Charles Bernstein, The Second War and Postmodern Memory.
Postmodernism abandons the modernist idea of a real past that is recoverable. Commandments I and II are central to this abandonment. Commandment 5 calls for the use of the past as pastiche (past-iche), an alternative way of looking back. The Bernstein essay allows us to look at the abandonment through the experience of a group of poets, those who came of age just after World War II. His report casts the abandonment of the past in a somewhat different story than that provided by the postmodern theorists. Bernstein says, "The Second War undermines authority in all its prescriptive forms and voices: the rights of the Father, of Law, of the Nation and National Spirit, of Technoratioinality, of Scientific Certainty, of Axiomatic Judgement, of Hierarchy, of Progress, of Tradition....No truths are self-evident, certainly not the prerogatives of patriarchy, authority, rationality, order, control." Such a predisposition to reject the metanarratives of past accomplishment makes it easier to deconstruct the idea of the past as such.
H. Aram Veeser, Ed. THE NEW HISTORICISM. New York and London: Routledge, 1989.
Veeser's own introduction leads to a varied collection of commentary on the new historicists' attack on the modernist, positivist way of producing historical studies.
REGRET: reflecting on the origin of the modernist temper
This essay tries to explain why it is easy for a postmodernist to use the past in a way that a modernist practitioner would see as abusive.