The Uses of Postmodernism

Jacob Edmond argues that while postmodernism might be useless as a theoretical concept or periodization, it nevertheless illuminates changes, both local and global, in the final decades of the twentieth century. Edmond analyzes the uses of postmodernism in the United States, New Zealand, Russia, and China. He shows how the various and even contradictory uses of the term postmodernism allowed it to represent both sides in the unfolding tension between globalization and localism in late twentieth-century culture.

(source: ebr)

Pull Quotes

What’s the use of postmodernism? Almost two decades later, the term has largely disappeared from literary and cultural criticism. There would seem to be little use in discussing postmodernism when the term and the concepts or artistic styles that it was meant to signify now seem completely outmoded.