history that is taught and written in universities today is less concerned with grand events and structured narratives, and more interested in reconstructing people's lives. This approach opens up new questions for discussion in Australian History and revitalises old ones. Pastiche, with its companion volume Memories and Dreams, provides a window into the transformations which have taken place in the writing of Australian History in the last two decades. They bring together some of the most important, illuminating and path-breaking work by many of Australia's leading historians, each of whom reflects back on the circumstances in which they wrote the particular articles and looks at the directions history has taken since. Pastiche covers major issues in the history of white Australia before 1900, including reinterpretations of race relations, political culture, class antagonisms, urban and rural experience, sexual politics in the family and the public sphere, and popular cultural practices. Collectively, these articles go even further, unstitching the narrative of Australian History, highlighting the unexpected connections, and challenging the whole notion of a fixed past.