Stories on Maps

Stories on Maps

Stories are obviously still crucial to our culture; stories, in fact, help to recuperate the fragmentations of postmodernism.

Postmodernism does not erase stories, but supplies them with different positions. The distinction between modernism and postmodernism fluctuates wildly. Jim Collins has commented on the way that postmodernism can itself become a character in a relatively modernist narrative:

As a design concept, the Wexner [Center for Visual Arts at Ohio State University] may indeed attempt to induce a schizophrenic panic of one sort or another as Modernist ruin, but as a dynamic text which becomes the intersection of multiple mappings, it also encourages visitors to regart it as a Modernist shrine--just as Canton, Ohio has its Professional Football Hall of Fame, Columbus has a Professional Avant-Garde Hall of Fame, complete with appropriate Tshirts.... The persistence of the desire to monumentalize suggests the insufficiency of exclusively spatial metaphors to describe the process of making sense of one's cultural terrain, that "mapping" in the context of self-location is inseparable from "narrating." (p. 58).


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