oligopsony:

some interesting stuff here, such as:

It’s only when you study a relatively sedate medium like literature that a clean line of evolution from ‘modernism’ to ‘postmodernism’ seems to appear, and only then if you focus on the slow, serious end of the medium – the Modern Library Top 100. Yes, if you ignored every cultural product of the interwar period except for a few novels by Joyce, Woolf and Lawrence, it could easily look like the big achievement of 20s modernism was stream-of-consciousness fiction, which babbled on for thirty years until it got supplanted by a new, self-consciously artificial postmodernism. Since then, it’s all been about reflexivity, metafiction, pop-culture pastiches and genre-slumming.

But the aesthetic history of the twentieth century would look very different if you judged it by the development of animated cartoons, which evolved a bit faster than novels. While the richer, stuffier modernists were still wrestling with their pommy-Freudian sex pastorales, American cartoons were getting more and more sophisticated, all thanks to – you guessed it! – the East Coast working class.

Well by the middle of the century, US cartoon animation had done something extraordinary; it had become the perfect medium for metafiction, pastiche, reflexivity and self-conscious artificialness – perhaps the only medium that could pull them off on a regular basis without embarrassing itself.  Tricks that looked clumsy in High Serious postmodern literary fiction came easily to Bugs Bunny and friends.