The Posteverything Generation“后”一切的一代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 supposed to be the class where you sit at the back of the room with every other jaded sophomore 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. That’s pretty much the way I spent the course, too: through structuralism, formalism, 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 seemingly blasé college-aged literati of which I was so self-consciously one.我从来没有指望通过上文学理论课来了解我们这一代人的特征，或美国大学不断变化的景象。

这门课实际是这样的，你和其他面容疲惫的大二学生一起坐在房间后面，他们身穿紧身牛仔裤和印有俏皮话的T恤，戴着黑框眼镜和超大的复古耳机，等课堂的结束后，你就会情绪高涨地在去吃午餐的路上边走边听威尔克的音乐。

我差不多就是这样上课的：一边听什么结构主义、形式主义、性别理论和后殖民主义的话题，一边用我的iPod搜好听的音乐，也没时间去理会伊坦·弗洛美提出的资本主义压迫下的父权社会是什么样的。

但当我们开始研究后现代主义时，一些观念引起了我的共鸣，让我提起精神，重新审视这个看似冷漠的大学生活。

According to my textbook, the problem wi th defining postmodernism is that it’s impossible. The difficulty is that it is so...post. It defines itself so negatively against what came before it –naturalism, romanticism and the wild revolution of modernism –that it’s 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 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, tempting 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 grown up in a postmodern world.根据我的课本，从定义的角度来说，后现代主义是很难定义的。

我们所面临的困难是它太···“后”了。

它的定义消极地否定了先于它的自然主义、浪漫主义和疯狂的现主义革命---因此有时很难看清它到底指什么。

它否认任何事物都可以很好地或甚至是完全解释出来。

它是模仿性的、分离的、陌生的，并且有时会威胁到根本不理解它的传统主义者。

虽然它出现在战后的西方国家，但迄今为止还没有一个合理的解释，后现代主义态度对国家和社会的未来到底意味什么。

这个话题引起了我的好奇心，因为在充斥着空文理论的阶级下，后现代主义是一本打开的书，引诱着年轻人和充满好奇心的人。

但我对它感兴趣还因为这个关于后现代主的问题--- “后”一切运动如此紧谨慎地界定自己，如今却面临着更大的有关政治和流行文化的问题，而它所说的似乎正是我身边这些不顾一屑的朋友们。

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 “post-literate.” We are a generati on 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.作为一个大学生，我们也生活在一个非常“后”的时代：后冷战时代、后工业、后婴儿潮时期、后9.11时代···文学评论家詹姆逊在他一篇著名的文章中提到了“后现代主义,或晚期资本主义的文化逻辑”，他甚至叫我们为“后文化人”。

我们这一代人生活在世纪战争的末端和推翻文明的革命时期，专制的社会制度被推翻了，这使得我们比其他任何社会历史时期的人都有更多的特权和机会。

我们这一时代能够成为实现任何目标的时代。

And yet do we take to the streets and the airwaves an d 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! 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 desegregation, and we sit back to watch the carnage on the evening news.然而，我们会走上街头，在电视广播中说“我们在这儿，这就是我们想要的”吗？我们会把年轻的叛逆之旗挂在华盛顿商区，并说“我们不会离开，直到看到改变！我们的特权让我们更为广泛地接受教育，而教育和观念扩大了我们的视野，我们想要一个更好的世界，因为这是我们的权利”？似乎我们在做一些相反的事。

我们在没有质疑合理性的情况下参与战争，我们签订不平等条约放弃公民自由，当最高法院使用布朗法案时时我们没作任何反应。

On campus, we sign petitions, join organizations, put our names on mailing lists, make small-money contributions, volunte er 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 refuse to weave together an overarching narrative to our own political consciousness, to present a cast of inspirational or revolutionary characters on our public stage, or to define a specificphilosophy. 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 “It’s the combination of narcissism and nihilism that really defines postmodernism,” he might as well have been echoing his entire generation’s cri tique 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.在校园里，我们在情愿书上签名，加入各种组织，把自己名字添加到各种邮件通讯录中，捐力所能及的钱，做一个小时的家教志愿者，为乳腺癌和全球变暖贡献力量。