# REDIRECT Postmodern philosophy

Postmodern philosophy is a philosophical direction which is critical of the foundational assumptions and structures of philosophy.

Postmodern philosophy is skeptical or nihilistic toward many of the values and assumptions of philosophy that derive from modernity, such as humanity having an essence which distinguishes humans from animals, or the assumption that one form of government is demonstrably better than another.

Postmodern philosophy is often particularly skeptical about simple binary oppositions characteristic of structuralism, emphasizing the problem of the philosopher cleanly distinguishing knowledge from ignorance, social progress from reversion, dominance from submission, and presence from absence.

Postmodern philosophy also drew from the world of the arts and architecture, particularly Marcel Duchamp, John Cage and artists who practiced collage, and the architecture of Las Vegas and the Pompidou Centre.

* Postmodern theatre – originated in Europe in the middle of the twentieth century out of the postmodern philosophy as a reaction against modernist theatre.

The Postmodern social construction of nature is a theory of postmodernist continental philosophy that poses an alternative critique of previous mainstream, promethean dialogue about environmental sustainability and ecopolitics.

* Postmodern philosophy

; and also from dance-specific practices, drawing from Modern and Postmodern dance, as well as Eastern movement philosophy and practice such as Yoga and Martial Arts.

Postmodern theatre is a recent phenomenon in world theatre, coming as it does out of the postmodern philosophy that originated in Europe in the middle of the twentieth century.

Postmodern Christianity is any form of Christianity which has been influenced by postmodern philosophy.

Noting this important conceptual shift, major contemporary theorists such as Matei Calinescu in Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism ( 1987 ), and Hans Bertens in The Idea of the Postmodern: A History ( 1995 ), have suggested that this is a sign our culture has entered a new post-modern age, when the former modernist ways of thinking and behaving have been rendered redundant.

Postmodern art has questioned common rules and guidelines of what is regarded as ' fine art ', merging low art with the fine arts until none is fully distinguishable.

Postmodern theology seeks to respond to the challenges of post modern and deconstructionist thought, and has included the death of God movement, Process Theology, Feminist theology and Queer Theology and most importantly Neo-orthodox Theology.

Postmodern education should emphasize works not in the canon ; it should focus on the achievements of non-whites, females, and the poor ; it should highlight the historical crimes of whites, males, and the rich ; and it should teach students that science ’ s method has no better claim to yielding truth than any other method and, accordingly, that students should be equally receptive to alternative ways of knowing.

Postmodern art, for instance, places a strong emphasis on irony, parody and humour in general ; modern art started to develop a more ironic approach to art which would later advance in a postmodern context.

Postmodern art blurred these distinctions, bringing a strong element of kitsch, commercialism and campness into contemporary fine art ; what is nowadays seen as fine art may have been seen as low art before postmodernism revolutionised the concept of what high or fine art truly is.

When it becomes possible for a people to describe as ‘ postmodern ’ the décor of a room, the design of a building, the diegesis of a film, the construction of a record, or a ‘ scratch ’ video, a television commercial, or an arts documentary, or the ‘ intertextual ’ relations between them, the layout of a page in a fashion magazine or critical journal, an anti-teleological tendency within epistemology, the attack on the ‘ metaphysics of presence ’, a general attenuation of feeling, the collective chagrin and morbid projections of a post-War generation of baby boomers confronting disillusioned middle-age, the ‘ predicament ’ of reflexivity, a group of rhetorical tropes, a proliferation of surfaces, a new phase in commodity fetishism, a fascination for images, codes and styles, a process of cultural, political or existential fragmentation and / or crisis, the ‘ de-centring ’ of the subject, an ‘ incredulity towards metanarratives ’, the replacement of unitary power axes by a plurality of power / discourse formations, the ‘ implosion of meaning ’, the collapse of cultural hierarchies, the dread engendered by the threat of nuclear self-destruction, the decline of the university, the functioning and effects of the new miniaturised technologies, broad societal and economic shifts into a ‘ media ’, ‘ consumer ’ or ‘ multinational ’ phase, a sense ( depending on who you read ) of ‘ placelessness ’ or the abandonment of placelessness (‘ critical regionalism ’) or ( even ) a generalised substitution of spatial for temporal coordinates-when it becomes possible to describe all these things as ‘ Postmodern ’ ( or more simply using a current abbreviation as ‘ post ’ or ‘ very post ’) then it ’ s clear we are in the presence of a buzzword.

While the term " Postmodern " and its derivatives are freely used, with some uses apparently contradicting others, those outside the academic milieu have described it as merely a buzzword that means nothing.

Literary postmodernism was officially inaugurated in the United States with the first issue of boundary 2, subtitled " Journal of Postmodern Literature and Culture ", which appeared in 1972.

Postmodern music, on the other hand, shares characteristics with postmodernist art — that is, art that comes after and reacts against modernism ( see Modernism in Music ).

As a proponent of anti-foundationalism and anti-essentialism within a Pragmatist framework, he echoes Postmodern strains of Conventionalism and Philosophical Relativism, but opposes much Postmodern thinking with his commitment to Social Liberalism.

In some respects, Postmodern music could be categorized as simply the music of the postmodern era, or music that follows aesthetic and philosophical trends of postmodernism, but with Jameson in mind, it is clear these definitions are inadequate.

Postmodern novelist Thomas Pynchon, who was also influenced by Beat fiction, experimented since the 1960s with the surrealist idea of startling juxtapositions ; commenting on the " necessity of managing this procedure with some degree of care and skill ", he added that " any old combination of details will not do.

Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century, with the advent of Modern and Postmodern art forms, distinctions between what is generally regarded as the fine arts and the low arts have started to fade, as contemporary high art continues to challenge these concepts by mixing with popular culture.

Postmodern novelists such as John Barth and Thomas Pynchon operate with even more freedom, mixing historical characters and settings with invented history and fantasy, as in the novels The Sot-Weed Factor and Mason & Dixon respectively.

For convenient access to many of Ritzer ’ s substantive contributions to modern and postmodern social theorizing, see Explorations in Social Theory: From Metatheorizing to Rationalization ( 2001 ) as well as more recent work often co-authored with his many students, such as ( with J. Michael Ryan ) “ Postmodern Social Theory and Sociology: On Symbolic Exchange with a ‘ Dead ’ Theory ,” in Reconstructing Postmodernism: Critical Debates ( 2007 ).

" Against Postmodernism, etcetera -- A Conversation with Susan Sontag " in Postmodern Culture, vol.

Postmodern pastiche of Chandler in which the protagonist shares his name with Marlowe.

Postmodern theorist Fredric Jameson calls it " a kind of hyped-up name-dropping ... an encyclopaedic familiarity with the fashions ... class status as a matter of knowing the score rather than of having money and power ".

* Postmodern theory: An approach that is critical of modernism, with a mistrust of grand theories and ideologies.

Postmodern art sees the blurring between the high and fine arts with low-end and commercial art ; modern art started to experiment with this blurring.

In an interview with Anglistik Gass commented on the subject of his genre and form defying works, laughing off the title " Postmodern ," and coining himself " Late " or " Decayed Modern "

* " Interview with Laura Hinton ", Postmodern Culture, Issue 16, Vol.

In 1971, the Arab-American scholar Ihab Hassan published The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature, an early work of literary criticism from a postmodern perspective, in which the author traces the development of what he calls " literature of silence " through Marquis de Sade, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Beckett, and many others, including developments such as the Theatre of the Absurd and the nouveau roman.

His writings have had a major influence on the larger body of Postmodern academic literature.

* Postmodern literature

Category: Postmodern literature

The main periods of 20th century literature are captured in the bipartite division, Modernist literature and Postmodern literature, flowering from roughly 1900 to 1940 and 1945 to 1980 respectively, divided, as a rule of thumb, by World War II.

Category: Postmodern literature

* Postmodern literature

Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is hard to define and there is little agreement on the exact characteristics, scope, and importance of postmodern literature.

Category: Postmodern literature

Category: Postmodern literature

It is more often thought of as a work of Postmodern literature, as evidenced by its inclusion in the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction.

* Postmodern literature