Defining Postmodernism

Three ways define post-modernism:
by Amy Elias (author of Sublime Desire)


1. Post-modernity
-epistemological postmodernism: a way of understanding the self
-a reaction to enlightenment modernity, the individual, scientific method, empiricism

Thoughts that can't be thought within enlightenment modernity, non-discursive, non-representational truth that can't be spoken


2. Sociocultural Postmodernism
-Post WWII society
-Quansut hut (used for building army barracks fast) --> ranch house,
Suburbs, Levittown, PA

-Diminished importance of the nation state, increasing significance of global migration, conomic importance of service and entertainment
workers rights
-service and capital flows vs. people flows

-aestheticizing of every day life
-life's increasingly dependent on technology and marketable images
-adult playgrounds
-life as Disneyland
-infotainment


3. Artistic
-new style after 1950s, reaction to modernism (1890 and 1930) cubism, Dada, James Joyce
-retains modernist experimentalism but stripped of utopian politics

-key characteristic is irony
-elevation of low art forms, like comic strips and detective story to high art

Artists
Andy Warhol
Cindy Sherman

Architects
Philip Johnson
James Sterling

Literature
Thomas Pynchon

-contested: some say this is just the rest of modernism
-hard to separate high modernists and post-modernists
but does seem to be some break Gertrude Stein wouldn't watch Bachelorette, emailing Ezra Pound