Questions Raised
What is Postmodernism
Why should I care? Or What does it have to do with me?- What does the word "postmodern" and/or "liberal humanism" mean to you right now?
What does the word "modernism" mean in this context?
Modernism
Traditionally equated with the new and progressive
Breakdown of the Enlightenment Project
Beliefs of Liberal Humanism
General
Absolute Truth
The world can be controlled and ordered
We can picture and represent the world
Belief in linear progress
Metanarratives supporting the main direction of history
10 Specific
Universality
Universality = no context outside of text
Universality means text must be studied in isolation (context,
personal ideologies)
Human nature is unchanging
People's individuality (personality) is transcendent
Purpose = humanist enhancement of life
Form & content must be organic
Human-ness is in the work not the author
Show it don't tell it
Criticism should mediate b/t the perceiver and the object
Postmodernism
A great, confusing, stressful, and enormously promising (and challenging)
transition in HOW we believe (not necessarily WHAT we believe)
BUT in many cases the What is just as challenged as the How
Postmodernity
Created by the breakdown of the Enlightenment and the transitions
brought on by the Industrial Revolution
Movement from agrarian to industrial economies (division of labor,
disassociation b/t the product and the producer, etc.)
Collision of multiple cultures, genders, ethnicities, religions
Four central areas of Postmodernity
Self-concept: understanding ourselves in terms of the made identity (constructed and reconstructed out of many cultural sources)
Moral and Ethical discourse: morality based on the ever shifting ground of socially constructed worldviews--relativism
Art and Culture: no single tradition with the position of artist re culture re observer re society/issues constantly being negotiated and rearranged
Globalization: truly global society separated by access to technology, w/unprecedented access to information, quick pace, highly mobile, unstable boundaries
Themes of Postmodernism
New understandings of "culture"
Doubt in any one "truth" as representative of reality
Focus on language as constitutive and constituting reality
Preference for the local and the specific over the universal and
abstract
Acceptance that different descriptions of reality cannot be measured
against one another in any type of final (objective) manner
Themes of Postmodernism-boiled down by Peter Barry
Politics is Pervasive
Language is constitutive
Truth is Provisional
Meaning is Contingent
Human Nature is a Myth
Postmodernism and Art
Art is not merely an aesthetic experience but a way of knowing
the world
Art contains a plurality of foci, methods, and references
Revised 23 January 2001