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POSTMODERN

Bibliography, Abstracts, Syllabus, Journals, Books on Postmodernism

Postmodern and Postmodernism are difficult terms to grasp and having somewhat different significance in architecture, literary criticism and art than in the social sciences.

In social theory postmodern and postmodernism are best seen as a rejection of central assumptions of the modern world or of what has been described as the ‘enlightenment project’. This project has had at least two core beliefs.

First is the assumption that modern society will become more democratic and just because of our growing ability to rationally and objectively understand the community's best interests.

Second is the assumption that scientists and social theorists hold a privileged viewpoint since they are taken to operate outside of local interests or bias.

Each of these assumptions suggests the possibility of disinterested knowledge, universal truths and social progress.

The late twentieth century writings of Michel Foucault (1929-1984) and Jean Francois Lyotard called these assumption into question. Foucault's work has argued that knowledge and power are always intertwined and that the social sciences, rather than empowering human actors, have made humans into objects of inquiry and have subjected them to knowledge legitimated by the claims of science. Similarly Lyotard has argued that social theory has always imposed meaning on historical events rather than providing for the understanding of the empirical significance of events.

This rejection of the idea of social and intellectual progress implies that people must accept the possibility of history having no meaning or purpose, abandon the idea that we can know what is or is not true and accept that science can never create and test theories according to universal scientific principles because there is no unitary reality from which such principles can be established.

We are left living in a fragmented world with multiple realities, a suspicion of science or authoritative claims and many groups involved in identity politics in order to impose their reality on others.

The clearest signs of a postmodern approach to sociology can be found in social constructionism, ethnomethodology and labeling theory.

The term postmodern can be described as meaning an era after a modern one or of, relating to, or being any of various movements in reaction to modernism that are typically characterized by a return to traditional materials and forms as one notices in architecture or by ironic self-reference and absurdity as one finds in literature. The term postmodern relates to, or involves a radical reappraisal of modern assumptions about culture, identity, history, or language.

The Dilemma of Postmodernism - This page is maintained by William S. Jamison

I view the main dilemma of postmodernism as the quest for meaning. While the quest for meaning is traditional and philosophical, the characteristics of postmodern times pose new difficulties for those on the quest. This paper is an attempt to outline those difficulties and describe the answers posed, so far, in response to the dilemma in light of those difficulties.

We are living in the postmodern age. So what do we mean by the term "postmodern"? That is what we are engaged in defining every day. There are some things that we can say about what it has been used for, so far. It is a shared feeling of dissatisfaction with the everyday, late modern life. It is expressed in the work of the elite, designated postmodern, but reflects the feelings of most who have gone on to higher education, and is part of the vocabulary of everyone in the range of the media.

If we look at the literature, or philosophy, it is not difficult to see a core of ideas associated with the postmodern. It is our challenge as postmodernists to decide how we want our philosophy to evolve.

Since we are "post" moderns, it would be helpful at this point to mention what it meant to be modern. Someone who was (or still is) modern believes that: ...

Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a concept that appears in a wide variety of disciplines or areas of study, including art, architecture, music, film, literature, sociology, communications, fashion, and technology. It's difficult to locate postmodernism because it's not clear exactly when postmodernism begins.

Both the theories of postmodernity and modernity have been based almost exclusively on studying capitalist societies in the West.

Postmodernism is a set of ideas, one that has only emerged as an area of academic study since the mid-1980s. We can think about postmodernism by first thinking about modernism, the movement from which postmodernism grew.

The definition of modernism comes from the aesthetic movement broadly labeled "modernism." Modernism, as you probably know, is the movement in visual arts, music, literature, and drama which rejected the old Victorian standards of how art should be made, consumed, and what it should mean. In the period of "high modernism," from around 1910 to 1930, the major figures of modernism literature helped radically to redefine what poetry and fiction could be

Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Proust, Mallarme, Kafka, and Rilke are considered the founders of twentieth-century modernism.

Postmodernism follows most of these same ideas, rejecting boundaries between high and low forms of art, rejecting rigid genre distinctions, emphasizing pastiche, parody, bricolage, irony, and playfulness. Postmodern art and thought favors reflexivity and self-consciousness, fragmentation and discontinuity, ambiguity, simultaneity, with an emphasis on the destructured, decentered, dehumanized subject.

While postmodernism seems very much like modernism in these ways, it differs from modernism in its attitude toward a lot of these trends. Modernism tends to present a fragmented view of human subjectivity and history, but presents that fragmentation as something tragic, something to be lamented and mourned as a loss. Many modernist works try to uphold the idea that works of art can provide the unity, coherence, and meaning which has been lost in most of modern life; art will do what other human institutions fail to do. Postmodernism, in contrast, doesn't lament the idea of fragmentation, but rather celebrates that.

Another way of looking at the relation between modernism and postmodernism helps to clarify some of these distinctions. According to Frederic Jameson, modernism and postmodernism are cultural formations which accompany particular stages of capitalism.

Books on Postmodernism

Postmodernism: A Graphic Guide to Cutting Edge Thinking by Richard Appiananesi

Modern Art: Impressionism to Post-Modernism by David Britt

Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society) by Mike Featherstone

Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church (The Church and Postmodern Culture) by James K. A. Smith

The Sociology of Postmodernism

Technology Pessimism and Postmodernism

Nouvelle Vague in American Social Science

Sociology after Postmodernism

Postmodernism and Management

Globalization Postmodernism and Identity

Consumer Culture and Postmodernism