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Postmodernism and modern philosophy

Postmodernism is largely a reaction against the intellectual assumptions and values of the modern period in the history of Western philosophy (roughly, the 17th through the 19th century). Indeed, many of the doctrines characteristically associated with postmodernism can fairly be described as the straightforward denial of general philosophical viewpoints that were taken for granted during the 18th-century Enlightenment, though they were not unique to that period. The most important of these viewpoints are the following.

1. There is an objective natural reality, a reality whose existence and properties are logically independent of human beings-of their minds, their societies, their social practices, or their investigative techniques. Postmodernists dismiss this idea as a kind of naive realism. Such reality as there is, according to postmodernists, is a conceptual construct, an artifact of scientific practice and language. This point also applies to the investigation of past events by historians and to the description of social institutions, structures, or practices by social scientists.

2. The descriptive and explanatory statements of scientists and historians can, in principle, be objectively true or false. The postmodern denial of this viewpoint-which follows from the rejection of an objective natural reality-is sometimes expressed by saying that there is no such thing as Truth.

3. Through the use of reason and logic, and with the more specialized tools provided by science and technology, human beings are likely to change themselves and their societies for the better. It is reasonable to expect that future societies will be more humane, more just, more enlightened, and more prosperous than they are now. Postmodernists deny this Enlightenment faith in science and technology as instruments of human progress. Indeed, many postmodernists hold that the misguided (or unguided) pursuit of scientific and technological knowledge led to the development of technologies for killing on a massive scale in World War II. Some go so far as to say that science and technology-and even reason and logic-are inherently destructive and oppressive, because they have been used by evil people, especially during the 20th century, to destroy and oppress others.

4. Reason and logic are universally valid-i.e., their laws are the same for, or apply equally to, any thinker and any domain of knowledge. For postmodernists, reason and logic too are merely conceptual constructs and are therefore valid only within the established intellectual traditions in which they are used.

5. There is such a thing as human nature; it consists of faculties, aptitudes, or dispositions that are in some sense present in human beings at birth rather than learned or instilled through social forces. Postmodernists insist that all, or nearly all, aspects of human psychology are completely socially determined.

6. Language refers to and represents a reality outside itself. According to postmodernists, language is not such a "mirror of nature," as the American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty characterized the Enlightenment view. Inspired by the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, postmodernists claim that language is semantically self-contained, or self-referential: the meaning of a word is not a static thing in the world or even an idea in the mind but rather a range of contrasts and differences with the meanings of other words. Because meanings are in this sense functions of other meanings-which themselves are functions of other meanings, and so on-they are never fully "present" to the speaker or hearer but are endlessly "deferred." Self-reference characterizes not only natural languages but also the more specialized "discourses" of particular communities or traditions; such discourses are embedded in social practices and reflect the conceptual schemes and moral and intellectual values of the community or tradition in which they are used. The postmodern view of language and discourse is due largely to the French philosopher and literary theorist Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), the originator and leading practitioner of deconstruction.

7. Human beings can acquire knowledge about natural reality, and this knowledge can be justified ultimately on the basis of evidence or principles that are, or can be, known immediately, intuitively, or otherwise with certainty. Postmodernists reject philosophical foundationalism-the attempt, perhaps best exemplified by the 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes's dictum cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"), to identify a foundation of certainty on which to build the edifice of empirical (including scientific) knowledge.

8. It is possible, at least in principle, to construct general theories that explain many aspects of the natural or social world within a given domain of knowledge-e.g., a general theory of human history, such as dialectical materialism. Furthermore, it should be a goal of scientific and historical research to construct such theories, even if they are never perfectly attainable in practice. Postmodernists dismiss this notion as a pipe dream and indeed as symptomatic of an unhealthy tendency within Enlightenment discourses to adopt "totalizing" systems of thought (as the French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas called them) or grand "metanarratives" of human biological, historical, and social development (as the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard claimed). These theories are pernicious not merely because they are false but because they effectively impose conformity on other perspectives or discourses, thereby oppressing, marginalizing, or silencing them. Derrida himself equated the theoretical tendency toward totality with totalitarianism.

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Postmodernism | Definition, Doctrines, & Facts

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Postmodernism, in contemporary Western philosophy, a late 20th-century movement characterized by broad skepticism, subjectivism, or relativism; a general suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power.

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Real World article
(written from a Production point of view)

Lost is an American serial drama television series that predominantly followed the lives of the survivors of a plane crash on a mysterious tropical island. There, they had to negotiate an unknown monster, an unpredictable group of prior occupants, strange, other worldly island inhabitants, polar bears, and each other as they tried to survive and attract rescue. The main ingredients that have made Lost an icon for success have been its international ensemble cast, plotline of mysteries, flashbacks, flash-forwards and flash sideways.

Lost was created by Jeffrey Lieber, J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof, was produced by Bad Robot Productions, and was filmed almost entirely on location in Hawaii by their local production company Grass Skirt Productions. The show was produced by ABC Studios (formerly Touchstone Television) and aired on the ABC network in the US. Its musical score was composed by Michael Giacchino. Lost has also been known for its innovative nontraditional marketing, including a world-spanning alternate reality game (ARG) in 2006 called The Lost Experience

Development

Conception

Under the lead of group chairman ( Lloyd Braun, ABC had seen a steady decline to the number four spot in ratings, behind NBC, CBS, and Fox. The network was desperate for new hits. In the summer of 2003, about 50 ABC executives met at a retreat in Disney's California Adventure in Anaheim, California. During a banquet, people suggested various concepts for new TV shows. Lloyd Braun himself pitched the idea of what he described as "Cast Away - The Series", after the movie starring Tom Hanks. The Genesis of Lost)

Even though many people initially laughed at Braun's idea (some comparing it to (Gilligan's Island), Thom Sherman, then former senior vice president at ABC, liked the idea and asked his friend Ted Gold, then employed at Spelling Productions, to come up with a working concept based on Braun's idea. Jeffrey Lieber was hired to write a story for what was pitched to him as a "hyperrealistic portrayal of life on a deserted island", and he came up with a setting similar to Lord of the Flies. In September 2003, Lieber pitched his premise, then named , to ABC, and was then asked to write a pilot. Even though he was originally only asked for a few minor rewrites before it would be considered ready to start shooting, Lieber eventually ended up heavily rewriting his script. At an unknown point of time, the concept was also known under the working name The Circle. The Genesis of Lost) Ultimately, Lloyd Braun, still not satisfied with Lieber's script, fired him.

At that point, it was very late in the 2003/2004 season, but Braun was desperate to get his idea turned into a TV series. He approached ( J.J. Abrams to rewrite the script. At that point, Abrams was involved with his TV show and the development of a new pilot named The Catch, but Braun still convinced him to help him out with the new show. The one inviolable edict Braun made was that the show's title must be Lost, having conceived of the title and being angry at its change to Nowhere by Lieber. Abrams had the idea of making the island itself a "character", an idea Braun liked. Because Abrams was busy with his other projects, another writer named Damon Lindelof was brought on board. The Genesis of Lost) Together with Abrams, he prepared a rough outline. Even though they had no actual script, Braun greenlit the project and granted it a budget of nearly $12 million.[4] This was the final straw for Disney, who had been dissatisfied with Braun's performance as ABC's chairman for quite a while. Considering the concept of the show "a crazy project that's never going to work" (Michael Eisner, chairman and chief executive of Disney) and "a waste of time" (Bob Iger, Eisner's deputy), they decided to fire Braun. [5] Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse later referred to Braun's decision to greenlight the pilot's budget as a "final f**k you" to Disney and ABC, who he knew intended to fire him anyway.[6]

Casting began before the script was finished-in fact, Abrams and Lindelof would write scenes just so they could begin casting actors. The show bible was still being developed during post-production of the ( pilot.[7] Many characters were written specifically based on actors who had made an impression during casting. From its initial conception by Abrams and Lindelof, the entire pilot was put together in just 12 weeks-including writing, casting and production. As a result, the larger show mythology wasn't put together by Lindelof and Carlton Cuse until some time later.[8] One of the earliest ideas that had come up in the very first meeting between Abrams and Lindelof was that the characters would discover a hatch on the island; however, ultimately this wouldn't happen until the eleventh episode, " All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues ". Secrets from the Hatch)

J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof first imagined Jack as a leader, who be killed by the Monster in the first part of the pilot. Michael Keaton was originally slated to play Jack in a guest capacity.[9] However, Keaton was never actually sent a script. The idea to have Jack die in the first episode remained until a week before shooting began. Stephen McPherson, who was at that time the head of Touchstone, was adamant that Jack had to survive, because he felt the audience would feel "cheated" if Jack died after they had invested into the character for an hour. Therefore, it was decided that Jack would survive, and the pilot of the plane was written into the script as the character who would be killed by the Monster instead. Matthew Fox was eventually cast as Jack. ( Season 1 DVD bonus feature "Before They Were Lost")

Kate was originally written as a woman in her late twenties/early thirties who was married. Her husband would have been missing following the crash since he would have been in the tail section of the plane, and Kate's quest to find him would be one of the character's main motivations. After Jack's (planned) death, Kate was intended to assume leadership of the survivors. These ideas for the character were ultimately scrapped during casting, coupled with the studio's decision to keep Jack alive, and some of the original ideas for the Kate character eventually ended up as the character of Rose, whose husband had also disappeared with the tail section of the plane during the crash. Both Evangeline Lilly and Yunjin Kim auditioned for the role of Kate. Lilly, who had sent in an audition tape from Canada, was the preferred choice of J.J. Abrams, but due to delays with getting her visa cleared, shooting had to begin without Lilly, and Abrams and Lindelof continued auditioning other actresses for an entire day until they were informed that Lilly's visa had finally been cleared. ( Season 1 DVD bonus feature "Before They Were Lost")

Sawyer was originally conceived as a "suit-wearing con man", while Charlie was intended to be an older, "has-been" rock star. Matthew Fox, Dominic Monaghan, Jorge Garcia and Josh Holloway all auditioned for the role of Sawyer. ( Season 1 DVD bonus features "Before They Were Lost" and "Audition Tapes") The character was ultimately rewritten to be more "feral" based on Holloway's performance, while Fox was cast as Jack. Meanwhile, the character of Charlie was turned into a younger "one hit wonder" rock star to suit Monaghan. ( Season 1 DVD bonus feature "Before They Were Lost")

Several characters were not in the original outline. Some of them were actually written specifically for actors who had made an impression during their auditions for other characters. The first character to be cast for the show was Hurley, created specifically for Jorge Garcia. Likewise, when Yunjin Kim revealed that she spoke fluent Korean, the character of Sun was created specifically for her, and Daniel Dae Kim was cast as her on-screen husband Jin within days after Yunjin Kim's initial audition. Meanwhile, the character of Sayid was also not in the original outline and was created for actor Naveen Andrews, who had previously worked with Lost executive producer Jeff Pinkner. ( Season 1 DVD bonus feature "Before They Were Lost")

Creatorship disputes

After Jeffrey Lieber, who had come up with a script for a pilot before the concept of the show would be overhauled by J.J. Abrams, had been fired by Lloyd Braun, he felt that he deserved a credit for his work. Lieber complained to the Writers Guild of America, whereupon ABC and Touchstone argued that Lieber's initial concept had nothing to do with the show that was now being developed.[10] Lieber managed to get his hands on a shooting script for the pilot and drew parallels between characters in the shooting script and those from his own script. The WGA eventually ruled in Lieber's favor, granting him a 60% creatorship credit, with the remaining 40% being split between Abrams and Lindelof. This was more than Lieber had hoped for, and he now feels outright embarrassed for being credited for something he himself admits he didn't really have anything to do with. In 2005, Lieber even received an Emmy nomination for his (credited) participation in the writing of the pilot.[11] Some former members of ABC's development team feel that Lieber's credit is undeserved, arguing that the alleged similarities between characters would have been the same under any writer. To this day, Lieber receives annual royalties in the "low six figures" for his credited contribution to the show's creation.[12] In September of 2009, Lieber's original pilot script, titled Nowhere, surfaced on the internet.[13]

In 1977, a TV producer named Anthony Spinner was asked to write a pilot named ( Lost for ABC, which was about a group of people who survive a plane crash on a seemingly deserted but mysterious island.[14] Even though Spinner was paid $30,000 for his 121-page script, the pilot was never picked up, and Spinner later tried to submit it again in 1991 and 1994.[15] When Lost the show started airing in 2004, Spinner believed that ABC had ripped off his idea and filed a lawsuit in 2005.[16] The suit was initially dismissed for procedural reasons, but Spinner eventually refiled it in 2009.[17] Among the parallels drawn are broad generalizations such as "plane crashes on a tropical island", stock characters such as "drug addict" or "female lead with a criminal past" and stock plots such as "female character torn between two men, resulting in jealousy". One character in Spinner's script, a man named "Hagan", is alternatively compared to John Locke, Sayid, Kate and Jack, whereas another character named "Butch" is alternatively claimed to share character traits with Jack, Sayid and Sawyer.[18] Shannon's relationship with Sayid, which doesn't happen until well into the first season, is also among the alleged similarities, a plot which actor Naveen Andrews previously took credit for. Lost: On Location (Season 2))

There have been numerous changes to the creative writing staff behind the storyline of ( Lost from the beginning to the end. The most notable one is the quick departure of co-creator J.J. Abrams from the show. Abrams was never fully invested in Lost due to his duties on his own show and his planned pilot The Catch (which ultimately never got picked up). Damon Lindelof had originally been brought on board to help Abrams develop the outline for the show. Together, Abrams and Lindelof wrote the two-part pilot episode, " Pilot, Part 1 " and " Pilot, Part 2 ", which Abrams also directed. The Genesis of Lost) Following that, Abrams passed on working duties to Lindelof. Early in Season 1, Carlton Cuse talked Lindelof out of quitting Lost, and joined the show's staff as an executive producer. [19] From this point on, Abrams stopped being directly involved with the show [20], although he made a brief return early in season 3 when he wrote the season premiere, " A Tale of Two Cities ", together with Damon Lindelof. Since Abrams' departure, Lindelof and Cuse have been the main showrunners, and worked out the main mythology of Lost during the development of season 1.[21]

Paul Dini was with Lost since its inception, and was present at the Season 1 preview screening at Comic-Con 2004. Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis joined the writing group midway through the first season. Javier Grillo-Marxuach no longer writes for Lost, although he wrote for and participated in The Lost Experience. Jeph Loeb joined as co-executive producer in Season 2. Drew Goddard and Brian K. Vaughan also joined the writing staff during Season 3. Many of the writers are also known for their work in the television as well as the comics industry.

The FX department, originally based in California, was later moved to Hawaii. The Hawaii offices of Grass Skirt Productions moved from Dole Cannery Offices to the Hawaii state-operated Hawaii Film Studio. At this time the primary sound stage in the former Xerox Hawaii building near Dole Cannery, which included the set for the caves, also moved to the Hawaii Film Studio where the sets for the Swan and Hydra station interiors were created. [22] [23]. The other location settings are, with a handful of exceptions, located exclusively the island of Oahu in Hawaii. [24] The exceptions include the airplane interior of the Pilot, and the underwater scenes in " Whatever the Case May Be ", filmed in southern California near Hollywood[25], and the polar bear cave, filmed on the Big Island of Hawaii.[26]

Jack Bender was an executive producer, and along with Jean Higgins comprises the top ranking staff members who resided in Hawaii with the film crew, although Carlton Cuse, the "show runner" for Lost, frequently traveled from California to be with the crew. Bender thus naturally served as the primary resident director for episodes, although Lost also used a wide range of guest directors.

Lost has been notable as a television program that has been heavily integrated with a multifaceted interaction with viewers, many of which have been industry firsts. These have included a significant use of the internet, including three Alternate Reality Games (The Lost Experience, , and the Dharma Initiative Recruiting Project), webisodes, official podcasts, an official forum called " The Fuselage", episodes made available through iTunes after broadcast for viewing on iPods, episodes viewable online at ABC's official site, Xbox Live downloads, and tacit support of fan sites. Lost has also been notable for combining all of these approaches to achieve what some have described as "viral" or "meme" status.

Lost (along with Desperate Housewives and Grey's Anatomy) is often credited with helping to "revive" ABC in its maiden 2004-05 season.[27] Prior to that, ABC had been falling behind other networks with unpopular derivative shows and low ratings. Thanks to Lost and other new shows of that season, ABC was revived as one of the stronger networks and has remained so since. The success of Lost also spawned subsequent attempts at various networks at serial dramas with continuous storylines , especially those with flashbacks and an element of mystery, such as ABC's own The Nine and Daybreak (both canceled), even though serial dramas tend to be less popular, and therefore less profitable, in syndication.

United States

See also: Criticism of Lost#Scheduling

Lost aired on the ABC network in the United States. ABC, and by extension its parent company Disney, own the rights to Lost.

ABC aired the first season of Lost (2004-2005) on Wednesdays at 8/7c, and moved the second season (2005-2006) one hour later to 9/8c. Both seasons started in the fall and ended in the spring, with multiple breaks in which repeats were shown. For Season 3 (2006-2007), in an effort to maximize the amount of straight-run episodes, ABC divided the season into two "mini-seasons": a 6-episode pod in the fall and a 16-episode pod in the spring. For the second "mini-season", due in part to avoiding Fox's American Idol, Lost was moved to a new time slot of 10/9c on Wednesdays. Viewership dropped to its lowest levels, although it is unclear if that was due more to the time slot, hiatus, or viewer interest in the actual storyline of Season 3. However, Nielsen reported that Lost was the top time shifted show from January 01, 2007-November 18, 2007, meaning that it benefited the most from DVR playback at a date later than the broadcast. [28] For Season 4, Lost was moved to Thursdays at 9/8c, starting on January 31, 2008, a change brought on by the effects of the writers' strike on the network's lineup. The straight-run format was kept, but reduced episodes meant that a fall start date and mid-season break were no longer necessary. Season 4 was broken up into an 8-episode pod and a 5-episode pod due to the writers' strike. For the second group of episodes, beginning on April 24, 2008, the timeslot has been changed to 10/9c on Thursdays [29]. In season 5, 17 episodes were broadcasted, with only two hiatuses, on Wednesdays at 9/8c. Season 6, the final season of Lost, began airing its run of 18 episodes on February 2, 2010 in its final timeslot of Tuesdays at 9/8c, with only one break during the season. ABC has announced the airdate for the series finale of Lost to be Sunday, May 23rd at 9/8c.

Lost was also available for viewing the next day in full episodes on the ABC webpage, and was available on the Xbox Live marketplace. Since the second "mini-season" of Season 3, ABC started showing Lost back-stories, of which four new mini-episodes were available on the website at the time of a new episode. Averaging around four and a half minutes long, these mini-episodes portrayed part of a character's life before the crash, in chronological order.

Lost was shown on different networks in Canada. (CTV) network aired in English. (SRC) network was dubbed in French. The CTV network showed Lost at 7:00 pm ET on Wednesdays. SRC (Société Radio-Canada) network showed Lost (under the name Perdus) dubbed in French. It was also shown on Wednesdays at 7:00 pm ET, and also aired on Saturdays at 10:30 pm ET.

Canadian broadcasts on the CTV Network were concurrent with US broadcasts, while on the SRC they were a little more than a half a season behind. With Season 3's post-hiatus later time slot change in the US, Canadian viewers actually saw Lost before the American viewers: the east coast Canadian broadcast was two hours, and in some weeks three hours, ahead of the east coast US broadcast.

For Season 4 the show was aired thursdays on both CTV and SRC, on CTV the same time as on ABC and at the SRC it was at 8:00 pm ET. CTV stopped airing LOST for the fifth season, but their affiliate 'A' channel did, Wednesdays at 9:00 pm ET.

Most Canadian cable and satellite providers also carry major ABC affiliates, usually from Seattle and Detroit.

United Kingdom

The first two seasons of Lost were seen on Channel 4. Before Season 3 began broadcast in the US, Sky One bought the rights to air Seasons 3 and 4. Virgin Media and Sky One disagreed over the price of the Sky TV channels. Virgin Media ceased carring Sky One, which made the Sky Digital platform the only way to watch Lost on broadcast TV in the United Kingdom. Virgin Media secured the rights to on-demand broadcasts of Seasons 1 - 3 of Lost, from August 2007. [30]

UK broadcasts of Lost originally began Season 1 eleven months later than in the US, but caught up by broadcasting Season 2 just two months after the end of the Season 1 broadcast. As of Season 3, the episode broadcast in the UK were just four days behind US airing.

Lost was aired in Ireland by free-to-air station RTE 2 and on a number of subscription packages by Sky One. RTE 2 was one of the first European stations to air Lost and began nine months after the first US airing, though began catching up during the first season by airing two episodes in one night on a number of occasions. Lost aired on Thursday nights at 10:00 and aired the finale on Monday, May 24th, 2010 at 9 pm

In Australia, Lost was always aired by free-to-air station Channel 7. From season one to two, Lost aired at Thursdays 8:30 pm. For season three, Lost was pushed up to 9:30 pm. For the most of season 4, Lost retained it's 9.30 pm timeslot but eventually it was moved to 10.30 pm. In season 4, new Lost episodes aired six days behind USA, in comparison to 3-5 months behind although as of Season 5, episodes aired 3-5 weeks behind. Many Australian fans of Lost complained that Channel 7 was 'abusing' Lost, by pushing it back to later times, ending each episode early (as of season 5) and airing episodes further and further behind the original US airing. Channel 7 has a history of doing similar things to US serials, eg 24 and Alias.

New Zealand

In New Zealand, Lost aired every Wednesday at 8:30pm and was broadcasted by TVNZ's free-to-air channel 2 [31]. New Zealand was usually about five episodes behind the United States.

The Lost Experience and countries involved

Australia's Channel 7 and the United Kingdom's Channel 4 also played an integral part in The Lost Experience (TLE), along with the United States' ABC, with official bloggers being assigned to each: The Lost Ninja was based in Australia with Channel 7, and The Other Girl was based in the UK with Channel 4, and rounded a trio with Speaker, the US TLE blogger working for ABC. Glyphs and clues in these official blogs and "live" events were found in all three countries during the course of the game.

Series finale

The series finale of Lost was simulcast in six different counties around the world at the same time as the original U.S. broadcast. The unprecedented scheduling move aimed to prevent illegal internet downloads of the finale and save UK fans of the show from having to spend five days dodging web spoilers until it aired on Sky1. Before deciding to join broadcasters in six other countries in simulcasting the show, the UK airing of the finale was due to air on the usual Friday 9pm slot, but then moved to 5am on a Monday morning to coincide with the event. It resulted in this time as it was simulcast at the same time as the west coast transmission. Had it of been simulcast with the east coast it could have aired three hours earlier at 2am making it more accessible to more viewers. According to The Guardian, of the 600,000 fans who watched the episode only 68,000 watched it live, the rest relying on their DVR devices. [32]

Other international

Lost was broadcast in a number of countries, and their airdates varied from being almost concurrent with the US broadcasts, such as Sweden which was generally only one episode behind, to broadcasting the first season years later, as in Japan. Some countries dub their broadcasts with voice actors, while others use the English audio with subtitling.

For the first three seasons, the future of the show was uncertain. There were rumors about further seasons, and even feature films. However, on May 7, 2007, ABC revealed that Lost was to continue for a further three seasons, with each of them being condensed into 16 episodes. They were to be aired back-to-back with no gaps, starting in February and ending in May. Unfortunately, the Writers Guild of America went on strike, and the fourth season only contained 14 episodes. To compensate, Season 5 ran for 17 episodes, and the final season ran for 18. Accordingly, Lost ended on Sunday, May 23, 2010, after 121 episodes.

Lost became a widespread hit around the world. This success created a community of dedicated fans who analyzed every single aspect of the show, including planted Easter eggs. The producers, aware of their fanbase, included these Easter eggs to enhance the enjoyment of the show.

Lost: Untangled

ABC, beginning in Season 5, found a new way to recap episodes of Lost called Lost Untangled. This was a comical way of summarizing the previous episode using the Lost character Action Figures from Season 1. These short clips aired after Lost during ABC's "Life On Mars", and were also shown on ABC's Lost web page.

References

Categories

Miscellaneous

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Lost is an American serial drama television series that predominantly followed the lives of the survivors of a plane crash on a mysterious tropical island. There, they had to negotiate an unknown monster, an unpredictable group of prior occupants, strange, other worldly island inhabitants, polar bears, and each other as they tried to survive and attract rescue.

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2 years after the "Lost" finale, a Retrospective on the series as a whole

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Two years ago today, Lost ended with its beautiful series finale, "The End." The episode has become controversial since then among pickier...

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Defining the parameters of postmodern literature is a daunting task, due not only to disagreements about what texts can or can't be approached as postmodern, but also to the paradoxical and elusive nature of the postmodern movement. Paradoxical seems to be an effective word to invoke when approaching postmodern literature-as Barry Lewis points out in his distillation of Linda Hutcheon's views in his essay entitled "Postmodernism and Fiction," postmodern works simultaneously create and destabilize meaning and conventions in their ironic or critical use of works from the past (171). Given that the postmodern movement embraces instability and skepticism as its main traits, how do we even begin to grasp what literature can or can't be approached as postmodern? In this post, I will briefly trace out the major components of postmodernity and postmodern literature using the 2011 edition of The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism (RCP)-and when appropriate, I will bring in original examples to illuminate some of the points made in the text.

Before addressing the issue of postmodern literature, it's important to quickly overview elements, trends, and perspectives that can be approached as postmodern. In the introduction to the RCP, Stuart Sims points out that postmodernity is characterized by skepticism and rejection, particularly the rejection of cultural progress, and even more so, the implementation of universalizing theories or grand narratives (sometimes called metanarratives). I am reminded of a universalizing theory when recalling a conversation I once had with one of my literature professors, in which she claimed that all narratives are either about "sex or war." A postmodern stance against my professor's claim would argue for the inability of sex and war to constitute the totality of a particular narrative. The issue with grand narratives is that in their effort to generalize, they fail to account for experiences and beliefs that do not fit within their parameters or confines. To claim, for instance, that literature is the study of the ideas of "dead white men" would imply a failure to recognize other literatures produced by non-male and non-white authors.

In the TED-ED video entitled "What Makes a Hero," Matthew Winkler discusses the elements and conventions that most stories on heroism embrace. Winkler identifies a blueprint that most epic tales share--thus developing a universalizing theory of the elements that shape heroism in fiction. While postmodernists do not deny the existence of universalizing theories, they are skeptical about them. Wherein lies the "danger" of approaching all epic tales through this metanarrative? Another question we can ask is: how do postmodern tales on heroism challenge or refute the hero's grand narrative?

Postmodernists not only reject grand narratives, but they also embody an "anti-authoritarian" position when approaching and analyzing the world and its cultural productions. In other words, postmodernists distrust any entity or agency that tries to control or regulate what people can or cannot do, and they also distrust any agent or element that tries to fixate the meaning that something possesses (or can ultimately possess). As Sims states in his introduction to postmodernism, "To move from the modern to the postmodern is to embrace scepticism about what our culture stands for and strives for" (vii). It might become clear at this point that the aims or stances of postmodernity and poststructuralist theories go hand-in-hand. As Sims puts it,

Poststructuralism has been an influential part of the cultural scene since the 1960s, but nowadays it can be seen to be part of a more general reaction to authoritarian ideologies and political systems that we define as postmodernism. (x)

Thus, it is unsurprising to observe that after the advent of postmodernity, ideas such as Barthe's death of the author began to emerge in the study of literature and the arts; even theoretical fields such as queer theory arose after the advent of the postmodern movement. Both the death of the author and queer theory are anti-authoritarian in their outlook: the death of the author discredits the ability of an author to dictate what his/her work can or can't mean to an interpreter, whereas queer theory is designed to assume a position against normativity to challenge binaristic thinking and the regulation of identities. Much more than being a genre or a typology, postmodernism can be approached as an attitude that is reactionary, especially towards the ideas and ideals perpetuated in the modernist movement (e.g. the divide between low and high culture, the view of humanity as an entity that is perpetually improving and progressing, among others). As Lloyd Spencer puts it in his discussion on "Postmodernism, Modernity and the Tradition of the Dissent," postmodernity's anti-authoritarian alignment is the element that continues to give this attitude strength and relevance, even in the face of its critics:

One way of drawing the line between postmodernism and its critics is to focus on postmodernism's refusal of the utopian, dream-like elements which have accompanied the constant change of modernity. Modernisms, including Marxism, dreamt of a better world. Legislating for this world on the basis of this dream of a better one is seen as the cardinal sin of that modernism which postmodernism seeks to go beyond. (220)

Returning to Barry Lewis' essay on "Postmodernism and Fiction," he claims that postmodernism underwent an "epistemic break" during the 1990s, creating a distinction between what he calls first-wave postmodernism and second-wave postmodernism. During the first wave, postmodernism referred to "an overlapping set of characteristics that applied to a particular set of novelists, bound together by their simultaneous acceptance/rejection of earlier traditions of fiction" (169). First-wave postmodern texts not only challenged the divide between high-literature and low-literature that was fostered by modernists such as Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot, but they were also known for being "self-reflexive, playful and exceedingly aware of the medium of language in an attempt to revivify the novel form" (169). A good example of how this self-reflexive and playful nature manifests in a literary text can be seen in John Barth's " Lost in the Funhouse." In Barth's short story, what at first seems to be a conventional coming-of-age story quickly metamorphoses into a critique on literary conventionality and ordinary structure. The text not only exposes how conventional plots work, but it actively highlights and questions its own structure, plot, and content.

When Lewis refers to the literary characteristics that postmodern authors embrace and reject, he is referring mostly to well-known literary conventions such as plot, setting, character, and theme. These conventions are challenged and shattered both in first-wave and second-wave postmodernism through features such as:

1. Temporal Disorder - This refers not only to the disruption of the past, but also the disruption of the present. Anachronism in historical postmodern fiction is an effective example of temporal disorder because it flaunts "glaring inconsistencies of detail or setting" (173). For an example, take Seth Grahame-Smith's 2010 novel Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, which depicts and alters the biographical facts of the 16th president of the U.S. Other postmodern novels alter the present by deviating from ordinary time (chronos) and focusing on various instances of significant time (kairos), as exemplified by novels such as Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow-which is known for its overwhelming plethora of events and characters.

2. Pastiche - Alluding to the act of piecing things together, as in the case of a collage, pastiche is a postmodern aesthetic that "actively encourages creative artists to raid the past in order to set up a sense of dialogue between it and the present" (231). Pastiche came to prominence when artists realized that the contemporary moment presents little room for originality because everything has been said and done before-leading postmodern artists to "pluck existing styles higgledy-piggledy from the resevoir of literary history" (173). A good example of pastiche would be Art Spiegelman's a graphic memoir that depicts a son who tries to create a work based on his father's experiences as a Polish Jew in the Holocaust.

3. Fragmentation - Perhaps one of the most prominent elements of postmodern texts, fragmentation refers to the breakdown of plot, character, theme, and setting. Plot, for instance, is not presented in a realistic or chronological fashion, bur rather, as "slabs of event and circumstance" (173). Take for instance Sandra Cisnero's The House on Mango Street (1984), which is told through a series of memories or vignettes rather than through the traditional narrative structure expected from a coming-of-age novel.

4. Looseness of Association - The incorporation of chance into the reading of a narrative text (e.g. pages in a random and disorganized order, or a program that scrambles the order of the pages in a text).

5. Paranoia - Paranoia refers to the distrust in a system or even a distrust in the self. Postmodern texts often reflect paranoia by depicting an antagonism towards immobility and stasis. A notable example of a literary text that invokes postmodern paranoia would be Tony Kushner's 1993 play Angels in America.

6. Vicious Circles - These circles manifest when the boundaries between the real world and the world of the text are collapsed, either through the incorporation of the author into the narrative, or through the incorporation of a historical figure in a a fictional text.

If first-wave and second-wave postmodernism share these traits, what differentiates the two? According to Lewis, the differing element would be experimentation. Whereas the features mentioned above were employed in first-wave postmodernism as a way of challenging the authority and dominance of literary conventions such as plot, setting, character, and theme, they are employed in second-wave postmodernism simply because they have become integrated with the dominant literary culture. Thus, fiction produced during second-wave postmodernism is crafted during a time in which "postmodernist fiction itself became perceptible as a kind of 'style' and its characteristic techniques and themes came to be adopted without the same sense of breaking new ground" (170). Notable examples of second-wave are novels such as Sherman Alexie's Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

I hope that this post gives you a better idea of the notions that constitute postmodernism and postmodern literature. I highly recommend The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism if you want to learn more about this "attitude" and "genre" with more nuance, and if you want to better understand how postmodernism manifests in other areas besides the literary, such as genre, sexuality, music, and popular culture, among others.

You can purchase a copy of The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism by clicking here.

All essays cited in this discussion can be found in:

Sims, Stuart (ed.). The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism. 3rd Edition. London: Routledge, 2011. Print.

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Defining the parameters of postmodern literature is a daunting task, due not only to disagreements about what texts can or can't be approached as postmodern, but also to the paradoxical and elusive nature of the postmodern movement. Paradoxical seems to be an effective word to invoke when approaching postmodern literature--as Barry Lewis points out in his...

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ABC's LOST explained!
Still wondering what the television show LOST was all about? I have answers!
SPOILER ALERT - the following article will completely explain and therefore give away to the most important puzzle pieces from the hit ABC television series LOST. Therefore if you haven't seen the show and don't want the end to be spoiled, stop reading this article right here! As for the rest of you who have wondered... what did it all mean? I have the answer for you!
Now that the spoiler warning is out of the way, lets get right to it...
The most mysterious lingering question remaining regarding the television show LOST is... what is the golden light in the cave at the heart of the island?

If only we knew what the light was maybe we could determine what the island was. And if we knew those facts we could piece together all the remaining details. Some might say the question was already answered when Jacob claimed the island was like a cork (when he said that he wasn't lying which I will explain later) yet saying the island is a cork really only raises another question instead of giving any type of comprehensive answer, after all... if the island is a cork, what does that mean? I for one am glad that the writers didn't spell it all out for us because if they had, it would have robbed us the opportunity to ponder the larger questions and solve the puzzle ourselves and ultimately that was the fun of LOST.

SO WHAT WAS THE LIGHT?

The golden light in the cave at the heart of the island is the same light that was behind the frozen donkey wheel that the MIB, Ben, and Locke, all were attempting to manipulate or channel to their benefit throughout the show. It also seems to be the same light (or a type of it) that engulfed the island when Desmond flipped the fail safe, when Juliette ignited Jughead, and each time our losties were bounced around when the island was skipping in time.

Most folks assume the light is God, or spirituality, or possibly the personification of goodness, or life, or something similarly vague. None of those solutions help us piece together the puzzle that is LOST.

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ABC's LOST: the ultimate theory and explanation

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Still wondering what the television show LOST was all about? I have answers! SPOILER ALERT - the following article will completely explain and therefore give away to the most important puzzle pieces from the hit ABC television series LOST. Therefore if you haven't seen the show and don't want the end to be spoiled, stop reading this article right here!

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Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse characterized by skepticism toward the " grand narratives" of modernism; rejection of epistemic (scientific) certainty or the stability of meaning; and sensitivity to the role of ideology in maintaining political power. Claims to objectivity are dismissed as naïve realism, with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses. The postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization.

Initially emerging from a mode of literary criticism, postmodernism developed in the mid-twentieth century as a rejection of modernism, and has been observed across many disciplines. Postmodernism is associated with the theories of deconstruction and post-structuralism. Various authors have criticized postmodernism as promoting obscurantism, as abandoning Enlightenment rationalism and scientific rigor, and as adding nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge.

Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse which challenges worldviews associated with Enlightenment rationality dating back to the 17th century. Postmodernism is associated with relativism and a focus on the role of ideology in the maintenance of economic and political power. Postmodernists are "skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person". It considers "reality" to be a mental construct. Postmodernism rejects the possibility of unmediated reality or objectively-rational knowledge, asserting that all interpretations are contingent on the perspective from which they are made; claims to objective fact are dismissed as naive realism.

Postmodern thinkers frequently describe knowledge claims and value systems as contingent or socially-conditioned, describing them as products of political, historical, or cultural discourses and hierarchies. Accordingly, postmodern thought is broadly characterized by tendencies to self-referentiality, epistemological and moral relativism, pluralism, and irreverence. Postmodernism is often associated with schools of thought such as deconstruction and post-structuralism. Postmodernism relies on critical theory, which considers the effects of ideology, society, and history on culture. Postmodernism and critical theory commonly criticize universalist ideas of objective reality, morality, truth, human nature, reason, language, and social progress.

Initially, postmodernism was a mode of discourse on literature and literary criticism, commenting on the nature of literary text, meaning, author and reader, writing, and reading. Postmodernism developed in the mid- to late-twentieth century across many scholarly disciplines as a departure or rejection of modernism. As a critical practice, postmodernism employs concepts such as hyperreality, simulacrum, trace, and difference, and rejects abstract principles in favor of direct experience.

The term postmodern was first used in 1870. John Watkins Chapman suggested "a Postmodern style of painting" as a way to depart from French Impressionism. J. M. Thompson, in his 1914 article in The Hibbert Journal (a quarterly philosophical review), used it to describe changes in attitudes and beliefs in the critique of religion, writing: "The raison d'être of Post-Modernism is to escape from the double-mindedness of Modernism by being thorough in its criticism by extending it to religion as well as theology, to Catholic feeling as well as to Catholic tradition."

In 1942 H. R. Hays described postmodernism as a new literary form.

In 1926, Bernard Iddings Bell, president of St. Stephen's College (now Bard College), published Postmodernism and Other Essays, marking the first use of the term to describe the historical period following Modernity. The essay criticizes the lingering socio-cultural norms, attitudes, and practices of the Age of Enlightenment. It also forecasts the major cultural shifts toward Postmodernity and (Bell being an Anglican Episcopal priest) suggests orthodox religion as a solution. However, the term postmodernity was first used as a general theory for a historical movement in 1939 by Arnold J. Toynbee: "Our own Post-Modern Age has been inaugurated by the general war of 1914-1918".

Portland Building (1982), by architect Michael Graves, an example of Postmodern architecture

In 1949 the term was used to describe a dissatisfaction with modern architecture and led to the postmodern architecture movement in response to the modernist architectural movement known as the International Style. Postmodernism in architecture was initially marked by a re-emergence of surface ornament, reference to surrounding buildings in urban settings, historical reference in decorative forms (eclecticism), and non-orthogonal angles.

Author Peter Drucker suggested the transformation into a post-modern world that happened between 1937 and 1957 and described it as a "nameless era" characterized as a shift to a conceptual world based on pattern, purpose, and process rather than a mechanical cause. This shift was outlined by four new realities: the emergence of an Educated Society, the importance of international development, the decline of the nation-state, and the collapse of the viability of non-Western cultures.

In 1971, in a lecture delivered at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, Mel Bochner described "post-modernism" in art as having started with Jasper Johns, "who first rejected sense-data and the singular point-of-view as the basis for his art, and treated art as a critical investigation".

In 1996, Walter Truett Anderson described postmodernism as belonging to one of four typological world views which he identified as:

Neo-romantic, in which truth is found through attaining harmony with nature or spiritual exploration of the inner self.

Postmodern-ironist, which sees truth as socially constructed.

Scientific-rational, in which truth is defined through methodical, disciplined inquiry.

Social-traditional, in which truth is found in the heritage of American and Western civilization.

The basic features of what is now called postmodernism can be found as early as the 1940s, most notably in the work of artists such as Jorge Luis Borges. However, most scholars today agree postmodernism began to compete with modernism in the late 1950s and gained ascendancy over it in the 1960s.

The primary features of postmodernism typically include the ironic play with styles, citations, and narrative levels, a metaphysical skepticism or nihilism towards a " grand narrative" of Western culture, and a preference for the virtual at the expense of the Real (or more accurately, a fundamental questioning of what 'the real' constitutes).

Since the late 1990s, there has been a growing sentiment in popular culture and in academia that postmodernism "has gone out of fashion". Others argue that postmodernism is dead in the context of current cultural production.

Structuralism was a philosophical movement developed by French academics in the 1950s, partly in response to French existentialism, and often interpreted in relation to modernism and high modernism. Thinkers who have been called "structuralists" include the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, and the semiotician Algirdas Greimas. The early writings of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the literary theorist Roland Barthes have also been called "structuralist". Those who began as structuralists but became post-structuralists include Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, and Gilles Deleuze. Other post-structuralists include Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-François Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Anthony Giddens, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray. The American cultural theorists, critics, and intellectuals whom they influenced include Judith Butler, John Fiske, Rosalind Krauss, Avital Ronell, and Hayden White.

Like structuralists, post-structuralists start from the assumption that people's identities, values, and economic conditions determine each other rather than having intrinsic properties that can be understood in isolation. Thus the French structuralists considered themselves to be espousing relativism and constructionism. But they nevertheless tended to explore how the subjects of their study might be described, reductively, as a set of essential relationships, schematics, or mathematical symbols. (An example is Claude Lévi-Strauss's algebraic formulation of mythological transformation in "The Structural Study of Myth").

Postmodernism entails reconsideration of the entire Western value system (love, marriage, popular culture, shift from an industrial to a service economy) that took place since the 1950s and 1960s, with a peak in the Social Revolution of 1968-are described with the term postmodernity, as opposed to postmodernism, a term referring to an opinion or movement. Post-structuralism is characterized by new ways of thinking through structuralism, contrary to the original form.

One of the most well-known postmodernist concerns is deconstruction, a theory for philosophy, literary criticism, and textual analysis developed by Jacques Derrida. Critics have insisted that Derrida's work is rooted in a statement found in Of Grammatology: " Il n'y a pas de hors-texte" ('there is nothing outside the text'). Such critics misinterpret the statement as denying any reality outside of books. The statement is actually part of a critique of "inside" and "outside" metaphors when referring to the text, and is a corollary to the observation that there is no "inside" of a text as well. This attention to a text's unacknowledged reliance on metaphors and figures embedded within its discourse is characteristic of Derrida's approach. Derrida's method sometimes involves demonstrating that a given philosophical discourse depends on binary oppositions or excluding terms that the discourse itself has declared to be irrelevant or inapplicable. Derrida's philosophy inspired a postmodern movement called deconstructivism among architects, characterized by a design that rejects structural "centers" and encourages decentralized play among its elements. Derrida discontinued his involvement with the movement after the publication of his collaborative project with architect Peter Eisenman in Chora L Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman.

The connection between postmodernism, posthumanism, and cyborgism has led to a challenge to postmodernism, for which the terms Post-postmodernism and postpoststructuralism were first coined in 2003:

In some sense, we may regard postmodernism, posthumanism, poststructuralism, etc., as being of the 'cyborg age' of mind over body. Deconference was an exploration in post-cyborgism (i.e. what comes after the postcorporeal era), and thus explored issues of postpostmodernism, postpoststructuralism, and the like. To understand this transition from 'pomo' (cyborgism) to 'popo' (postcyborgism) we must first understand the cyborg era itself.

More recently metamodernism, post-postmodernism and the "death of postmodernism" have been widely debated: in 2007 Andrew Hoberek noted in his introduction to a special issue of the journal Twentieth-Century Literature titled "After Postmodernism" that "declarations of postmodernism's demise have become a critical commonplace". A small group of critics has put forth a range of theories that aim to describe culture or society in the alleged aftermath of postmodernism, most notably Raoul Eshelman (performatism), Gilles Lipovetsky ( hypermodernity), Nicolas Bourriaud ( altermodern), and Alan Kirby (digimodernism, formerly called pseudo-modernism). None of these new theories or labels have so far gained very widespread acceptance. Sociocultural anthropologist Nina Müller-Schwarze offers neostructuralism as a possible direction. The exhibition Postmodernism - Style and Subversion 1970-1990 at the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, 24 September 2011 - 15 January 2012) was billed as the first show to document postmodernism as a historical movement.

In the 1970s a group of poststructuralists in France developed a radical critique of modern philosophy with roots discernible in Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, and became known as postmodern theorists, notably including Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and others. New and challenging modes of thought and writing pushed the development of new areas and topics in philosophy. By the 1980s, this spread to America (Richard Rorty) and the world.

Jacques Derrida was a French-Algerian philosopher best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction, which he discussed in numerous texts, and developed in the context of phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy.

Derrida re-examined the fundamentals of writing and its consequences on philosophy in general; sought to undermine the language of "presence" or metaphysics in an analytical technique which, beginning as a point of departure from Heidegger's notion of Destruktion, came to be known as deconstruction.

Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, and literary critic. First associated with structuralism, Foucault created an oeuvre that today is seen as belonging to post-structuralism and to postmodern philosophy. Considered a leading figure of French theory, his work remains fruitful in the English-speaking academic world in a large number of sub-disciplines. The Times Higher Education Guide described him in 2009 as the most cited author in the humanities.

Michel Foucault introduced concepts such as discursive regime, or re-invoked those of older philosophers like and genealogy in order to explain the relationship between meaning, power, and social behavior within social orders (see The Order of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality).

Jean-François Lyotard

Influenced by Nietzsche, Jean-François Lyotard is credited with being the first to use the term in a philosophical context, in his 1979 work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. In it, he follows Wittgenstein's language games model and speech act theory, contrasting two different language games, that of the expert, and that of the philosopher. He talks about the transformation of knowledge into information in the computer age and likens the transmission or reception of coded messages (information) to a position within a language game.

Lyotard defined philosophical postmodernism in The Postmodern Condition, writing: "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives...."  where what he means by metanarrative (in French, grands récits) is something like a unified, complete, universal, and epistemically certain story about everything that is. Postmodernists reject metanarratives because they reject the concept of truth that metanarratives presuppose. Postmodernist philosophers, in general, argue that truth is always contingent on historical and social context rather than being absolute and universal-and that truth is always partial and "at issue" rather than being complete and certain.

Richard Rorty argues in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature that contemporary analytic philosophy mistakenly imitates scientific methods. In addition, he denounces the traditional epistemological perspectives of representationalism and correspondence theory that rely upon the independence of knowers and observers from phenomena and the passivity of natural phenomena in relation to consciousness.

Jean Baudrillard, in Simulacra and Simulation, introduced the concept that reality or the principle of the Real is short-circuited by the interchangeability of signs in an era whose communicative and semantic acts are dominated by electronic media and digital technologies. For Baudrillard, "simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal."

Fredric Jameson set forth one of the first expansive theoretical treatments of postmodernism as a historical period, intellectual trend, and social phenomenon in a series of lectures at the Whitney Museum, later expanded as Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991).

In Analysis of the Journey, a journal birthed from postmodernism, Douglas Kellner insists that the "assumptions and procedures of modern theory" must be forgotten. Extensively, Kellner analyzes the terms of this theory in real-life experiences and examples. Kellner used science and technology studies as a major part of his analysis; he urged that the theory is incomplete without it. The scale was larger than just postmodernism alone; it must be interpreted through cultural studies where science and technology studies play a huge role. The reality of the September 11 attacks on the United States of America is the catalyst for his explanation. In response, Kellner continues to examine the repercussions of understanding the effects of the 11 September attacks. He questions if the attacks are only able to be understood in a limited form of postmodern theory due to the level of irony.

The conclusion he depicts is simple: postmodernism, as most use it today, will decide what experiences and signs in one's reality will be one's reality as they know it.

Neue Staatsgalerie (1977-84), Stuttgart, Germany, designed by the British architects James Stirling and Michael Wilford, showing the eclectic mix of classical architecture and colourful ironic detailing.

Ray and Maria Stata Center (2004), designed by the Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Modern Architecture, as established and developed by Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, was focused on:

They argued for architecture that represented the spirit of the age as depicted in cutting-edge technology, be it airplanes, cars, ocean liners, or even supposedly artless grain silos. Modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is associated with the phrase " less is more".

Critics of Modernism have:

argued that the attributes of perfection and minimalism are themselves subjective;

pointed out anachronisms in modern thought; and,

The intellectual scholarship regarding postmodernism and architecture is closely linked with the writings of critic-turned-architect Charles Jencks, beginning with lectures in the early 1970s and his essay "The Rise of Post Modern Architecture" from 1975. His magnum opus, however, is the book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, first published in 1977, and since running to seven editions. Jencks makes the point that Post-Modernism (like Modernism) varies for each field of art, and that for architecture it is not just a reaction to Modernism but what he terms double coding: "Double Coding: the combination of Modern techniques with something else (usually traditional building) in order for architecture to communicate with the public and a concerned minority, usually other architects." In their book, "Revisiting Postmodernism", Terry Farrell and Adam Furman argue that postmodernism brought a more joyous and sensual experience to the culture, particularly in architecture.

Postmodern art is a body of art movements that sought to contradict some aspects of modernism or some aspects that emerged or developed in its aftermath. Cultural production manifesting as intermedia, installation art, conceptual art, deconstructionist display, and multimedia, particularly involving video, are described as postmodern.

April Greiman

Early mention of postmodernism as an element of graphic design appeared in the British magazine, "Design". A characteristic of postmodern graphic design is that "retro, techno, punk, grunge, beach, parody, and pastiche were all conspicuous trends. Each had its own sites and venues, detractors and advocates."

Orhan Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature

Jorge Luis Borges' (1939) short story " Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", is often considered as predicting postmodernism and is a paragon of the ultimate parody. Samuel Beckett is also considered an important precursor and influence. Novelists who are commonly connected with postmodern literature include Vladimir Nabokov, William Gaddis, Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Pier Vittorio Tondelli, John Hawkes, William S. Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, John Barth, Robert Coover, Jean Rhys, Donald Barthelme, E. L. Doctorow, Richard Kalich, Jerzy Kosiński, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon (Pynchon's work has also been described as high modern), Ishmael Reed, Kathy Acker, Ana Lydia Vega, Jáchym Topol and Paul Auster.

In 1971, the American scholar Ihab Hassan published The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature, an early work of literary criticism from a postmodern perspective that traces the development of what he calls "literature of silence" through Marquis de Sade, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, and many others, including developments such as the Theatre of the Absurd and the nouveau roman.

In Postmodernist Fiction (1987), Brian McHale details the shift from modernism to postmodernism, arguing that the former is characterized by an epistemological dominant and that postmodern works have developed out of modernism and are primarily concerned with questions of ontology. McHale's second book, Constructing Postmodernism (1992), provides readings of postmodern fiction and some contemporary writers who go under the label of cyberpunk. McHale's "What Was Postmodernism?" (2007) follows Raymond Federman's lead in now using the past tense when discussing postmodernism.

American singer-songwriter Madonna

Jonathan Kramer has written that avant-garde musical compositions (which some would consider modernist rather than postmodernist) "defy more than seduce the listener, and they extend by potentially unsettling means the very idea of what music is." In the 1960s, composers such as Terry Riley, Henryk Górecki, Bradley Joseph, John Adams, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Michael Nyman, and Lou Harrison reacted to the perceived elitism and dissonant sound of atonal academic modernism by producing music with simple textures and relatively consonant harmonies, whilst others, most notably John Cage challenged the prevailing narratives of beauty and objectivity common to Modernism.

Author on postmodernism, Dominic Strinati, has noted, it is also important "to include in this category the so-called ' art rock' musical innovations and mixing of styles associated with groups like Talking Heads, and performers like Laurie Anderson, together with the self-conscious 'reinvention of disco' by the Pet Shop Boys".

In the late-20th century, avant-garde academics labelled American singer Madonna, as the "personification of the postmodern", with Christian writer Graham Cray saying that "Madonna is perhaps the most visible example of what is called post-modernism", and Martin Amis described her as "perhaps the most postmodern personage on the planet". She was also suggested by assistant professor Olivier Sécardin of Utrecht University to epitomise postmodernism.

Modernism sought to design and plan cities that followed the logic of the new model of industrial mass production; reverting to large-scale solutions, aesthetic standardisation, and prefabricated design solutions. Modernism eroded urban living by its failure to recognise differences and aim towards homogeneous landscapes (Simonsen 1990, 57). Jane Jacobs' 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities was a sustained critique of urban planning as it had developed within Modernism and marked a transition from modernity to postmodernity in thinking about urban planning.

The transition from Modernism to Postmodernism is often said to have happened at 3:32 pm on 15 July in 1972, when Pruitt-Igoe, a housing development for low-income people in St. Louis designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki, which had been a prize-winning version of Le Corbusier's 'machine for modern living,' was deemed uninhabitable and was torn down. Since then, Postmodernism has involved theories that embrace and aim to create diversity. It exalts uncertainty, flexibility and change and rejects utopianism while embracing a utopian way of thinking and acting. Postmodernity of 'resistance' seeks to deconstruct Modernism and is a critique of the origins without necessarily returning to them. As a result of Postmodernism, planners are much less inclined to lay a firm or steady claim to there being one single 'right way' of engaging in urban planning and are more open to different styles and ideas of 'how to plan'.

The postmodern approach to understanding the city were pioneered in the 1980s by what could be called the "Los Angeles School of Urbanism" centered on the UCLA's Urban Planning Department in the 1980s, where contemporary Los Angeles was taken to be the postmodern city par excellence, contra posed to what had been the dominant ideas of the Chicago School formed in the 1920s at the University of Chicago, with its framework of urban ecology and emphasis on functional areas of use within a city, and the concentric circles to understand the sorting of different population groups. Edward Soja of the Los Angeles School combined Marxist and postmodern perspectives and focused on the economic and social changes (globalization, specialization, industrialization/deindustrialization, Neo-Liberalism, mass migration) that lead to the creation of large city-regions with their patchwork of population groups and economic uses.

Criticisms of postmodernism are intellectually diverse, including the argument that postmodernism is meaningless and promotes obscurantism.

In part in reference to post-modernism, conservative English philosopher Roger Scruton wrote, "A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative,' is asking you not to believe him. So don't." Similarly, Dick Hebdige criticized the vagueness of the term, enumerating a long list of otherwise unrelated concepts that people have designated as postmodernism, from "the décor of a room" or "a 'scratch' video", to fear of nuclear armageddon and the "implosion of meaning", and stated that anything that could signify all of those things was "a buzzword".

The linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky has said that postmodernism is meaningless because it adds nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge. He asks why postmodernist intellectuals do not respond like people in other fields when asked, "what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn't already obvious, etc.?...If [these requests] can't be met, then I'd suggest recourse to Hume's advice in similar circumstances: 'to the flames'."

Christian philosopher William Lane Craig has said "The idea that we live in a postmodern culture is a myth. In fact, a postmodern culture is an impossibility; it would be utterly unliveable. People are not relativistic when it comes to matters of science, engineering, and technology; rather, they are relativistic and pluralistic in matters of religion and ethics. But, of course, that's not postmodernism; that's modernism!"

American author Thomas Pynchon targeted postmodernism as an object of derision in his novels, openly mocking postmodernist discourse.

American academic and aesthete Camille Paglia has said:

The end result of four decades of postmodernism permeating the art world is that there is very little interesting or important work being done right now in the fine arts. The irony was a bold and creative posture when Duchamp did it, but it is now an utterly banal, exhausted, and tedious strategy. Young artists have been taught to be "cool" and "hip" and thus painfully self-conscious. They are not encouraged to be enthusiastic, emotional, and visionary. They have been cut off from artistic tradition by the crippled skepticism about history that they have been taught by ignorant and solipsistic postmodernists. In short, the art world will never revive until postmodernism fades away. Postmodernism is a plague upon the mind and the heart.

German philosopher Albrecht Wellmer has said that "postmodernism at its best might be seen as a self-critical - a sceptical, ironic, but nevertheless unrelenting - form of modernism; a modernism beyond utopianism, scientism and foundationalism; in short a post-metaphysical modernism."

A formal, academic critique of postmodernism can be found in Beyond the Hoax by physics professor Alan Sokal and in Fashionable Nonsense by Sokal and Belgian physicist Jean Bricmont, both books discussing the so-called Sokal affair. In 1996, Sokal wrote a deliberately nonsensical article in a style similar to postmodernist articles, which was accepted for publication by the postmodern cultural studies journal, Social Text. On the same day of the release he published another article in a different journal explaining the Social Text article hoax. The philosopher Thomas Nagel has supported Sokal and Bricmont, describing their book Fashionable Nonsense as consisting largely of "extensive quotations of scientific gibberish from name-brand French intellectuals, together with eerily patient explanations of why it is gibberish," and agreeing that "there does seem to be something about the Parisian scene that is particularly hospitable to reckless verbosity."

Zimbabwean-born British Marxist Alex Callinicos says that postmodernism "reflects the disappointed revolutionary generation of '68, and the incorporation of many of its members into the professional and managerial 'new middle class'. It is best read as a symptom of political frustration and social mobility rather than as a significant intellectual or cultural phenomenon in its own right."

Analytic philosopher Daniel Dennett said, "Postmodernism, the school of 'thought' that proclaimed 'There are no truths, only interpretations' has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for 'conversations' in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster."

American historian Richard Wolin traces the origins of postmodernism to intellectual roots in fascism, writing "postmodernism has been nourished by the doctrines of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, and Paul de Man -all of whom either prefigured or succumbed to the proverbial intellectual fascination with fascism."

Richard Caputo, William Epstein, David Stoesz & Bruce Thyer consider postmodernism to be a "dead-end in social work epistemology." They write:

Postmodernism continues to have a detrimental influence on social work, questioning the Enlightenment, criticizing established research methods, and challenging scientific authority. The promotion of postmodernism by editors of Social Work and the Journal of Social Work Education has elevated postmodernism, placing it on a par with theoretically guided and empirically based research. The inclusion of postmodernism in the 2008 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards of the Council on Social Work Education and its 2015 sequel further erode the knowledge-building capacity of social work educators. In relation to other disciplines that have exploited empirical methods, social work's stature will continue to ebb until postmodernism is rejected in favor of scientific methods for generating knowledge.

H. Sidky pointed out what he sees as several inherent flaws of a postmodern antiscience perspective, including the confusion of the authority of science (evidence) with the scientist conveying the knowledge; its self-contradictory claim that all truths are relative; and its strategic ambiguity. He sees 21st-century anti-scientific and pseudo-scientific approaches to knowledge, particularly in the United States, as rooted in a postmodernist "decades-long academic assault on science:"

Many of those indoctrinated in postmodern anti-science went on to become conservative political and religious leaders, policymakers, journalists, journal editors, judges, lawyers, and members of city councils and school boards. Sadly, they forgot the lofty ideals of their teachers, except that science is bogus.

Criticism by "postmodernists" themselves

The French psychotherapist and philosopher, Félix Guattari, rejected its theoretical assumptions by arguing that the structuralist and postmodernist visions of the world were not flexible enough to seek explanations in psychological, social, and environmental domains at the same time. In an interview with Truls Lie, Jean Baudrillard noted: "[ Transmodernism, etc.] are better terms than "postmodernism". It is not about modernity; it is about every system that has developed its mode of expression to the extent that it surpasses itself and its own logic. This is what I am trying to analyze." "There is no longer any ontologically secret substance. I perceive this to be nihilism rather than postmodernism."

Culture and politics

Defamiliarization - Artistic technique of presenting common things in an unfamiliar or strange way

Disenchantment - Cultural rationalization and devaluation of religion apparent in modern society

Syncretism - Assimilation of two or more originally discrete religious traditions

Philosophy

Second modernity - Industrial society transformed into a more reflexive network society or information society

Altermodern - term for art that reacts against standardisation and commercialism

Remodernism - Revival of modernism

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Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse characterized by skepticism toward the " grand narratives" of modernism; rejection of epistemic (scientific) certainty or the stability of meaning; and sensitivity to the role of ideology in maintaining political power.

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Postmodernism broadly refers to a socio-cultural and literary theory, and a shift in perspective that has manifested in a variety of disciplines including the social sciences, art, architecture, literature, fashion, communications, and technology. It is generally agreed that the postmodern shift in perception began sometime back in the late 1950s, and is probably still continuing. Postmodernism can be associated with the power shifts and dehumanization of the post- Second World War era and the onslaught of consumer capitalism.

The very term Postmodernism implies a relation to Modernism. Modernism was an earlier aesthetic movement which was in vogue in the early decades of the twentieth century. It has often been said that Postmodernism is at once a continuation of and a break away from the Modernist stance.

Postmodernism shares many of the features of Modernism. Both schools reject the rigid boundaries between high and low art. Postmodernism even goes a step further and deliberately mixes low art with high art, the past with the future, or one genre with another. Such mixing of different, incongruous elements illustrates Postmodernism's use of lighthearted parody, which was also used by Modernism. Both these schools also employed pastiche, which is the imitation of another's style. Parody and pastiche serve to highlight the self-reflexivity of Modernist and Postmodernist works, which means that parody and pastiche serve to remind the reader that the work is not "real" but fictional, constructed. Modernist and Postmodernist works are also fragmented and do not easily, directly convey a solid meaning. That is, these works are consciously ambiguous and give way to multiple interpretations. The individual or subject depicted in these works is often decentred, without a central meaning or goal in life, and dehumanized, often losing individual characteristics and becoming merely the representative of an age or civilization, like Tiresias in The Waste Land.

In short, Modernism and Postmodernism give voice to the insecurities, disorientation and fragmentation of the 20th century western world. The western world, in the 20th century, began to experience this deep sense of security because it progressively lost its colonies in the Third World, worn apart by two major World Wars and found its intellectual and social foundations shaking under the impact of new social theories an developments such as Marxism and Postcolonial global migrations, new technologies and the power shift from Europe to the United States. Though both Modernism and Postmodernism employ fragmentation, discontinuity and decentredness in theme and technique, the basic dissimilarity between the two schools is hidden in this very aspect.

Modernism projects the fragmentation and decentredness of contemporary world as tragic. It laments the loss of the unity and centre of life and suggests that works of art can provide the unity, coherence, continuity and meaning that is lost in modern life. Thus Eliot laments that the modern world is an infertile wasteland, and the fragmentation, incoherence, of this world is effected in the structure of the poem. However, The Waste Land tries to recapture the lost meaning and organic unity by turning to Eastern cultures, and in the use of Tiresias as protagonist

In Postmodernism, fragmentation and disorientation is no longer tragic. Postmodernism on the other hand celebrates fragmentation. It considers fragmentation and decentredness as the only possible way of existence, and does not try to escape from these conditions.

This is where Postmodernism meets Poststructuralism -both Postmodernism and Poststructuralism recognize and accept that it is not possible to have a coherent centre. In Derridean terms, the centre is constantly moving towards the periphery and the periphery constantly moving towards the centre. In other words, the centre, which is the seat of power, is never entirely powerful. It is continually becoming powerless, while the powerless periphery continually tries to acquire power. As a result, it can be argued that there is never a centre, or that there are always multiple centres. This postponement of the centre acquiring power or retaining its position is what Derrida called differance. In Postmodernism's celebration of fragmentation, there is thus an underlying belief in differance, a belief that unity, meaning, coherence is continually postponed.

The Postmodernist disbelief in coherence and unity points to another basic distinction between Modernism and Postmodernism. Modernism believes that coherence and unity is possible, thus emphasizing the importance of rationality and order. The basic assumption of Modernism seems to be that more rationality leads to more order, which leads a society to function better. To establish the primacy of Order, Modernism constantly creates the concept of Disorder in its depiction of the Other-which includes the non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual, non-adult, non-rational and so on. In other words, to establish the superiority of Order, Modernism creates the impression- that all marginal, peripheral, communities such as the non-white, non-male etc. are contaminated by Disorder. Postmodernism, however, goes to the other extreme. It does not say that some parts of the society illustrate Order, and that other parts illustrate Disorder. Postmodernism, in its criticism of the binary opposition, cynically even suggests that everything is Disorder.

The Modernist belief in order, stability and unity is what the Postmodernist thinker Lyotard calls a metanarrative. Modernism works through metanarratives or grand narratives, while Postmodernism questions and deconstructs metanarratives. A metanarrative is a story a culture tells itself about its beliefs and practices.

Postmodernism understands that grand narratives hide, silence and negate contradictions, instabilities and differences inherent in any social system. Postmodernism favours "mini-narratives," stories that explain small practices and local events, without pretending universality and finality. Postmodernism realizes that history, politics and culture are grand narratives of the power-wielders, which comprise falsehoods and incomplete truths.

Having deconstructed the possibility of a stable, permanent reality, Postmodernism has revolutionized the concept of language. Modernism considered language a rational, transparent tool to represent reality and the activities of the rational mind. In the Modernist view, language is representative of thoughts and things. Here, signifiers always point to signifieds. In Postmodernism, however, there are only surfaces, no depths. A signifier has no signified here, because there is no reality to signify.

The French philosopher Baudrillard has conceptualized the Postmodern surface culture as a simulacrum. A simulacrum is a virtual or fake reality simulated or induced by the media or other ideological apparatuses. A simulacrum is not merely an imitation or duplication-it is the substitution of the original by a simulated, fake image. Contemporary world is a simulacrum, where reality has been thus replaced by false images. This would mean, for instance, that the Gulf war that we know from newspapers and television reports has no connection whatsoever to what can be called the "real" Iraq war. The simulated image of Gulf war has become so much more popular and real than the real war, that Baudrillard argues that the Gulf War did not take place. In other words, in the Postmodern world, there are no originals, only copies; no territories, only maps; no reality, only simulations. Here Baudrillard is not merely suggesting that the postmodern world is artificial; he is also implying that we have lost the capacity to discriminate between the real and the artificial.

Just as we have lost touch with the reality of our life, we have also moved away from the reality of the goods we consume. If the media form one driving force of the Postmodern condition, multinational capitalism and globalization is another. Fredric Jameson has related Modernism and Postmodernism to the second and third phases of capitalism. The first phase of capitalism of the 18th -19th centuries, called Market Capitalism, witnessed the early technological development such as that of the steam-driven motor, and corresponded to the Realist phase. The early 20th century, with the development of electrical and internal combustion motors, witnessed the onset of Monopoly Capitalism and Modernism. The Postmodern era corresponds to the age of nuclear and electronic technologies and Consumer Capitalism, where the emphasis is on marketing, selling and consumption rather than production. The dehumanized, globalized world, wipes out individual and national identities, in favour of multinational marketing.

It is thus clear from this exposition that there are at least three different directions taken by Postmodernim, relating to the theories of Lyotard, Baudrillard and Jameson. Postmodernism also has its roots in the theories Habermas and Foucault. Furthermore, Postmodernism can be examined from Feminist and Post-colonial angles. Therefore, one cannot pinpoint the principles of Postmodernism with finality, because there is a plurality in the very constitution of this theory.

Postmodernism, in its denial of an objective truth or reality, forcefully advocates the theory of constructivism-the anti-essentialist argument that everything is ideologically constructed. Postmodernism finds the media to be a great deal responsible for "constructing" our identities and everyday realiites. Indeed, Postmodernism developed as a response to the contemporary boom in electronics and communications technologies and its revolutionizing of our old world order.

Constructivism invariably leads to relativism. Our identities are constructed and transformed every moment in relation to our social environment. Therefore there is scope for multiple and diverse identities, multiple truths, moral codes and views of reality.

The understanding that an objective truth does not exist has invariably led the accent of Postmodernism to fall on subjectivity. Subjectivity itself is of course plural and provisional. A stress on subjectivity will naturally lead to a renewed interest in the local and specific experiences, rather than the and universal and abstract; that is on mini-narratives rather than grand narratives.

Finally, all versions of Postmodernism rely on the method of Deconstruction to analyze socio-cultural situations. Postmodernism has often been vehemently criticized. The fundamental characteristic of Postmodernism is disbelief, which negates social and personal realities and experiences. It is easy to claim that the Gulf War or Iraq War does not exist; but then how does one account for the deaths, the loss and pain of millions of people victimized by these wars? Also, Postmodernism fosters a deep cynicism about the one sustaining force of social life-culture. By entirely washing away the ground beneath our feet, the ideological presumptions upon which human civilization is built, Postmodernism generates a feeling of lack and insecurity in contemporary societies, which is essential for the sustenance of a capitalistic world order. Finally, when the Third World began to assert itself over Euro-centric hegemonic power, Postmodernism had rushed in with the warning, that the empowerment of the periphery is but transient and temporary; and that just as Europe could not retain its imperialistic power for long, the new-found power of the erstwhile colonies is also under erasure.

In literature, postmodernism (relying heavily on fragmentation, deconstruction, playfulness, questionable narrators etc.) reacted against the Enlightenment ideas implicit in modernist literature - informed by Lyotard's concept of the "metanarrative", Derrida's concept of "play", and Budrillard's "simulacra." Deviating from the modernist quest for meaning in a chaotic world, the postmodern. writers eschew, often playfully, the possibility of meaning, and the postmodern novel is often a parody of this. quest. Marked by a distrust of totalizing mechanisms and self-awareness, postmodern writers often celebrate chance over craft and employ metafiction to undermine the author's "univocation". The distinction between high and low culture is also attacked with the employment of pastiche, the combination of multiple cultural elements including subjects and genres not previously deemed fit for literature. Postmodern literature can be considered as an umbrella term for the post-war developments in literature such as Theatre of the Absurd, Beat Generation and Magical Realism.

Postmodern literature, as expressed in the writings of Beckett, Robbe Grillet, Borges, Marquez, Naguib Mahfouz and Angela Carter rests on a recognition of the complex nature of reality and experience, the role of time and memory in human perception, of the self and the world as historical constructions, and the problematic nature of language.

Postmodern literature reached its peak in the '60s and '70s with the publication of Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Lost in the Funhouse and Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth, Gravity's Rainbow, V., and Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, "factions" like Armies in the Night and In Cold Blood by Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, postmodern science fiction novels like Neoromancer by William Gibson, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut and many others. Some declared the death of postmodernism in the '80's with a new surge of realism represented and inspired by Raymond Carver. Tom Wolfe in his 1989 article Stalking the Billion-Footed Beas t called for a new emphasis on realism in fiction to replace postmodernism. With this new emphasis on realism in mind, some declared White Noise in (1985) or The Satanic Verses (1988) to be the last great novels of the postmodern era.

Postmodern film describes the articulation of ideas of postmodernism trough the cinematic medium - by upsetting the mainstream conventions of narrative structure and characterization and destroying (or playing with) the audience's "suspension of disbelief," to create a work that express through less-recognizable internal logic. Two such examples are Jane Campion's Two Friends, in which the story of two school girls is shown in episodic segments arranged in reverse order; and Karel Reisz's The French Lieutenant's Woman, in which the story being played out on the screen is mirrored in the private lives of the actors playing it, which the audience also sees. However, Baudrillard dubbed Sergio Leone's epic 1968 spaghetti western Once Upon a Time in the West as the first postmodern film. Other examples include Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People, Federico Fellini's Satyricon and Amarcord, David Lynch' s Mulholland Drive, Quentin Tarantino 's Pulp Fiction.

In spite of the rather stretched, cynical arguments of Postmodernism, the theory has exerted a fundamental influence on late 20th century thought. It has indeed revolutionized all realms of intellectual inquiry in varying degrees.

Categories: Literature

Tags: Amarcord, Angela Carter, Armies in the Night, Baudrillard, Beat Generation, Catch-22, Crying of Lot 49, Federico Fellini, Fredric Jameson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gravity's Rainbow, Habermas, Jane Campion, Jorge Luis Borges, Joseph Heller, Karel Reisz, Kurt Vonnegut, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Lost in the Funhouse, Lyotard, Magical Realism, Marxism, metanarrative, Michael Winterbottom, Michel Foucault, Modernism, Naguib Mahfouz, Neoromancer, Norman Mailer, Once Upon a Time in the Wes, Postmodern film, Postmodernism, Raymond Carver, Robbe Grillet, Salman Rushdie, Sergio Leone, simulacrum, Sot-Weed Factor, Stalking the Billion-Footed Beas, The Satanic Verses, The Waste Land, Truman Capote, White Noise, William Gibson

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Postmodernism broadly refers to a socio-cultural and literary theory, and a shift in perspective that has manifested in a variety of disciplines including the social sciences, art, architecture, literature, fashion, communications, and technology. It is generally agreed that the postmodern shift in perception began sometime back in the late 1950s, and is probably still continuing....

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Mysteries abound on the first season of LOST as the 48 survivors of Oceanic Air Flight 815 find themselves stranded on an unidentified island with little hope of rescue.

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Lost was created by Jeffrey Lieber, J. J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof, who share story writing credits for the pilot episode, which Abrams directed. Throughout the show's run, Lindelof and Carlton Cuse served as showrunners and head writers, working together with a large number of other executive producers and writers.

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How lost changed tv forever

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The LOST History of the Internet

The story of how the Official Lost Podcast - one of TV's first big companion podcasts - became a model for TV podcasts and how fans helped shaped the show, featuring interviews with Lostpedia as well as some of Lost's most prolific Podcasters. Read More...

How a Volcano Would Have Changed the Ending

Did you even know there was a volcano on the ABC series Lost? It's true. And it might have made a bigger impression - and led to a different series finale - if not for a small matter of money. The presence of this geographical feature on the show's mystical, time-skipping island was established in season 3. You see drawings, images, and even a model of it in a DHARMA Initiative classroom. Obsessive viewers spotted it and theorized about it, but when Lost never returned to it, fans assumed the volcano was a red herring or rich bit of detail. Actually, it was one of the first hints of an endgame. Read More...

Carlton Cuse and Michael Giacchino Reflect on LOST at Hollywood Reunion Concert

It wasn't quite as traumatic as Oceanic Flight 815 ripping apart in the blue skies over the Pacific Ocean, but executive producer Carlton Cuse recalls a difficult landing process for the final stretch of Lost all the same. Speaking in front of a packed crowd at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre in Hollywood, Cuse reflected on the ending of Lost - a process that included a whole lot of writing, a whole lot of tears, and an impressive amount of tequila. "We cried, and it was cathartic," Cuse said, repeating the line throughout his recollection, a mantra of sorts. Read More...

Netflix to Restore LOST Finale After Fan Outcry

The Lost footage is being found! Netflix issued a statement pledging to restore the ABC hit's series finale after co-creator Damon Lindelof publicly backed fan outcry over a heavily edited version being streamed by the company. Earlier today, EW reported the two-part Lost closer, " The End ", was missing about 18 minutes in various cuts. A lengthy Reddit thread chronicled the changes. Lindelof himself weighed in, saying he was "totally befuddled" by the decision and called for the full regular cut to be restored on the service. Read More...

Lostpedia is 10 years old!

On September 22nd 2005, Lostpedia was created. That means it's now 10 years old! It was also the first anniversary of Lost, and the day after the much anticipated Season 2 premiere was aired. During the years that followed, Lostpedia grew into one of the biggest fansites about the TV series on the internet. It became an incredible resource for fans to keep track of all the twists and storylines within the show as they obsessively documented everything from the number of crash survivors still on the Island, to more bizarre stuff like how many times a season Hurley said dude. I've been coming here since 2006, and I've been a member since 2007. So in order to mark this milestone, I'd like to go through 10 things which had a significant impact on the site, and shaped it into what it is today. Read More...

5 Years After LOST - Why It's Wrong To Judge the Show on The End

5 years after Lost's ending, I still hear and read the opinion "that it was rubbish." That it "didn't make sense" or "it was a complete let down." And yeah, astonishingly people still think they were dead all along. This post is my attempt to explain why Lost's final episode hit the nail on the head in doing what it was supposed to do, and while it may have disappointed some (more on that later) it was certainly not rubbish. It was actually quite brilliant. Read More...

10 Years On: Damon Lindelof Reveals Why He "Broke Down Sobbing" and Opens Up About Show's Legacy

Something really awful tends to happen when we lose someone we love-especially if the death itself didn't play out exactly the way that we might have imagined. For a period of time, all we can think about is the end, about the death itself, about how the final weeks or days or moments that maybe didn't exactly go how we had hoped.

There's a period of grieving. And shock. And sorrow. But over time, if we are lucky, we start to focus again on what really actually mattered: That person's life. All the moments and experiences that made us love them so very much in the first place. You know, what really actually mattered. The living.

It's time to do that for Lost. Read More...

Celebrating 10 Years of LOST - Share Your Story!

10 years? Has it really been that long? I am of course talking about 10 years since the Lost Pilot first hit television screens and kick started a worldwide phenomenon. It was one of the most explosive TV pilots of all time, quite literally in the case of the opening sequence. At the time it aired, it was the most expensive pilot in TV history, rolling in at around $12 million - but it was worth every penny as 18 million tuned in to watch it. So it really has been 10 years since this incredible show took over our lives, and I'm glad to have been a part of it from the very start. I have a small confession to make though - I wasn't there from the start...at least not September 22nd, 2004. I am British, and therefore never had the opportunity to watch Lost from the start. No, my tenth anniversary is just under a year from now, on August 10th. That's the date it first aired in 2005 in the UK, and the first opportunity I had to watch the show. Read More...

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Lostpedia is a Lost-related wiki with over 6,000 articles, 25,000 registered users, and 150 million page views. It was launched on September 22, 2005, one day after the Season 2 premiere "Man of Science, Man of Faith" aired. Kevin Croy was the owner of the site, until the site merged with Wikia on December 17, 2008.

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Lost was created by Jeffrey Lieber, J. J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof, who share story writing credits for the pilot episode, which Abrams directed. Throughout the show's run, Lindelof and Carlton Cuse served as showrunners and head writers, working together with a large number of other executive producers and writers.

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Postmodernism in US Television Show Lost Essay - 1770 Words | Cram

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Free Essay: Postmodernism can be defined as a rejection of the idea that there are certain unequivocal truths or grand narratives (such as capitalism, faith...

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Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse characterized by skepticism toward the " grand narratives" of modernism; rejection of epistemic (scientific) certainty or the stability of meaning; and sensitivity to the role of ideology in maintaining political power. Claims to objectivity are dismissed as naïve realism, with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses. The postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization.

Initially emerging from a mode of literary criticism, postmodernism developed in the mid-twentieth century as a rejection of modernism, and has been observed across many disciplines. Postmodernism is associated with the theories of deconstruction and post-structuralism. Various authors have criticized postmodernism as promoting obscurantism, as abandoning Enlightenment rationalism and scientific rigor, and as adding nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge.

Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse which challenges worldviews associated with Enlightenment rationality dating back to the 17th century. Postmodernism is associated with relativism and a focus on the role of ideology in the maintenance of economic and political power. Postmodernists are "skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person". It considers "reality" to be a mental construct. Postmodernism rejects the possibility of unmediated reality or objectively-rational knowledge, asserting that all interpretations are contingent on the perspective from which they are made; claims to objective fact are dismissed as naive realism.

Postmodern thinkers frequently describe knowledge claims and value systems as contingent or socially-conditioned, describing them as products of political, historical, or cultural discourses and hierarchies. Accordingly, postmodern thought is broadly characterized by tendencies to self-referentiality, epistemological and moral relativism, pluralism, and irreverence. Postmodernism is often associated with schools of thought such as deconstruction and post-structuralism. Postmodernism relies on critical theory, which considers the effects of ideology, society, and history on culture. Postmodernism and critical theory commonly criticize universalist ideas of objective reality, morality, truth, human nature, reason, language, and social progress.

Initially, postmodernism was a mode of discourse on literature and literary criticism, commenting on the nature of literary text, meaning, author and reader, writing, and reading. Postmodernism developed in the mid- to late-twentieth century across many scholarly disciplines as a departure or rejection of modernism. As a critical practice, postmodernism employs concepts such as hyperreality, simulacrum, trace, and difference, and rejects abstract principles in favor of direct experience.

The term postmodern was first used in 1870. John Watkins Chapman suggested "a Postmodern style of painting" as a way to depart from French Impressionism. J. M. Thompson, in his 1914 article in The Hibbert Journal (a quarterly philosophical review), used it to describe changes in attitudes and beliefs in the critique of religion, writing: "The raison d'être of Post-Modernism is to escape from the double-mindedness of Modernism by being thorough in its criticism by extending it to religion as well as theology, to Catholic feeling as well as to Catholic tradition."

In 1942 H. R. Hays described postmodernism as a new literary form.

In 1926, Bernard Iddings Bell, president of St. Stephen's College (now Bard College), published Postmodernism and Other Essays, marking the first use of the term to describe the historical period following Modernity. The essay criticizes the lingering socio-cultural norms, attitudes, and practices of the Age of Enlightenment. It also forecasts the major cultural shifts toward Postmodernity and (Bell being an Anglican Episcopal priest) suggests orthodox religion as a solution. However, the term postmodernity was first used as a general theory for a historical movement in 1939 by Arnold J. Toynbee: "Our own Post-Modern Age has been inaugurated by the general war of 1914-1918".

Portland Building (1982), by architect Michael Graves, an example of Postmodern architecture

In 1949 the term was used to describe a dissatisfaction with modern architecture and led to the postmodern architecture movement in response to the modernist architectural movement known as the International Style. Postmodernism in architecture was initially marked by a re-emergence of surface ornament, reference to surrounding buildings in urban settings, historical reference in decorative forms (eclecticism), and non-orthogonal angles.

Author Peter Drucker suggested the transformation into a post-modern world that happened between 1937 and 1957 and described it as a "nameless era" characterized as a shift to a conceptual world based on pattern, purpose, and process rather than a mechanical cause. This shift was outlined by four new realities: the emergence of an Educated Society, the importance of international development, the decline of the nation-state, and the collapse of the viability of non-Western cultures.

In 1971, in a lecture delivered at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, Mel Bochner described "post-modernism" in art as having started with Jasper Johns, "who first rejected sense-data and the singular point-of-view as the basis for his art, and treated art as a critical investigation".

In 1996, Walter Truett Anderson described postmodernism as belonging to one of four typological world views which he identified as:

Neo-romantic, in which truth is found through attaining harmony with nature or spiritual exploration of the inner self.

Postmodern-ironist, which sees truth as socially constructed.

Scientific-rational, in which truth is defined through methodical, disciplined inquiry.

Social-traditional, in which truth is found in the heritage of American and Western civilization.

The basic features of what is now called postmodernism can be found as early as the 1940s, most notably in the work of artists such as Jorge Luis Borges. However, most scholars today agree postmodernism began to compete with modernism in the late 1950s and gained ascendancy over it in the 1960s.

The primary features of postmodernism typically include the ironic play with styles, citations, and narrative levels, a metaphysical skepticism or nihilism towards a " grand narrative" of Western culture, and a preference for the virtual at the expense of the Real (or more accurately, a fundamental questioning of what 'the real' constitutes).

Since the late 1990s, there has been a growing sentiment in popular culture and in academia that postmodernism "has gone out of fashion". Others argue that postmodernism is dead in the context of current cultural production.

Structuralism was a philosophical movement developed by French academics in the 1950s, partly in response to French existentialism, and often interpreted in relation to modernism and high modernism. Thinkers who have been called "structuralists" include the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, and the semiotician Algirdas Greimas. The early writings of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the literary theorist Roland Barthes have also been called "structuralist". Those who began as structuralists but became post-structuralists include Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, and Gilles Deleuze. Other post-structuralists include Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-François Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Anthony Giddens, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray. The American cultural theorists, critics, and intellectuals whom they influenced include Judith Butler, John Fiske, Rosalind Krauss, Avital Ronell, and Hayden White.

Like structuralists, post-structuralists start from the assumption that people's identities, values, and economic conditions determine each other rather than having intrinsic properties that can be understood in isolation. Thus the French structuralists considered themselves to be espousing relativism and constructionism. But they nevertheless tended to explore how the subjects of their study might be described, reductively, as a set of essential relationships, schematics, or mathematical symbols. (An example is Claude Lévi-Strauss's algebraic formulation of mythological transformation in "The Structural Study of Myth").

Postmodernism entails reconsideration of the entire Western value system (love, marriage, popular culture, shift from an industrial to a service economy) that took place since the 1950s and 1960s, with a peak in the Social Revolution of 1968-are described with the term postmodernity, as opposed to postmodernism, a term referring to an opinion or movement. Post-structuralism is characterized by new ways of thinking through structuralism, contrary to the original form.

One of the most well-known postmodernist concerns is deconstruction, a theory for philosophy, literary criticism, and textual analysis developed by Jacques Derrida. Critics have insisted that Derrida's work is rooted in a statement found in Of Grammatology: " Il n'y a pas de hors-texte" ('there is nothing outside the text'). Such critics misinterpret the statement as denying any reality outside of books. The statement is actually part of a critique of "inside" and "outside" metaphors when referring to the text, and is a corollary to the observation that there is no "inside" of a text as well. This attention to a text's unacknowledged reliance on metaphors and figures embedded within its discourse is characteristic of Derrida's approach. Derrida's method sometimes involves demonstrating that a given philosophical discourse depends on binary oppositions or excluding terms that the discourse itself has declared to be irrelevant or inapplicable. Derrida's philosophy inspired a postmodern movement called deconstructivism among architects, characterized by a design that rejects structural "centers" and encourages decentralized play among its elements. Derrida discontinued his involvement with the movement after the publication of his collaborative project with architect Peter Eisenman in Chora L Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman.

The connection between postmodernism, posthumanism, and cyborgism has led to a challenge to postmodernism, for which the terms Post-postmodernism and postpoststructuralism were first coined in 2003:

In some sense, we may regard postmodernism, posthumanism, poststructuralism, etc., as being of the 'cyborg age' of mind over body. Deconference was an exploration in post-cyborgism (i.e. what comes after the postcorporeal era), and thus explored issues of postpostmodernism, postpoststructuralism, and the like. To understand this transition from 'pomo' (cyborgism) to 'popo' (postcyborgism) we must first understand the cyborg era itself.

More recently metamodernism, post-postmodernism and the "death of postmodernism" have been widely debated: in 2007 Andrew Hoberek noted in his introduction to a special issue of the journal Twentieth-Century Literature titled "After Postmodernism" that "declarations of postmodernism's demise have become a critical commonplace". A small group of critics has put forth a range of theories that aim to describe culture or society in the alleged aftermath of postmodernism, most notably Raoul Eshelman (performatism), Gilles Lipovetsky ( hypermodernity), Nicolas Bourriaud ( altermodern), and Alan Kirby (digimodernism, formerly called pseudo-modernism). None of these new theories or labels have so far gained very widespread acceptance. Sociocultural anthropologist Nina Müller-Schwarze offers neostructuralism as a possible direction. The exhibition Postmodernism - Style and Subversion 1970-1990 at the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, 24 September 2011 - 15 January 2012) was billed as the first show to document postmodernism as a historical movement.

In the 1970s a group of poststructuralists in France developed a radical critique of modern philosophy with roots discernible in Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, and became known as postmodern theorists, notably including Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and others. New and challenging modes of thought and writing pushed the development of new areas and topics in philosophy. By the 1980s, this spread to America (Richard Rorty) and the world.

Jacques Derrida was a French-Algerian philosopher best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction, which he discussed in numerous texts, and developed in the context of phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy.

Derrida re-examined the fundamentals of writing and its consequences on philosophy in general; sought to undermine the language of "presence" or metaphysics in an analytical technique which, beginning as a point of departure from Heidegger's notion of Destruktion, came to be known as deconstruction.

Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, and literary critic. First associated with structuralism, Foucault created an oeuvre that today is seen as belonging to post-structuralism and to postmodern philosophy. Considered a leading figure of French theory, his work remains fruitful in the English-speaking academic world in a large number of sub-disciplines. The Times Higher Education Guide described him in 2009 as the most cited author in the humanities.

Michel Foucault introduced concepts such as discursive regime, or re-invoked those of older philosophers like and genealogy in order to explain the relationship between meaning, power, and social behavior within social orders (see The Order of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality).

Jean-François Lyotard

Influenced by Nietzsche, Jean-François Lyotard is credited with being the first to use the term in a philosophical context, in his 1979 work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. In it, he follows Wittgenstein's language games model and speech act theory, contrasting two different language games, that of the expert, and that of the philosopher. He talks about the transformation of knowledge into information in the computer age and likens the transmission or reception of coded messages (information) to a position within a language game.

Lyotard defined philosophical postmodernism in The Postmodern Condition, writing: "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives...."  where what he means by metanarrative (in French, grands récits) is something like a unified, complete, universal, and epistemically certain story about everything that is. Postmodernists reject metanarratives because they reject the concept of truth that metanarratives presuppose. Postmodernist philosophers, in general, argue that truth is always contingent on historical and social context rather than being absolute and universal-and that truth is always partial and "at issue" rather than being complete and certain.

Richard Rorty argues in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature that contemporary analytic philosophy mistakenly imitates scientific methods. In addition, he denounces the traditional epistemological perspectives of representationalism and correspondence theory that rely upon the independence of knowers and observers from phenomena and the passivity of natural phenomena in relation to consciousness.

Jean Baudrillard, in Simulacra and Simulation, introduced the concept that reality or the principle of the Real is short-circuited by the interchangeability of signs in an era whose communicative and semantic acts are dominated by electronic media and digital technologies. For Baudrillard, "simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal."

Fredric Jameson set forth one of the first expansive theoretical treatments of postmodernism as a historical period, intellectual trend, and social phenomenon in a series of lectures at the Whitney Museum, later expanded as Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991).

In Analysis of the Journey, a journal birthed from postmodernism, Douglas Kellner insists that the "assumptions and procedures of modern theory" must be forgotten. Extensively, Kellner analyzes the terms of this theory in real-life experiences and examples. Kellner used science and technology studies as a major part of his analysis; he urged that the theory is incomplete without it. The scale was larger than just postmodernism alone; it must be interpreted through cultural studies where science and technology studies play a huge role. The reality of the September 11 attacks on the United States of America is the catalyst for his explanation. In response, Kellner continues to examine the repercussions of understanding the effects of the 11 September attacks. He questions if the attacks are only able to be understood in a limited form of postmodern theory due to the level of irony.

The conclusion he depicts is simple: postmodernism, as most use it today, will decide what experiences and signs in one's reality will be one's reality as they know it.

Neue Staatsgalerie (1977-84), Stuttgart, Germany, designed by the British architects James Stirling and Michael Wilford, showing the eclectic mix of classical architecture and colourful ironic detailing.

Ray and Maria Stata Center (2004), designed by the Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Modern Architecture, as established and developed by Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, was focused on:

They argued for architecture that represented the spirit of the age as depicted in cutting-edge technology, be it airplanes, cars, ocean liners, or even supposedly artless grain silos. Modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is associated with the phrase " less is more".

Critics of Modernism have:

argued that the attributes of perfection and minimalism are themselves subjective;

pointed out anachronisms in modern thought; and,

The intellectual scholarship regarding postmodernism and architecture is closely linked with the writings of critic-turned-architect Charles Jencks, beginning with lectures in the early 1970s and his essay "The Rise of Post Modern Architecture" from 1975. His magnum opus, however, is the book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, first published in 1977, and since running to seven editions. Jencks makes the point that Post-Modernism (like Modernism) varies for each field of art, and that for architecture it is not just a reaction to Modernism but what he terms double coding: "Double Coding: the combination of Modern techniques with something else (usually traditional building) in order for architecture to communicate with the public and a concerned minority, usually other architects." In their book, "Revisiting Postmodernism", Terry Farrell and Adam Furman argue that postmodernism brought a more joyous and sensual experience to the culture, particularly in architecture.

Postmodern art is a body of art movements that sought to contradict some aspects of modernism or some aspects that emerged or developed in its aftermath. Cultural production manifesting as intermedia, installation art, conceptual art, deconstructionist display, and multimedia, particularly involving video, are described as postmodern.

April Greiman

Early mention of postmodernism as an element of graphic design appeared in the British magazine, "Design". A characteristic of postmodern graphic design is that "retro, techno, punk, grunge, beach, parody, and pastiche were all conspicuous trends. Each had its own sites and venues, detractors and advocates."

Orhan Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature

Jorge Luis Borges' (1939) short story " Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", is often considered as predicting postmodernism and is a paragon of the ultimate parody. Samuel Beckett is also considered an important precursor and influence. Novelists who are commonly connected with postmodern literature include Vladimir Nabokov, William Gaddis, Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Pier Vittorio Tondelli, John Hawkes, William S. Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, John Barth, Robert Coover, Jean Rhys, Donald Barthelme, E. L. Doctorow, Richard Kalich, Jerzy Kosiński, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon (Pynchon's work has also been described as high modern), Ishmael Reed, Kathy Acker, Ana Lydia Vega, Jáchym Topol and Paul Auster.

In 1971, the American scholar Ihab Hassan published The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature, an early work of literary criticism from a postmodern perspective that traces the development of what he calls "literature of silence" through Marquis de Sade, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, and many others, including developments such as the Theatre of the Absurd and the nouveau roman.

In Postmodernist Fiction (1987), Brian McHale details the shift from modernism to postmodernism, arguing that the former is characterized by an epistemological dominant and that postmodern works have developed out of modernism and are primarily concerned with questions of ontology. McHale's second book, Constructing Postmodernism (1992), provides readings of postmodern fiction and some contemporary writers who go under the label of cyberpunk. McHale's "What Was Postmodernism?" (2007) follows Raymond Federman's lead in now using the past tense when discussing postmodernism.

American singer-songwriter Madonna

Jonathan Kramer has written that avant-garde musical compositions (which some would consider modernist rather than postmodernist) "defy more than seduce the listener, and they extend by potentially unsettling means the very idea of what music is." In the 1960s, composers such as Terry Riley, Henryk Górecki, Bradley Joseph, John Adams, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Michael Nyman, and Lou Harrison reacted to the perceived elitism and dissonant sound of atonal academic modernism by producing music with simple textures and relatively consonant harmonies, whilst others, most notably John Cage challenged the prevailing narratives of beauty and objectivity common to Modernism.

Author on postmodernism, Dominic Strinati, has noted, it is also important "to include in this category the so-called ' art rock' musical innovations and mixing of styles associated with groups like Talking Heads, and performers like Laurie Anderson, together with the self-conscious 'reinvention of disco' by the Pet Shop Boys".

In the late-20th century, avant-garde academics labelled American singer Madonna, as the "personification of the postmodern", with Christian writer Graham Cray saying that "Madonna is perhaps the most visible example of what is called post-modernism", and Martin Amis described her as "perhaps the most postmodern personage on the planet". She was also suggested by assistant professor Olivier Sécardin of Utrecht University to epitomise postmodernism.

Modernism sought to design and plan cities that followed the logic of the new model of industrial mass production; reverting to large-scale solutions, aesthetic standardisation, and prefabricated design solutions. Modernism eroded urban living by its failure to recognise differences and aim towards homogeneous landscapes (Simonsen 1990, 57). Jane Jacobs' 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities was a sustained critique of urban planning as it had developed within Modernism and marked a transition from modernity to postmodernity in thinking about urban planning.

The transition from Modernism to Postmodernism is often said to have happened at 3:32 pm on 15 July in 1972, when Pruitt-Igoe, a housing development for low-income people in St. Louis designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki, which had been a prize-winning version of Le Corbusier's 'machine for modern living,' was deemed uninhabitable and was torn down. Since then, Postmodernism has involved theories that embrace and aim to create diversity. It exalts uncertainty, flexibility and change and rejects utopianism while embracing a utopian way of thinking and acting. Postmodernity of 'resistance' seeks to deconstruct Modernism and is a critique of the origins without necessarily returning to them. As a result of Postmodernism, planners are much less inclined to lay a firm or steady claim to there being one single 'right way' of engaging in urban planning and are more open to different styles and ideas of 'how to plan'.

The postmodern approach to understanding the city were pioneered in the 1980s by what could be called the "Los Angeles School of Urbanism" centered on the UCLA's Urban Planning Department in the 1980s, where contemporary Los Angeles was taken to be the postmodern city par excellence, contra posed to what had been the dominant ideas of the Chicago School formed in the 1920s at the University of Chicago, with its framework of urban ecology and emphasis on functional areas of use within a city, and the concentric circles to understand the sorting of different population groups. Edward Soja of the Los Angeles School combined Marxist and postmodern perspectives and focused on the economic and social changes (globalization, specialization, industrialization/deindustrialization, Neo-Liberalism, mass migration) that lead to the creation of large city-regions with their patchwork of population groups and economic uses.

Criticisms of postmodernism are intellectually diverse, including the argument that postmodernism is meaningless and promotes obscurantism.

In part in reference to post-modernism, conservative English philosopher Roger Scruton wrote, "A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative,' is asking you not to believe him. So don't." Similarly, Dick Hebdige criticized the vagueness of the term, enumerating a long list of otherwise unrelated concepts that people have designated as postmodernism, from "the décor of a room" or "a 'scratch' video", to fear of nuclear armageddon and the "implosion of meaning", and stated that anything that could signify all of those things was "a buzzword".

The linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky has said that postmodernism is meaningless because it adds nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge. He asks why postmodernist intellectuals do not respond like people in other fields when asked, "what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn't already obvious, etc.?...If [these requests] can't be met, then I'd suggest recourse to Hume's advice in similar circumstances: 'to the flames'."

Christian philosopher William Lane Craig has said "The idea that we live in a postmodern culture is a myth. In fact, a postmodern culture is an impossibility; it would be utterly unliveable. People are not relativistic when it comes to matters of science, engineering, and technology; rather, they are relativistic and pluralistic in matters of religion and ethics. But, of course, that's not postmodernism; that's modernism!"

American author Thomas Pynchon targeted postmodernism as an object of derision in his novels, openly mocking postmodernist discourse.

American academic and aesthete Camille Paglia has said:

The end result of four decades of postmodernism permeating the art world is that there is very little interesting or important work being done right now in the fine arts. The irony was a bold and creative posture when Duchamp did it, but it is now an utterly banal, exhausted, and tedious strategy. Young artists have been taught to be "cool" and "hip" and thus painfully self-conscious. They are not encouraged to be enthusiastic, emotional, and visionary. They have been cut off from artistic tradition by the crippled skepticism about history that they have been taught by ignorant and solipsistic postmodernists. In short, the art world will never revive until postmodernism fades away. Postmodernism is a plague upon the mind and the heart.

German philosopher Albrecht Wellmer has said that "postmodernism at its best might be seen as a self-critical - a sceptical, ironic, but nevertheless unrelenting - form of modernism; a modernism beyond utopianism, scientism and foundationalism; in short a post-metaphysical modernism."

A formal, academic critique of postmodernism can be found in Beyond the Hoax by physics professor Alan Sokal and in Fashionable Nonsense by Sokal and Belgian physicist Jean Bricmont, both books discussing the so-called Sokal affair. In 1996, Sokal wrote a deliberately nonsensical article in a style similar to postmodernist articles, which was accepted for publication by the postmodern cultural studies journal, Social Text. On the same day of the release he published another article in a different journal explaining the Social Text article hoax. The philosopher Thomas Nagel has supported Sokal and Bricmont, describing their book Fashionable Nonsense as consisting largely of "extensive quotations of scientific gibberish from name-brand French intellectuals, together with eerily patient explanations of why it is gibberish," and agreeing that "there does seem to be something about the Parisian scene that is particularly hospitable to reckless verbosity."

Zimbabwean-born British Marxist Alex Callinicos says that postmodernism "reflects the disappointed revolutionary generation of '68, and the incorporation of many of its members into the professional and managerial 'new middle class'. It is best read as a symptom of political frustration and social mobility rather than as a significant intellectual or cultural phenomenon in its own right."

Analytic philosopher Daniel Dennett said, "Postmodernism, the school of 'thought' that proclaimed 'There are no truths, only interpretations' has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for 'conversations' in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster."

American historian Richard Wolin traces the origins of postmodernism to intellectual roots in fascism, writing "postmodernism has been nourished by the doctrines of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, and Paul de Man -all of whom either prefigured or succumbed to the proverbial intellectual fascination with fascism."

Richard Caputo, William Epstein, David Stoesz & Bruce Thyer consider postmodernism to be a "dead-end in social work epistemology." They write:

Postmodernism continues to have a detrimental influence on social work, questioning the Enlightenment, criticizing established research methods, and challenging scientific authority. The promotion of postmodernism by editors of Social Work and the Journal of Social Work Education has elevated postmodernism, placing it on a par with theoretically guided and empirically based research. The inclusion of postmodernism in the 2008 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards of the Council on Social Work Education and its 2015 sequel further erode the knowledge-building capacity of social work educators. In relation to other disciplines that have exploited empirical methods, social work's stature will continue to ebb until postmodernism is rejected in favor of scientific methods for generating knowledge.

H. Sidky pointed out what he sees as several inherent flaws of a postmodern antiscience perspective, including the confusion of the authority of science (evidence) with the scientist conveying the knowledge; its self-contradictory claim that all truths are relative; and its strategic ambiguity. He sees 21st-century anti-scientific and pseudo-scientific approaches to knowledge, particularly in the United States, as rooted in a postmodernist "decades-long academic assault on science:"

Many of those indoctrinated in postmodern anti-science went on to become conservative political and religious leaders, policymakers, journalists, journal editors, judges, lawyers, and members of city councils and school boards. Sadly, they forgot the lofty ideals of their teachers, except that science is bogus.

Criticism by "postmodernists" themselves

The French psychotherapist and philosopher, Félix Guattari, rejected its theoretical assumptions by arguing that the structuralist and postmodernist visions of the world were not flexible enough to seek explanations in psychological, social, and environmental domains at the same time. In an interview with Truls Lie, Jean Baudrillard noted: "[ Transmodernism, etc.] are better terms than "postmodernism". It is not about modernity; it is about every system that has developed its mode of expression to the extent that it surpasses itself and its own logic. This is what I am trying to analyze." "There is no longer any ontologically secret substance. I perceive this to be nihilism rather than postmodernism."

Culture and politics

Defamiliarization - Artistic technique of presenting common things in an unfamiliar or strange way

Disenchantment - Cultural rationalization and devaluation of religion apparent in modern society

Syncretism - Assimilation of two or more originally discrete religious traditions

Philosophy

Second modernity - Industrial society transformed into a more reflexive network society or information society

Altermodern - term for art that reacts against standardisation and commercialism

Remodernism - Revival of modernism

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Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse characterized by skepticism toward the " grand narratives" of modernism; rejection of epistemic (scientific) certainty or the stability of meaning; and sensitivity to the role of ideology in maintaining political power.

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Duality

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How lost changed TV forever

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Mystery factors

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Diversity amongst characters

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While watching Lost one can not help but relate to at least one of the characters in the show.  When applying the theory of Postmodernism to the show one can create their own understanding of the events that take place.  Each scene builds upon the next with some sort of suspense, mystery, or adventure.  This enigma makes it so there’s rarely scenes that do not have a build up before them.  As the scenes go on setting each other up connections from previous episodes can be made, as well as, connections to the previous scenes.