英译汉竞赛原文：
The Posteverything Generation
I never expected to gain any new insight into the nature of my generation, or the changing landscape of American colleges, in Lit Theory. Lit Theory is suppod to be the class where you sit at the back of the room with every other jaded sophomore wearing skinny jeans, thick-framed glass, an ironic tee-shirt and over-sized retro headphones, just waiting for lecture to be over so you can light up a Turkish Gold and walk to lunch while listening to Wilco. That’优美语段摘抄s pretty much the way I spent the cour, too: through structuralism, formalism, gender theory, and post-colonialism, I was far too busy shuffling through my Ipod to e what the patriarchal world order of capitalist oppression had to do with Ethan Frome. But when we began to study postmodernism, something struck a chord with me and made me sit up and look anew at the emingly blasé college-aged literati of which I was so lf-consciously one.
According to my textbook, the problem with defining postmodernism is that it’s impossible.
The difficulty is that it post. It defines itlf so negatively against what came before it – naturalism, romanticism and the wild revolution of modernism – that it’s sometimes hard to e what it actually is. It denies that anything can be explained neatly or even at all. It is parodic, detached, strange, and sometimes menacing to traditionalists who do not understand it. Although it aro in the post-war west (the term was coined in 1949), the generation that has witnesd its ascendance has yet to come up with an explanation of what postmodern attitudes mean for the future of culture or society. The subject intrigued me becau, in a class otherwi consumed by dead-letter theories, postmodernism remained an open book, tempting to the young and curious. But it also intrigued me becau the question of what postmodernism – what a movement so post-everything, so reticent to define itlf – is spoke to a larger question about the political and popular culture of today, of the other jaded sophomores sitting around me who had grown up in a postmodern world.
In many ways, as a college-aged generation, we are also extremely post: post-Cold War, post-industrial, post-baby boom, at one point in his famous essay, “Postmoder
nism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,”艾籺 literary critic Frederic Jameson even calls us “post-literate.” We are a generation that is riding on the tail-end of a century of war and revolution that toppled civilizations, overturned repressive social orders, and left us with more privilege and opportunity than any other society in history. Ours could be an era to accomplish anything.
And yet do we take to the streets and the airwaves and say “here we are, and this is what we demand”火锅汤底怎么做? Do we plant our flag of youthful rebellion on the mall in Washington and say “we are not leaving until we e change! Our eyes have been opened by our education and our conception of what is possible has been expanded by our privilege and we demand a better world becau it is our right”? It would em we do the opposite. We go to war without so much as questioning the rationale, we sign away our civil liberties, we say nothing when the Supreme Court us Brown v. Board of Education to outlaw degregation, and we sit back to watch the carnage on the evening news.
On campus, we sign petitions, join organizations, put our names on mailing lists, make s
mall-money contributions, volunteer a spare hour to tutor, and sport an entire wardrobe’s worth of Live Strong bracelets advertising our moderately priced opposition to everything from breast cancer to global warming. But what do we really stand for? Like a true postmodern generation we refu to weave together an overarching narrative to our own political consciousness, to prent a cast of inspirational or revolutionary characters on our public stage, or to define a specific philosophy. We are a story emingly without direction or theme, structure or meaning – a generation defined negatively against what came before us. When Al Gore once said “It’s the combination of narcissism and nihilism that really defines postmodernism,同义词库如何养护头发” he might as well have been echoing his entire generation’s critique of our own. We are a generation for whom even revolution ems trite, and therefore as fair a target for bland imitation as anything el. We are the generation of the Che Geuvera tee-shirt.
谈谈对环境保护的认识
Jameson calls it 两百字的日记“Pastiche” – 洋芋鸡“the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language.” In literature, this means an author speaking in a style that is not his own – borrowing a voice and continuing to u it until the words lo all meaning and the chaos
that is real life ts in. It is an imitation of an imitation, something that has been re-envisioned so many times the original model is no longer relevant or recognizable. It is mass-produced individualism, anticipated revolution. It is why postmodernism lacks cohesion, why it ems to lack purpo or direction. For us, the post-everything generation, pastiche is the u and reu of the old clichés of social change and moral outrage – a perfunctory rebelliousness that has culminated in the age of rapidly multiplying non-profits and relief funds. We live our lives in masks and speak our minds in a dead language – the language of a society that expects us to agitate becau that’s what young people do. But how do we rebel against a generation that is expecting, anticipating, nostalgic for revolution?
