A Postmodern Reader

✍ Scribed by Linda Hutcheon (editor)

• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Year: 1993
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 595
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Those who recognize that the concept of postmodernism is with us to stay and who meet the necessary responsibility of bringing it to our students will welcome this book. It is ample in its offerings; and from the point of view of the potential user, the convenience and utility of the collection are prime virtues.

"The mix is refreshing. The selections are both varied and representative; they touch on essential aspects of the topic and exhaust its full range; they also underscore the conflictive nature of what is called 'the postmodern'. " -- John W. Kronik, Cornell University

"This is an outstanding book--timely, lucid, and much-needed--whose aims are well-fulfilled and that moves with ease from theory to practice."-- Alison M. Lee, The University of Western Ontario

These readings are organized into four sections. The first explores the wellsprings of the debates in the relationship between the postmodern and the enterprise it both continues and contravenes: modernism. Here philosophers, social and political commentators, as well as cultural and literary analysts present controversial background essays on the complex history of postmodernism. The readings in the second section debate the possibility--or desirability--of trying to define the postmodern, given its cultural agenda of decentering, challenging, even undermining the guiding "master" narratives of Western culture. The readings in the third section explore postmodernism's complicated complicity with these very narratives, while the fourth section moves from theory to practice in order to investigate, in a variety of fields, the common denominators of the postmodern condition in action.

✦ Table of Contents

A Postmodern Reader
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: READING A POSTMODERN READER
Works Cited
I MODERN/POSTMODERN
Preface
Works Cited
Postmodernity, or Living with Ambivalence
From Tolerance to Solidarity
The Exorcist and The Omen, or Modern and Postmodern Limits to Knowledge
Notes
The Postmodern Weltanschauung and its Relation to Modernism: An Introductory Survey
0. Introduction.
1. A Historical Survey: 1934 to the mid-1970s
1.1. The Term ''Postmodern" from 1934 to 1964
1.2. Postmodernism and the American Counterculture: the Mid-Sixties.
1.3 Postmodernism as an Intellectual Revolt against Modernism
1.4. Existentialist Postmodernism
2. Toward a Synthesis: from Postmodernisms to Postmodernism
2.1. The Postmodernism of Ihab Hassan: the Emerging of a New Episteme
2.2. The Postmodern Episteme: Other Approaches
3. Literary Postmodernism Revisited
3.1. Graff, Mellard, Wilde and Others
4. Questions and a Few Tentative Conclusions
References
Excerpts from The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
Introduction
6. The Pragmatics of Narrative Knowledge
7. The Pragmatics of Scientific Knowledge
8. The Narrative Function and the Legitimation of Knowledge
Notes
Modernity versus Postmodernity*
"The Ancients and the Moderns"
The Discipline of Aesthetic Modernity
Cultural Modernity and Societal Modernization
The Project of Enlightenment
The False Programs of the Negation of Culture
Alternatives
Mapping the Postmodern
A Story
The Problem
The Exhaustion of the Modernist Movement
Postmodernism in the 1960s: An American Avantgarde?
Postmodernism in the 1970s and 1980s
Habermas and the Question of Neo-Conservatism
Poststructuralism: Modern or Postmodern?
Whither Postmodernism?
Notes
Modernism versus Postmodernism: Towards an Analytic istinction
I
II
III
Notes
References and Related Works
II REPRESENTING THE POSTMODERN
Preface
Works Cited
Excerpts from Postmodernism and Its Critics
Notes
Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences1
Notes
Beginning to Theorize Postmodernism
References
Toward a Concept of Postmodernism
Notes
The Context of the Concept
Preface
Notes
III ENTANGLEMENTS AND COMPLICITIES
Preface
Works Cited
Excerpts from Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Notes
Excerpts from The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction
Method
1. Rule of immanence
2. Rules of continual variations
3. Rule of double conditioning
4. Rule of the tactical polyvalence of discourses
The Precession of Simulacra
The Divine Irreference of Images
Rameses, or Rose-Colored Resurrection
Hyperreal and Imaginary
Political Incantation
Moebius-Spiraling Negativity
Strategy of the Real
The End of the Panopticon
Orbital and Nuclear
Notes
The Resolution of Revolutions
Notes
Black Culture and Postmodernism
From Here to Modernity: Feminism and Postmodernism
I. The Collapse of The Master Narrative
II. The "Nostalgia" Film
III. Gyncsis, Postmodernism and The Sci-fi Horror Film
IV. Feminism and Gynesis: The Search for The Mother
V. Conclusions
Notes
Excerpts from Thinking Fragments
Gender: Its Absence and Effects in and on Postmodernist Spaces
Notes
Modernism's Last Post
Notes
Works Cited
IV POSTMODERN PRACTICES
Preface
Works Cited
Postmodernism as Border Pedagogy: Redefining the Boundaries of Race and Ethnicity
Refiguring the Boundaries of Modernism
Educational Theory and the Discourse of Race and Ethnicity
Postmodernism and the Shifting Boundaries of Otherness
Afro-American Feminist Writers and the Discourse of Possibility
Border Pedagogy as Postmodern Resistance
Notes
Existentialism, Alienation, Postmodernism: Cultural Movements as Vehicles of Change in the Patterns ...
Postmodern Blackness
Excerpts from Dissident Postmodernists
Postmodernism as a Literary-Critical Concept
Dissident Postmodernist Fiction
Notes
References
Hybridity, the Rap Race, and Pedagogy for the 1990s
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X.
Notes
Towards Cultural History
I
II
III
IV
V
Notes
INDEX
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Z