"}some interesting stuff here, such as:
It\u2019s only when you study a relatively sedate medium like literature that a clean line of evolution from \u2018modernism\u2019 to \u2018postmodernism\u2019 seems to appear, and only then if you focus on the slow, serious end of the medium \u2013 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 you guessed it! \u2013 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 \u2013 perhaps the only medium that could pull them off on a regular basis without embarrassing itself. \u00a0Tricks that looked clumsy in High Serious postmodern literary fiction came easily to Bugs Bunny and friends.