Postmodernism

Postmodernism Abstracts, Books on Postmodernism, Sociologyindex, Bibliography, Syllabus, Journals, Sociology Books 2011

Postmodernism is hard to define, because it 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 hard to locate postmodernism temporally or historically, because it's not clear exactly when postmodernism begins.

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

Postmodernism is a complicated term, or set of ideas, one that has only emerged as an area of academic study since the mid-1980s. The best way to start thinking about postmodernism is by first thinking about modernism, the movement from which postmodernism grew.

The first facet or definition of modernism comes from the aesthetic movement broadly labeled "modernism." This movement is roughly coterminous with twentieth century Western ideas about art (though traces of it in emergent forms can be found in the nineteenth century as well). 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 and do: figures like Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Proust, Mallarme, Kafka, and Rilke are considered the founders of twentieth-century modernism.

Postmodernism, like modernism, 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 (especially in narrative structures), ambiguity, simultaneity, and an emphasis on the destructured, decentered, dehumanized subject.

But, while postmodernism seems very much like modernism in these ways, it differs from modernism in its attitude toward a lot of these trends. Modernism, for example, tends to present a fragmented view of human subjectivity and history (think of The Wasteland, for instance, or of Woolf's To the Lighthouse), 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, provisionality, or incoherence, but rather celebrates that. The world is meaningless? Let's not pretend that art can make meaning then, let's just play with nonsense.

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. Jameson outlines three primary phases of capitalism which dictate particular cultural practices (including what kind of art and literature is produced). The first is market capitalism, which occurred in the eighteenth through the late nineteenth centuries in Western Europe, England, and the United States (and all their spheres of influence).

This first phase is associated with particular technological developments, namely, the steam-driven motor, and with a particular kind of aesthetics, namely, realism.

The second phase occurred from the late nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century; this phase, monopoly capitalism, is associated with electric and internal combustion motors, and with modernism.

The third, the phase we're in now, is multinational or consumer capitalism (with the emphasis placed on marketing, selling, and consuming commodities, not on producing them), associated with nuclear and electronic technologies, and correlated with postmodernism. - - http://www.colorado.edu/English/ ENGL2012Klages/pomo.html

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

Talking pomo: An analysis of the postmodern movement
by Steve Mizrach (aka Seeker1) - fiu.edu/~mizrachs/pomo.html
Postmodernism according to friends, foes, and spectators
"Critics of postmodernism come mainly from the Marxist camp. They feel that postmodernism is a diversionary tactic, the last ditch of a late capitalism in the process of dying. They dislike fervently the way that postmodern aesthetics rejects socialist realism - and, for that matter, epistemological realism. They often point out how semiotics and the postmodern idea that everything is image and nothing is substance are used cynically by advertising agencies - which, unable to sell us real goods of real production, can now only sell us images of satisfaction and packaged happiness. Marxists also dislike postmodernism's relativist treatment of science, since as they see 'criticism' (the critical method) and science as being identical. And they are not all too pleased by postmodernism's rejection of the proletariat and industrialism as liberators, nor its insistence (dating from the Situationists) that liberation of leisure may be more important than liberation of work... the way postmodernism intertwines with Nietzschean thought, deep ecology, mysticism, and libertarian individualism makes many Marxists view it as right-wing, reactionary, perhaps even fascist!"

HOW TO SPEAK AND WRITE POSTMODERN
Stephen Katz in humourous vein
by Stephen Katz, Associate Professor, Sociology Trent University, Peterborough, Canada - gettingintogradschool.com/book/how-to-speak-and-write-postmodern
Postmodernism has been the buzzword in academia for the last decade. Books, journal articles, conference themes and university courses have resounded to the debates about postmodernism that focus on the uniqueness of our times, where computerization, the global economy and the media have irrevocably transformed all forms of social engagement. As a professor of sociology who teaches about culture, I include myself in this environment. Indeed, I have a great interest in postmodernism both as an intellectual movement and as a practical problem. In my experience there seems to be a gulf between those who see the postmodern turn as a neo-conservative reupholstering of the same old corporate trappings, and those who see it as a long overdue break with modernist doctrines in education, aesthetics and politics. Of course there are all kinds of positions in between, depending upon how one sorts out the optimum route into the next millennium. However, I think the real gulf is not so much positional as linguistic.

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

Postmodernism and Social Inquiry

The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism

Postmodernism A Very Short Introduction

Against Postmodernism

Social Postmodernism