Postmodernism

This reader provides a selection of articles and essays by leading figures in the postmodernism debate.

Thomas Docherty is Professor of English at Warwick University. He has published on most areas of English and comparative literature from the Renaissance to the present day. He specializes in the philosophy of literary criticism, in critical theory, and in cultural history in relation primarily to European philosophy and literatures. Some of his previous publications include John Donne Undone (Methuen/Routledge, 1986), Postmodernism (Harvester/Columbia UP, 1993), Aesthetic Democracy (Stanford UP, 2006) and The English Question (Sussex Academic, 2008).

Postmodernism: An Introduction; 1: Founding Propositions; 1: Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?; 2: Note on the Meaning of 'Post-'; 3: The Entry into Postmodernity: Nietzsche as a turning point; 4: Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; 2: Modernity Complete and Incomplete; 5: Modernity - An Incomplete Project; 6: The Structure of Artistic Revolutions; 7: The Last Days of Liberalism; 8: The Fall of the Legislator; 3: Aesthetic and Cultural Practices; 9: Toward a Concept of Postmodernism; 10: Introduction to Terpsichore in Sneakers; 11: The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism; 12: Postmodernism in the Visual Arts: A question of ends; 13: The Evil Demon of Images and The Precession of Simulacra; 14: The City of Robots; 15: Against Intellectual Complexity in Music; 4: Crisis in the Avant-Garde; 16: The Search for Tradition: Avant-garde and postmodernism in the 1970s; 17: The Negation of the Autonomy of Art by the Avant-Garde; 18: The Sublime and the Avant-Garde; 19: The International Trans-Avant-Garde; 5: Architecture and Urbanicity; 20: Toward a Critical Regionalism: Six points for an architecture of resistance; 21: The Emergent Rules; 22: The Duck and the Decorated Shed; 23: Postmodern; 6: Politics; 24: Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism; 25: Politics and the Limits of Modernity; 26: The Condition of Post-Marxist Man; 27: Toward a Principle of Evil; 7: Feminism; 28: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism; 29: Feminism and Postmodernism; 30: Social Criticism without Philosophy: An encounter between feminism and postmodernism; 31: The Demise of Experience: Fiction as stranger than truth?; 8: Periphery and Postmodernism; 32: Postmodernism or Post-colonialism Today; 33: Postmodernism and Periphery; 34: Rereading Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: A response to the 'postmodern' condition