Digital Commons Network^™

Images Of/And The Postmodern. Review Of Spectacular Allegories: Postmodern American Writing And The Politics Of Seeing By Josh Cohen, Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

Josh Cohen, in his new book Spectacular Allegories: Postmodern American Writing and the Politics of Seeing, argues that postmodern American novelists ranging from Norman Mailer to Joan Didion, Robert Coover to James Ellroy, do not merely fall into accord with this critique -text good; image bad- but are in fact using the allegorical nature of their encounters with and representations of visual culture as a means of reintroducing the image to history, an attempt to construct a new critical politics of visuality. The possibility of a critical visual agency is raised for Cohen in these writers’ gendered representations of the …