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| postmodernism literature for dummies: Postmodernism for Beginners Jim Powell, 2007 If you are like most people, you're not sure what Postmodernism is. And if this were like most books on the subject, it probably wouldn't tell you. Jim Powell takes the position that Postmodernism is a series of `maps' that help people find their way through a changing world. Postmodernism For Beginners features the thoughts of Foucault on power and knowledge, Jameson on mapping the postmodern, Baudrillard on the media, Harvey on time-space compression, Derrida on deconstruction and Deleuze and Guattari on rhizomes. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Postmodern American Literature and Its Other W. Lawrence Hogue, 2009 Redefining postmodern American literature to include the voices of women and nonwhite writers |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Postmodernism Kevin Hart, 2004-04-01 Adopting the role of tour guide, award-winning writer Kevin Hart leads the reader through the pitfalls, conundrums and complexities that characterize postmodernism, while providing an overview of the many different approaches (philosophical, cultural, literary…) to the subject. All the major thinkers are introduced – from Derrida to Blanchot, Irigaray to Foucault, and more besides – while the book is unique among introductory guides in its consideration of the role of religion in a postmodern world. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: A Poetics of Postmodernism Linda Hutcheon, 2003-09-02 First published in 1988. Postmodernism is a word much used and misused in a variety of disciplines, including literature, visual arts, film, architecture, literary theory, history, and philosophy. A Poetics of Postmodernism is neither a defense nor a denunciation of the postmodern. It continues the project of Hutcheon's Narcissistic Narrative and A Theory of Parody in studying formal self-consciousness in art, but adds to this both a historical and ideological dimension. Modelled on postmodern architecture, postmodernism is the name given here to current cultural practices characterized by major paradoxes of form and of ideology. The poetics of postmodernism offered here is drawn from these contradictions, as seen in the intersecting concerns of both contemporary theory and cultural practice. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: From Puritanism to Postmodernism Richard Ruland, Malcolm Bradbury, 2016-04-14 Widely acknowledged as a contemporary classic that has introduced thousands of readers to American literature, From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature brilliantly charts the fascinating story of American literature from the Puritan legacy to the advent of postmodernism. From realism and romanticism to modernism and postmodernism it examines and reflects on the work of a rich panoply of writers, including Poe, Melville, Fitzgerald, Pound, Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks and Thomas Pynchon. Characterised throughout by a vibrant and engaging style it is a superb introduction to American literature, placing it thoughtfully in its rich social, ideological and historical context. A tour de force of both literary and historical writing, this Routledge Classics edition includes a new preface by co-author Richard Ruland, a new foreword by Linda Wagner-Martin and a fascinating interview with Richard Ruland, in which he reflects on the nature of American fiction and his collaboration with Malclolm Bradbury. It is published here for the first time. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Postmodern Belief Amy Hungerford, 2010-07-01 How can intense religious beliefs coexist with pluralism in America today? Examining the role of the religious imagination in contemporary religious practice and in some of the best-known works of American literature from the past fifty years, Postmodern Belief shows how belief for its own sake--a belief absent of doctrine--has become an answer to pluralism in a secular age. Amy Hungerford reveals how imaginative literature and religious practices together allow novelists, poets, and critics to express the formal elements of language in transcendent terms, conferring upon words a religious value independent of meaning. Hungerford explores the work of major American writers, including Allen Ginsberg, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Marilynne Robinson, and links their unique visions to the religious worlds they touch. She illustrates how Ginsberg's chant-infused 1960s poetry echoes the tongue-speaking of Charismatic Christians, how DeLillo reimagines the novel and the Latin Mass, why McCarthy's prose imitates the Bible, and why Morrison's fiction needs the supernatural. Uncovering how literature and religion conceive of a world where religious belief can escape confrontations with other worldviews, Hungerford corrects recent efforts to discard the importance of belief in understanding religious life, and argues that belief in belief itself can transform secular reading and writing into a religious act. Honoring the ways in which people talk about and practice religion, Postmodern Belief highlights the claims of the religious imagination in twentieth-century American culture. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Postmodernism for Historians Callum G. Brown, 2013-12-02 Postmodernism is an essential approach to History. This is the first dedicated primer on postmodernism for the historian. It offers a step-by-step guide to postmodern theory, includes a guide to how historians have applied the theory, and provides a review of why its critics are wrong. In simple and clear language, it takes the reader through the chain of theory that developed in the 20th century to become now, in the early 21st century, the leading stimulant of new forms of research in History. With separate chapters on The Sign, The Discourse, Post/Structuralism, The Text, The Self, and Morality, this book will encourage a new critical awareness of Theory when reading books of History, and when writing essays and dissertations. Armed with the principal ideas of Saussure, Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida, the historians can formulate how to combine empirical History with the excitement of fresh perspectives and new skills, merged in the new moral impetus of the postmodern condition. Designed for the beginner this is the essential postmodern starting point. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Derrida For Beginners Jim Powell, 2007-08-21 In 1966, Jacques Derrida gave a lecture at Johns Hopkins University that cast the entire history of Western Philosophy into doubt. The following year, Derrida published three brilliant but mystifying books that convinced the pollsters that he was the most important philosopher of the late 20th Century. Unfortunately, nobody was sure whether the intellectual movement that he spawned – Deconstruction – advanced philosophy or murdered it. The truth? – Derrida is one of those annoying geniuses you can take a class on, read half-a-dozen books by and still have no idea what he’s talking about. Derrida’s ‘writing’ – confusing doesn’t begin to describe it (it’s like he’s pulling the rug out from under the rug that he pulled out from under philosophy.) But beneath the confusion, like the heartbeat of a bird in your hand, you can feel Derrida’s electric genius. It draws you to it; you want to understand it... but it’s so confusing. What you need, Ducky, is Derrida For Beginners by James Powell! Jim Powell’s Derrida For Beginners is the clearest explanation of Derrida and deconstruction presently available in our solar system. Powell guides us through blindingly obscure texts like Of Grammatology (Derrida’s deconstruction of Saussure, Lévi Strauss, and Rousseau), “Différance” (his essay on language and life), Dissemination (his dismantling of Plato, his rap on Mallarmé), and Derrida’s other masterpieces (the mere titles can make strong men tremble in terror – Glas, Signéponge/Signsponge, The Post Card, and Specters of Marx.) Readers will learn the coolest Derridian buzzwords (e.g., intertextuality, binary oppositions, hymen, sous rature, arche-writing, phallogocentrism), the high-and-low lights of deconstruction’s history (including the DeMan controvercy), and the various criticisms of Derrida and deconstruction, including Camille Paglia’s objection that America, the rock-n-roll nation, isn’t formal enough to need deconstruction. The master, however, begs to disagree: “America is Deconstruction” -Jacques Derrida |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction Bran Nicol, 2009-10-08 Postmodern fiction presents a challenge to the reader: instead of enjoying it passively, the reader has to work to understand its meanings, to think about what fiction is, and to question their own responses. Yet this very challenge makes postmodern writing so much fun to read and rewarding to study. Unlike most introductions to postmodernism and fiction, this book places the emphasis on literature rather than theory. It introduces the most prominent British and American novelists associated with postmodernism, from the 'pioneers', Beckett, Borges and Burroughs, to important post-war writers such as Pynchon, Carter, Atwood, Morrison, Gibson, Auster, DeLillo, and Ellis. Designed for students and clearly written, this Introduction explains the preoccupations, styles and techniques that unite postmodern authors. Their work is characterized by a self-reflexive acknowledgement of its status as fiction, and by the various ways in which it challenges readers to question common-sense and commonplace assumptions about literature. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Late Postmodernism J. Green, 2005-05-12 Does the novel have a future? Questions of this kind, which are as old as the novel itself, acquired a fresh urgency at the end of the twentieth-century with the rise of new media and the relegation of literature to the margins of American culture. As a result, anxieties about readership, cultural authority and literary value have come to preoccupy a second generation of postmodern novelists. Through close analysis of several major novels of the past decade, including works by Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Kathryn Davis, Jonathan Franzen and Richard Powers, Late Postmodernism examines the forces shaping contemporary literature and the remarkable strategies American writers have adopted to make sense of their place in culture. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Understand Postmodernism Glenn Ward, 2010 Explore the wide-ranging and sometimes demanding terrain of postmodernism. This guide tracks the emergence of postmodern theory and explores it in the context of art, literature, politics, philosophy and more. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Signs and Cities Madhu Dubey, 2007-11-01 Signs and Cities is the first book to consider what it means to speak of a postmodern moment in African-American literature. Dubey argues that for African-American studies, postmodernity best names a period, beginning in the early 1970s, marked by acute disenchantment with the promises of urban modernity and of print literacy. Dubey shows how black novelists from the last three decades have reconsidered the modern urban legacy and thus articulated a distinctly African-American strain of postmodernism. She argues that novelists such as Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Ishmael Reed, Sapphire, and John Edgar Wideman probe the disillusionment of urban modernity through repeated recourse to tropes of the book and scenes of reading and writing. Ultimately, she demonstrates that these writers view the book with profound ambivalence, construing it as an urban medium that cannot recapture the face-to-face communities assumed by oral and folk forms of expression. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Fredric Jameson, 1992-01-06 Now in paperback, Fredric Jameson’s most wide-ranging work seeks to crystalize a definition of ”postmodernism”. Jameson’s inquiry looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from “high” art to “low” from market ideology to architecture, from painting to “punk” film, from video art to literature. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Constructing Postmodernism Brian McHale, 2012-11-12 Brian McHale provides a series of readings of a wide range of postmodernist fiction, from Eco's Foucault's Pendulum to the works of cyberpunk science-fiction, relating the works to aspects of postmodern popular culture. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Sound and Aural Media in Postmodern Literature Justin St. Clair, 2013 |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Wittgenstein's Mistress David Markson, 2023-11-14 Wittgenstein's Mistress is a novel unlike anything David Markson or anyone else has ever written before. It is the story of a woman who is convinced and, astonishingly, will ultimately convince the reader as well that she is the only person left on earth. Presumably she is mad. And yet so appealing is her character, and so witty and seductive her narrative voice, that we will follow her hypnotically as she unloads the intellectual baggage of a lifetime in a series of irreverent meditations on everything and everybody from Brahms to sex to Heidegger to Helen of Troy. And as she contemplates aspects of the troubled past which have brought her to her present state—obviously a metaphor for ultimate loneliness—so too will her drama become one of the few certifiably original fictions of our time. “The novel I liked best this year,” said the Washington Times upon the book’s publication; “one dizzying, delightful, funny passage after another . . . Wittgenstein’s Mistress gives proof positive that the experimental novel can produce high, pure works of imagination.” |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism Stuart Sim, 2012-05-23 This fully revised third edition of The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism provides the ideal introduction to postmodernist thought. Featuring contributions from a cast of international scholars, the Companion contains 19 detailed essays on major themes and topics along with an A-Z of key terms and concepts. As well as revised essays on philosophy, politics, literature, and more, the first section now contains brand new essays on critical theory, business, gender and the performing arts. The concepts section, too, has been enhanced with new topics ranging from hypermedia to global warming. Students interested in any aspect of postmodernism will continue to find this an indispensable resource. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature Brian McHale, Len Platt, 2020-12-17 The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature offers a comprehensive survey of the field, from its emergence in the mid-twentieth century to the present day. It offers an unparalleled examination of all facets of postmodern writing that helps readers to understand how fiction and poetry, literary criticism, feminist theory, mass media, and the visual and fine arts have characterized the historical development of postmodernism. Covering subjects from the Cold War and countercultures to the Latin American Boom and magic realism, this History traces the genealogy of a literary tradition while remaining grounded in current scholarship. It also presents new critical approaches to postmodern literature that will serve the needs of students and specialists alike. Written by a host of leading scholars, this History will not only engage readers in contemporary debates but also serve as a definitive reference for years to come. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Introducing Postmodernism Richard Appignanesi, Chris Garratt, 2003 Postmodernism is the maddeningly enigmatic concept which is supposed to describe our cultural condition the world over. In this newly updated edition the author asks what this over-used term means in 2003 and beyond. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Literary Criticism Joseph North, 2017-05-08 Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- 1. The Critical Revolution Turns Right -- 2. The Scholarly Turn -- 3. The Historicist/Contextualist Paradigm -- 4. The Critical Unconscious -- Conclusion: The Future of Criticism -- Appendix: The Critical Paradigm and T.S. Eliot -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism Brian McHale, 2015-06-25 The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism surveys the full spectrum of postmodern culture - high and low, avant-garde and popular, famous and obscure - across a range of fields, from architecture and visual art to fiction, poetry, and drama. It deftly maps postmodernism's successive historical phases, from its emergence in the 1960s to its waning in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Weaving together multiple strands of postmodernism - people and places from Andy Warhol, Jefferson Airplane and magical realism, to Jean-François Lyotard, Laurie Anderson and cyberpunk - this book creates a rich picture of a complex cultural phenomenon that continues to exert an influence over our present 'post-postmodern' situation. Comprehensive and accessible, this Introduction is indispensable for scholars, students, and general readers interested in late twentieth-century culture. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Succeeding Postmodernism Mary K. Holland, 2013-04-25 While critics collect around the question of what comes after postmodernism, this book asks something different about recent American fiction: what if we are seeing not the end of postmodernism but its belated success? Succeeding Postmodernism examines how novels by DeLillo, Wallace, Danielewski, Foer and others conceptualize threats to individuals and communities posed by a poststructural culture of mediation and simulation, and possible ways of resisting the disaffected solipsism bred by that culture. Ultimately it finds that twenty-first century American fiction sets aside the postmodern problem of how language does or does not mean in order to raise the reassuringly retro question of what it can and does mean: it finds that novels today offer language as solution to the problem of language. Thus it suggests a new way of reading antihumanist late postmodern fiction, and a framework for understanding postmodern and twenty-first century fiction as participating in a long and newly enlivened tradition of humanism and realism in literature. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Qualified Hope Mitchum Huehls, 2021-01-29 What is the political value of time, and where does that value reside? Should politics place its hope in future possibility, or does that simply defer action in the present? Can the present ground a vision of change, or is it too circumscribed by the status quo? In Qualified Hope: A Postmodern Politics of Time, Mitchum Huehls contends that conventional treatments of time's relationship to politics are limited by a focus on real-world experiences of time. By contrast, the innovative literary forms developed by authors in direct response to political events such as the Cold War, globalization, the emergence of identity politics, and 9/11 offer readers uniquely literary experiences of time. And it is in these literary experiences of time that Qualified Hope identifies more complicated--and thus more productive--ways to think about the time-politics relationship. Qualified Hope challenges the conventional characterization of postmodernism as a period in which authors reject time in favor of space as the primary category for organizing experience and knowledge. And by identifying a common commitment to time at the heart of postmodern literature, Huehls suggests that the period-defining divide between multiculturalism and theory is not as stark as previously thought. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: The Routledge Introduction to American Postmodernism Linda Wagner-Martin, 2018-10-03 The Routledge Introduction to American Postmodernism offers readers a fresh, insightful overview to all genres of postmodern writing. Drawing on a variety of works from not only mainstream authors but also those that are arguably unconventional, renowned scholar Linda Wagner-Martin gives the reader a solid framework and foundation to reading, understanding, and appreciating postmodern literature since its inception through the present day. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Postmodernist Fiction Brian McHale, 2003-09-02 In this trenchant and lively study Brian McHale undertakes to construct a version of postmodernist fiction which encompasses forms as wide-ranging as North American metafiction, Latin American magic realism, the French New New Novel, concrete prose and science fiction. Considering a variety of theoretical approaches including those of Ingarden, Eco, Dolezel, Pavel, and Hrushovski, McHale shows that the common denominator is postmodernist fiction's ability to thrust its own ontological status into the foreground and to raise questions about the world (or worlds) in which we live. Exploiting various theoretical approaches to literary ontology - those of Ingarden, Eco, Dolezel, Pavel, Hrushovski and others - and ranging widely over contemporary world literature, McHale assembles a comprehensive repertoire of postmodernist fiction's strategies of world-making and -unmaking. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Defining Literary Postmodernism for the Twenty-First Century Matthias Stephan, 2019-04-25 This book presents a definition of literary postmodernism, using detective and science fictions as a frame. Through an exploration of both prior theoretical approaches, and indicators through characteristics of postmodernist fiction, this book identifies a structural framework to both understand and apply the lessons of postmodernism for the next generation. Within a growing consensus that the postmodern era has passed, this book examines the different conceptions of postmodernism and posits a meaningful definition, one which can provide the foundation for future literary expression. This theory is then applied to genre fiction, particularly detective fiction and science fiction, demonstrating that postmodernism is found in the structure, rather than questions posed about literary expression. Finally, Matthias Stephan considers post-postmodern movements, and how they can be expressed given this definition of literary postmodernism, moving forward to the twenty-first century. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Postmodern Approaches to the Short Story Farhat Iftekharrudin, 2003-03-30 Postmodernism, as a mode of the contemporary short story, has been clearly established and recognized by short story theorists. But postmodern theory, as pervasive as it has become among academics in the last half century, has scarcely been applied to the short story genre in particular. Many contemporary scholars, nonetheless, are currently making use of certain postmodern thematic approaches to help them determine meanings of particular short stories. T Short story theory began with Edgar Allan Poe's review of Twice-Told Tales, a collection of stories by his contemporary, Nathaniel Hawthorne. But theoretical discussions of the short story languished until modernism and the new criticism provided impetus for further development. Surprisingly, though, the next large critical movement, postmodernism, failed to address the short story as a genre. But while there is little postmodern theory concerning the short story, contemporary scholars have used certain postmodern critical approaches to help determine meaning. This book demonstrates the effect of postmodern theory on the study of the short story genre. The expert contributors to this volume examine such topics as genre and form, the role of the reader, cultural and ethnic diversity, and feminist perspectives on the short story. In doing so, they apply postmodern theoretical approaches to international short stories, be they in the traditional mode, the modern mode, or the postmodern mode. The volume looks at fiction by Edith Wharton, Henry James, Katherine Mansfield, and other authors, and at Iranian short fiction, the postcolonial short story, the fantastic in short fiction, and other subjects. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: The Postmodern Short Story Farhat Iftekharrudin, Joseph Boyden, Mary Rohrberger, Jaie Claudet, 2003-12-30 Short stories are usually defined in terms of characteristics of modernism, in which the story begins in the middle, develops according to a truncated plot, and ends with an epiphany. This approach tends to ignore postmodernism, a movement often characterized by a negation of objective reality where plots are seemingly abandoned, surfaces are extraordinary, and symbols turn inward on themselves. This book examines postmodern forms and characteristic themes by analyzing a group of short stories that make use of postmodern narrative strategies, including nonfictional fiction, gender profiling, and death as an image. The volume begins with a discussion of the blurred lines between fiction and nonfiction in the short story and imaginative personal essay. It then looks at the role of women in works by such authors as Sandra Cisneros, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joyce Carol Oates, and Lorrie Moore. This is followed by a section of chapters on postmodern masculinity and short fiction. The next section focuses on death as an image and theme in works by Richard Ford, Richard Brautigan, and James Joyce. The final set of chapters considers postmodern short fiction from South Africa and Canada. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: The Poverty of Postmodernism John O'Neill, 2002-11-01 The Poverty of Postmodernism rejects the current celebration of knowledge and value relativism. This is on the grounds that it renders critical reason and commonsense incapable of resisting the superifical ideologies of minoritarianism that leave the hard core of global capitalism unanalyzed. In this book John O'Neill examines the postmodern turn in the social sciences. From a phenomenological standpoint (Husserl, Merleau Ponty, Schutz, Winch), he challenges Lyotard's postrationalist reading of Wittgenstein and Habermas in order to defend commonsense reason and values that are constitutive of the everyday life-world. In addition he argues from the standpoint of Vico and Marx on the civil history of embodied mind that the post-rationalist celebration of the arts of superificiality undermines the recognition of the cultural debt each generation owes to past and post-generations. In a positive way O'Neill develops an account of the historical vocation of reason and of the charitable accountability of science to commonsense that is necessary to sustain the basic institutions of civic democracy. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Modernism/Postmodernism Peter Brooker, 2014-09-25 The concepts of 'Modernism' and 'Postmodernism' constitute the single most dominant issue of twentieth-century literature and culture and are the cause of much debate. In this influential volume, Peter Brooker presents some of the key viewpoints from a variety of major critics and sets these additionally alongside challenging arguments from Third World, Black and Feminist perspectives. His excellent Introduction and detailed headnotes for each section and essay provide an indispensable guide to interpreting the many different opinions, and prove to be valuable contributions in their own right. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Postmodernism Patricia Waugh, 1995-02-15 Postmodernism provides a collection of the incessantly cited but nevertheless still widely-scattered critical texts on postmodernism and literary theory. It includes all the classics as well as some less obvious, though no less stimulating, choices. An introduction and commentary by Pat Waugh provides essential information and offers a context within which to view the chosen texts. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Amnesiascope Steve Erickson, 2013-04-30 DIVDIVA washed-up novelist navigates the dreamscape of a cataclysm-ravaged Los Angeles /divDIV In the apocalyptic Los Angeles of Amnesiascope, time zones multiply freely, spectral figures roam the streets, and rings of fire separate the city from the rest of the country. The narrator, a former novelist, lives in a hotel and writes film criticism for a newspaper whose offices are located in a bombed-out theater. Viv, his girlfriend, is a sexually voracious artist, and together the two are collaborating on an avant-garde pornographic film. But in this world, what’s real and what’s merely the conjuring of the protagonist’s imagination—obsessed with dreams, movies, sex, and remembrance—is far from clear. At once outrageous and hypnotically lyrical, Amnesiascope enflames the reader’s memory. /div/div |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: The Book of Shadows Don Paterson, 2005 Aphorism (n.): a pithy observation which contains a general truth 'All my teachers have been women. Though several men have taken me aside for an hour to tell me things they know' The Book of Shadows contains several hundred reflections and aphorisms on love, God, art, sex, death, work, and the spirit, imagination and conduct of the human animal. Writing with the same mixture of high seriousness, dark humour and lyric precision that define his poetry, Don Paterson has made a book to carry everywhere and open anywhere - to brighten or darken the moment, but always to administer a jolt to the idling mind. 'Falling and flying are near-identical sensations, in all but one final detail. We should remember this when we see those men and women seemingly in love with their own decline' |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Women and Men Joseph McElroy, 2023-01-17 Beginning in childbirth and entered like a multiple dwelling in motion, Women and Men embraces and anatomizes the 1970s in New York - from experiments in the chaotic relations between the sexes to the flux of the city itself. Yet through an intricate overlay of scenes, voices, fact, and myth, this expanding fiction finds its way also across continents and into earlier and future times and indeed the Earth, to reveal connections between the most disparate lives and systems of feeling and power. At its breathing heart, it plots the fuguelike and fieldlike densities of late-twentieth-century life. McElroy rests a global vision on two people, apartment-house neighbors who never quite meet. Except, that is, in the population of others whose histories cross theirs believers and skeptics; lovers, friends, and hermits; children, parents, grandparents, avatars, and, apparently, angels. For Women and Men shows how the families through which we pass let one person's experience belong to that of many, so that we throw light on each other as if these kinships were refracted lives so real as to be reincarnate. A mirror of manners, the book is also a meditation on the languages, rich, ludicrous, exact, and also American, in which we try to grasp the world we're in. Along the kindred axes of separation and intimacy Women and Men extends the great line of twentieth-century innovative fiction. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Postmodernism and Narratives of Erasure in Culture, Literature, and Language Hassen Zriba, 2020-09-15 Edited by rising Tunisian literary scholar Hassen Zriba, Postmodernism and Narratives of Erasure in Culture, Literature, and Language is a collection of interdisciplinary essays arguing that the concept of erasure is an essential analytical tool/mode of thought in shaping conceptualizations of change and continuity in subjects of human knowledge. It defines erasure as the act of deleting, of removing something, following the German philosopher Martin Heidegger in his book Being and Time, and proceeds with the French deconstructionist Jacques Derrida's meaning of the inadequacy, but necessariness, of some words and concepts. In this volume's working definition, erasure is vital to unlocking the paradoxical nature of the very subject under erasure, allowing us to move beyond fixed binary creations of meaning and significance. Accordingly, erasure substitutes the classical metaphysics of presence (fixed meaning) with an alternative metaphysics of absence, where meaning is always under construction. Signs are relational, not referential. This book is unique in its use of an interdisciplinary approach to detect how erasure emerges in language, culture, and literature. It examines how the concept shapes and is shaped by various discursive and critical formations in culture, language, and literature. Its major contribution is to expound a fundamental concept of postmodern theory that has been under-theorized to advance understanding the realities of our post-modern times. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Postmodernism For Beginners Jim Powell, 2007-08-21 If you are like most people, you’re not sure what Postmodernism is. And if this were like most books on the subject, it probably wouldn’t tell you. Besides what a few grumpy critics claim, Postmodernism is not a bunch of meaningless intellectual mind games. On the contrary, it is a reaction to the most profound spiritual and philosophical crisis of our time – the failure of the Enlightenment. Jim Powell takes the position that Postmodernism is a series of “maps” that help people find their way through a changing world. Postmodernism For Beginners features the thoughts of Foucault on power and knowledge, Jameson on mapping the postmodern, Baudrillard on the media, Harvey on time-space compression, Derrida on deconstruction and Deleuze and Guattari on rhizomes. The book also discusses postmodern artifacts such as Madonna, cyberpunk, Buddhist ecology, and teledildonics. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Psalms as Postmodern Poetry Lyola Thomas, 2023-06-16 This book offers a refreshing new look at the Book of Psalms, presenting an analysis of the postmodern elements found in its poetry, and, as such, will be of special interest to scholars in the field of literature and Bible studies. The book highlights the continued relevance of the Book of Psalms as a source of sustenance and comfort, and as an enduring practical handbook for life. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Nostalgic Postmodernism Lois Shawver, 2005 Here's a book on postmodernism that is written in plain English. Whereas many books on postmodernism are so obscure that the Flesch index of readability goes off the chart (see Fredric Jameson's books, for example), Shawver's book is of average readability. That's excellent for a book on postmodernism. Her reviewers, too, seem inevitably to comment on the book's clear style. In this readable book, Shawver tells us the story of how therapy became postmodern. When therapy was modern, she tells us, therapists did therapy within the guidelines of specific schools. The postmodern therapist, however, works like a fine chef, highly trained, but invariably changing the recipe and spicing the food with her own salsa. Nostalgic postmodernism is just an early guilt-ridden phase in this postmodernism, but the postmodern therapist soon morphs out of nostalgia and recognizes and appreciates her postmodern shift. This story of the postmodernization of the therapists is cast, in this book, in the context of the history of therapy, and, to some extent, in the context of the author's own experience of her own postmodernization. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Postmodernism Thomas Docherty, 2016-07-01 This reader provides a selection of articles and essays by leading figures in the postmodernism debate. |
| postmodernism literature for dummies: Literary Research and American Postmodernism Emily Witsell, 2016-07-18 This book is a guide to scholarly research in the field of American postmodern literature, defined as the period between 1950 and 1990 and provide advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars of literature with a comprehensive view of the print and online resources available in literature and related subject areas |
Postmodernism - Wikipedia
Postmodernism encompasses a variety of artistic, cultural, and philosophical movements that claim to mark a break from modernism. …
Postmodernism - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Sep 30, 2005 · That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism. However, it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and …
Postmodernism | Definition, Doctrines, & Facts | Britannica
Apr 21, 2025 · postmodernism, in Western philosophy, a late 20th-century movement characterized by broad skepticism, …
What is Postmodernism? – Introduction to Philosophy
With Postmodernism, we leave the certainty of a single, integrated, and sense-making narrative, and we enter into a period cut …
What is Postmodernism? | Definitions, Examples & Analysis
Mar 12, 2023 · Postmodernism is a movement which emerged in the late twentieth century, characterised by suspicion of a universal …
Postmodernism - Wikipedia
Postmodernism encompasses a variety of artistic, cultural, and philosophical movements that claim to mark a break from modernism. They have in common the conviction that it is no …
Postmodernism - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Sep 30, 2005 · That postmodernism is indefinable is a truism. However, it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, …
Postmodernism | Definition, Doctrines, & Facts | Britannica
Apr 21, 2025 · postmodernism, in Western philosophy, a late 20th-century movement characterized by broad skepticism, subjectivism, or relativism; a general suspicion of reason; …
What is Postmodernism? – Introduction to Philosophy
With Postmodernism, we leave the certainty of a single, integrated, and sense-making narrative, and we enter into a period cut adrift from certainty, plunged into “multiple, incompatible, …
What is Postmodernism? | Definitions, Examples & Analysis
Mar 12, 2023 · Postmodernism is a movement which emerged in the late twentieth century, characterised by suspicion of a universal ‘truth’, which had dominated Western philosophy …
Postmodernism in Sociology: Characteristics, & Examples - Simply Psychology
In sociology, postmodernism is a perspective that emphasizes the social construction of reality, the role of language and discourse in shaping knowledge, and the fragmentation of identities …
Postmodernism and Its Critics – Anthropology
The term “postmodernism” is somewhat controversial since many doubt whether it can ever be dignified by conceptual coherence. For instance, it is difficult to reconcile postmodernist …
Postmodernism - Tate
Postmodernism can be seen as a reaction against the ideas and values of modernism, as well as a description of the period that followed modernism's dominance in cultural theory and practice …
Explainer: what is postmodernism? - The Conversation
Jan 2, 2014 · Postmodernism is best understood as a questioning of the ideas and values associated with a form of modernism that believes in progress and innovation.
Postmodernism - Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Postmodernism. Postmodernism is a style of doing philosophy that is often distinguished from the analytic style. The Postmodern era is the time period when postmodernism was popular, …
