Monthly Archive for July, 2010

From Alan Kirby at The Times Higher Education…

Postmodernism is dead. Wail and rend your clothes. Postmodernism is dead. The tyrant is vanquished!

Can the rumours be true? Can postmodernism, the darling of the humanities for a quarter of a century, really have departed this world?

Who says postmodernism is dead? Jean-Michel Rabaté, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania, for one. For him, the term is “now almost completely discarded”.

Scholars who a generation or so ago built their careers on explaining the meaning of postmodernism now tell us the game is over. Linda Hutcheon, the Canadian literary critic, whose 1988 book A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction became a standard text, now calls it “a twentieth-century phenomenon, that is, a thing of the past … Let’s just say: it’s over.” The Egyptian-born critic Ihab Hassan, who pioneered the study of postmodern culture in the 1970s, explored similar territory in a recent paper, “Beyond postmodernism: toward an aesthetic of trust”. And the American architectural theorist Charles Jencks, whose 1977 book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture helped popularise the term, now believes that postmodernism came to an end around the turn of the millennium. In fact, as the American literary critic Andrew Hoberek says, “declarations of postmodernism’s demise have become a critical commonplace”. They are everywhere … but are they true? More…