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For better or worse, modernism and postmodernism are now the two most comprehensive and influential terms applied to twentieth-century culture. The Postmodern Arts begins by establishing definitions of both words, while also demonstrating the inconsistencies and contradictions which are inherent within them.
As with all books in the Critical Readers in Theory and Practice series, the volume is divided into two halves: the first, a comprehensive and thorough introduction by the editor, offering a schematic survey of the major themes and positions taken in the debates around modernism and postmodernism. The second is a collection of pertinent essays grouped into four sections to demonstrate how the debates have been applied to specific cultural activities:
* Popular Culture
* Architecture and Visual Arts
* Literature
* Documentary Film
List of contents
Part I Postmodernism: a new representation? Paradigms of the Postmodern, Using this book, Modern, modernity, moderniz: Economic transformation, commodity and consumption; Modernism and Its Consequences: Continuity or Break? The forms of art ; The genders of modernism ; The impact of war ; Rationality or the unconscious? Formal experiment or conventional form? Elite modernism versus popular taste ; Modernism- a limiting paradigm: Modernisms aftermath ; Postmodernism: from Elite to Mass Culture? Architecture, mother of the arts ; Representation in crisis? A lexicon of postmodern technique ; Subjectivity and subjection, history and nature ; Conclusion: Resisting the Postmodern: The use of paradigms: renaissance and postmodernity; Culture and the debt bomb Part II Essays on Postmodernism, One: Popular Culture: Rock on: the popular front against postmodernism LA: the city as postmodern future shock ; 1 Popular Music and Postmodern Theory In search of the postmodern text; But is it Art? ; Coda: hyper-marketing postmodernism ; 2 Recognizing a 'human-Thing': Cyborgs, Robots and Replicants in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner ; Dick's dystopia: the death of species ; Visualizing novels, thinking in pictures: Blade Runner as optical philosophy ; Epilogue: the Director's Cut, the cruellest cut ; Two: Architecture and Visual Arts; Postmodernism and the visual arts: the end of painting? ; Art of the women's movement feminist and/ or postmodernist? ; Tom Phillips: painterly skill and postmodern technique ; 3 Melancholy Meanings: Architecture, Postmodernity and Philosophy; 4 'The World Is Indeed a Fabulous Tale'; Yve Lomax- a Practice around Photography; HILARY GRESTY in dialogue With YVE LOMAXs Televising Hell: Tom Phillips and Peter Greenaway's TV Dante; Painting language; 5 Televising Hell; Theorizing text and image; Three: Literature: John Ashbery: postmodernity's laureate? It was and it was not so:· the politics of fiction Violent misreading; Gayatn· Spivak: deconstruction and postcolonial fiction 6 A New Subjectivity? John Ashbery's Three Poems; Ashbery's postmodern successors; In conclusion: a pre-modern Homeric truth 7 Reading The Satanic Verses: Four: The Real and the True: Documentary Film; Documentary: how is reality represented? Trinh T. Minh-ha and the critique of documentary 8 The Totalizing Quest of Meaning
About the author
Nigel Wheale
Summary
`As good a short introduction to postmodernism as one is likely to find, providing an admirable model for the student who may feel lost in the jostling critical crowd. - Steven Connor, University of London
Report
'This is a beautifully produced and a carefully, almost too carefully composed book.' - The Times Higher Education Supplement
