Where Are the Missing Contents? (Post)Modernism, Gender, and the Canon

Abstract

Jean-François Lyotard has argued that the master narratives sustaining Western civilization in the past have been delegitimated and can no longer be presented. Although a sense of loss for these “missing contents” marks modernist and postmodernist literature, this sense seems more evident in texts written by men than in texts written by women. Women's texts that convey these missing contents do not look backward toward past master narratives. Rather, what is missing is the “not yet presented,” that which has not yet come into range. This pattern of bifurcation in modernism and postmodernism suggests that male texts are more readily adopted into the canon than female texts are because their nostalgic stance toward the past binds them, as female texts generally are not bound, to the long reach of the male Western narrative tradition. (EGF)