Neither a defense nor a denunciation of the postmodern, it continues Hutcheon's previous projects in studying formal self-consciousness in art, but adds to this both a historical and ideological dimension.

Linda Hutcheon (University of Toronto University of Toronto, Canada)

PART I 1 Theorizing the postmodern: toward a poetics 2 Modelling the postmodern: parody and politics 3 Limiting the postmodern: the paradoxical aftermath of modernism 4 Decentering the postmodern: the ex-centric 5 Contextualizing the postmodern: enunciation and the revenge of "parole" 6 Historicizing the postmodern: the problematizing of history PART II 7 Historiographic metafiction: "the pastime of past time" 8 Intertextuality, parody, and the discourses of history 9 The problem of reference 10 Subject in/of/to history and his story 11 Discourse, power, ideology: humanism and postmodernism 12 Political double-talk 13 Conclusion: a poetics or a problematics?