Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Though first used to define a style of architecture in the 1940s, the term postmodernism first became widely used in the 1960s to describe a “new sensibility” in literature which either rejected modernist attitudes and techniques or adapted or extended them. In the following decades the term began to figure in other academic disciplines too, such as social theory, cultural and media studies, visual arts, philosophy, and history. Such widespread usage meant that an already contentious term became overloaded with meaning, chiefly because it was being used to describe characteristics of the social and political landscape as well as art and literature. To understand the postmodern it is therefore useful to distinguish between postmodernity , the economic and social conditions of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and postmodernism , aesthetic and intellectual production in this period. More specifically, we can say that postmodernism refers to (1) changes in how we live in the period from, roughly, the Second World War to the present day and (2) how these changes have led to shifts in the way we think, feel, and express ourselves culturally and aesthetically. Postmodernity is an umbrella term for a set of related socioeconomic phenomena. It is “postindustrial” ( Bell 1973 ), as the production of consumer goods has replaced “heavy” industry (such as manufacturing ... log in or subscribe to read full text