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1、“CATTI杯”第二十七届韩素音青年翻译奖竞赛英译汉竞赛原文：The Posteverything GenerationI 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 supposed to be the class where you sit at the back of the room with every other jaded so
2、phomore wearing skinny jeans, thick-framed glasses, 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. Thats pretty much the way I spent the course, too: through structuralism, formal
3、ism, gender theory, and post-colonialism, I was far too busy shuffling through my Ipod to see 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 seemi
4、ngly blas college-aged literati of which I was so self-consciously one.According to my textbook, the problem with defining postmodernism is that its impossible. The difficulty is that it is so.post. It defines itself so negatively against what came before it naturalism, romanticism and the wild revo
5、lution of modernism that its sometimes hard to see 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 arose in the post-war west (the term was coined in
6、 1949), the generation that has witnessed 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 because, in a class otherwise consumed by dead-letter theories, postmodernism remained an open book, tempti
7、ng to the young and curious. But it also intrigued me because the question of what postmodernism what a movement so post-everything, so reticent to define itself is spoke to a larger question about the political and popular culture of today, of the other jaded sophomores sitting around me who had gr
8、own 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, post-9/11.at one point in his famous essay, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” literary critic Frederic Jameson even calls us “
9、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 ye
10、t do we take to the streets and the airwaves and say “here we are, and this is what we demand”? Do we plant our flag of youthful rebellion on the mall in Washington and say “we are not leaving until we see change! Our eyes have been opened by our education and our conception of what is possible has
11、been expanded by our privilege and we demand a better world because it is our right”? It would seem 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 uses Brown v. Board of Education to outlaw desegr
12、egation, 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 small-money contributions, volunteer a spare hour to tutor, and sport an entire wardrobes worth of Live Strong bracelets advertising our moderately
13、 priced opposition to everything from breast cancer to global warming. But what do we really stand for? Like a true postmodern generation we refuse to weave together an overarching narrative to our own political consciousness, to present a cast of inspirational or revolutionary characters on our pub
14、lic stage, or to define a specific philosophy. We are a story seemingly without direction or theme, structure or meaning a generation defined negatively against what came before us. When Al Gore once said “Its the combination of narcissism and nihilism that really defines postmodernism,” he might as
15、 well have been echoing his entire generations critique of our own. We are a generation for whom even revolution seems trite, and therefore as fair a target for bland imitation as anything else. We are the generation of the Che Geuvera tee-shirt.Jameson calls it “Pastiche” “the wearing of a linguist
16、ic 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 use it until the words lose all meaning and the chaos that is real life sets 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 cohes
