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this volume). Fisher does, however, find an aesthetic kinship between Kushner and his more postmodern contemporaries:
Among other connections to the postmodern, Fisher also notes that Kushner often “goes beyond a mere articulated rejection of the status quo to imagine a differently constructed society.” Clearly, grand narratives have been given up in Kushner’s work in favor of constructed ones (a postmodern move, if ever there was one). However, Fisher goes on to argue that “Kushner’s emerging aesthetic offers a vision in which postmodern pessimism is merged with his essential ‘optimism of the will’ ” (261 in this volume) and that Kushner’s ultimate emphasis “is on what must come next: the question of how America will choose to move forward into the future” (262 in this volume). Perhaps, the ability to replace traditional grand narratives with new ones can tip negative, in which case the postmodernist will decry how we will never have anything to believe in again, or positive, in which case we get Kushner’s optimism of the will). In either case, we find once again that Kushner’s work is self-conscious of this dilemma between postmodernity and political progressivism, even while Kushner himself seems more than willing to trade in his postmodernity for a premodern modernism ideology.
Beyond the Postmodern
What late-twentieth-century drama seems to be telling us, then, is that in the aftermath of a postmodern epistemology comes a post-postmodern ethical sensibility. This change has its counterpart in theoretical discussions of