27/6/13
I have some good news—kick back, relax, enjoy the rest of the summer, stop worrying about where your life is and isn’t heading. What news? Well, on 24th September, we can officially and definitively declare that postmodernism is dead. Finished. History. A difficult period in human thought over and done with. How do I know this? Because that is the date when the Victoria and Albert Museum opens what it calls “the first comprehensive retrospective” in the world: “Postmodernism—Style and Subversion 1970-1990.”
Wait, I hear you cry. How do they know? And what was it? Postmodernism—I didn’t understand it. I never understood it. How can it be over?
You are not alone. If there’s one word that confuses, upsets, angers, beleaguers, exhausts and contaminates us all, then it is postmodernism. And yet, properly understood, postmodernism is playful, intelligent, funny and fascinating. From Grace Jones to Lady Gaga, from Andy Warhol to Gilbert and George, from Paul Auster to David Foster Wallace, its influence has been everywhere and continues. It has been the dominant idea of our age.
I found this post on the internet rather interesting as I am new to post-modernism and don't quite get it yet, so hearing that it was dead came to a surprise to me as I don't really know what exactly is dead? However this has helped me to understand it a bit more.
8/7/13
Postmodernity can mean a personal response to a postmodern society, the conditions in a society which make it postmodern or the state of being that is associated with a postmodern society. In most contexts it should be distinguished from postmodernism, the adoption of postmodern philosophies or traits in art, literature, culture and society.
Postmodernism is generally used to describe the cultural state and condition of society which is said to exist after modernity. It can also mean a personal response in society.
13/7/13
bbc
"The term 'postmodernism' has become so over-used during the past 50 years that it is now difficult to take seriously as a respectable philosophical or sociological concept. However, despite the difficulty many people seem to have in making sense of it, this very ubiquity can be taken as an indication that postmodernism fulfils a useful role in the way people think about the changes that society has undergone during this period.
In order to understand it we need briefly to examine the modernism that postmodernism is supposed to be replacing. Generally, history is too messy to be divided into neat periods but a classification in which...
- The Ancient World ended with the fall of the Roman Empire
- The Middle Ages lasted until the Renaissance, and
- The Modern World developed through the Reformation and the Enlightenment
...is not too controversial for our purposes.
What, then, was different about the modern world from that which existed before? One way of looking at the difference is through individual identity. People no longer identified themselves by their place in a rigid social structure; nor did they judge the success of their lives on how closely they had conformed to the course pre-determined by their place within that framework. The way of defining the individual began to change1, and it became necessary to find criteria that could define a good or successful life, other than those of established authority."
This pieces of research was more easy to understand
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