John McGowan brings a fresh perspective to ongoing debates about the political implications of postmodernist thought and the relationship of intellectuals to contemporary culture. In addition to providing a comprehensive overview of the philosophical context of postmodernism, he considers the kinds of freedom and oppositional politics that are possible under postmodern conditions.

If you are like most people, you’re not sure what Postmodernism is. And if this were like most books on the subject, it probably wouldn’t tell you. Besides what a few grumpy critics claim, Postmodernism is not a bunch of meaningless intellectual mind games. On the contrary, it is a reaction to the most profound spiritual and philosophical crisis of our time – the failure of the Enlightenment. Jim Powell takes the position that Postmodernism is a series of “maps” that help people find their way through a changing world. Postmodernism For Beginners features the thoughts of Foucault on power and knowledge, Jameson on mapping the postmodern, Baudrillard on the media, Harvey on time-space compression, Derrida on deconstruction and Deleuze and Guattari on rhizomes. The book also discusses postmodern artifacts such as Madonna, cyberpunk, Buddhist ecology, and teledildonics.

The aim of this book is to tell a fuller story of postmodernism as applied to philosophy and a few other related disciplines. The book considers postmodernism from different angles. Apart from examining the nexus between postmodernism and different branches of philosophy. The ideas of leading postmodern thinkers we critically discussed. In an age where students find it very difficult to buy relevant books, this book is a handy reference material because it covers the very essential areas of postmodernism. I must commend the Editors of the book for their editorial astuteness and all the contributors for exhibiting a wonderful and overwhelming enlightenment for philosophy students and students of related disciplines. I strongly recommend the book for these and enlightened readers who seek a deeper knowledge of the subject.

V.1 Foundational essays -- V.2 Critical Texts -- V.3 Disciplinary texts: Humanities and social sciences -- V.4 Legal studies, psychoanalytic studies, visual arts and architecture.

Driven by global economic forces to innovate, today’s society paradoxically looks forward to the future while staring only at the nearest, most local present—the most recent financial quarter, the latest artistic movement, the instant message or blog post at the top of the screen. Postmodernity is lived, it seems, at the end of history. In the essays collected in Local Transcendence, Alan Liu takes the pulse of such postmodern historicism by tracking two leading indicators of its acceleration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: postmodern cultural criticism—including the new historicism, the new cultural history, cultural anthropology, the new pragmatism, and postmodern and postindustrial theory—and digital information technology. What is the relation between the new historicist anecdote and the database field, Liu asks, and can either have a critical function in the age of postmodern historicism? Local Transcendence includes two previously unpublished essays and a synthetic introduction in which Liu traverses from his earlier work on the theory of historicism to his recent studies of information culture to propose a theory of contingent method incorporating a special inflection of history: media history.

Larry A. Hickman presents John Dewey as very much at home in the busy mix of contemporary philosophy—as a thinker whose work now, more than fifty years after his death, still furnishes fresh insights into cutting-edge philosophical debates. Hickman argues that it is precisely the rich, pluralistic mix of contemporary philosophical discourse, with its competing research programs in French-inspired postmodernism, phenomenology, Critical Theory, Heidegger studies, analytic philosophy, and neopragmatism—all busily engaging, challenging, and informing one another—that invites renewed examination of Dewey’s central ideas. Hickman offers a Dewey who both anticipated some of the central insights of French-inspired postmodernism and, if he were alive today, would certainly be one of its most committed critics, a Dewey who foresaw some of the most trenchant problems associated with fostering global citizenship, and a Dewey whose core ideas are often at odds with those of some of his most ardent neopragmatist interpreters. In the trio of essays that launch this book, Dewey is an observer and critic of some of the central features of French-inspired postmodernism and its American cousin, neopragmatism. In the next four, Dewey enters into dialogue with contemporary critics of technology, including Jürgen Habermas, Andrew Feenberg, and Albert Borgmann. The next two essays establish Dewey as an environmental philosopher of the first rank—a worthy conversation partner for Holmes Ralston, III, Baird Callicott, Bryan G. Norton, and Aldo Leopold. The concluding essays provide novel interpretations of Dewey’s views of religious belief, the psychology of habit, philosophical anthropology, and what he termed “the epistemology industry.”

In all the arts a war is being waged between modernists and postmodernists. Radicals have tended to side with the modernists against the forces of conservatism. Postmodern Culture is a break with this tendency. Its contributors propose a postmodernism of resistance - an aesthetic that rejects hierarchy and celebrates diversity. Ranging from architecture, sculpture and painting to music, photography and film, this collection is now recognised as a seminal text on the postmodernism debate.The essays are by Hal Foster, Jürgen Habermas, Kenneth Frampton, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp, Craig Owens, Gregory L. Ulmer, Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and Edward W. Said.

In the decade that followed 1972, the journal boundary 2 consistently published many of the most distinguished and most influential statements of an emerging literary postmodernism. Recognizing postmodernism as a dominant force in culture, particularly in the literary and narrative imagination, the journal appeared when literary critical study in the United States was in a period of theory-induced ferment. The fundamental relations between postmodernism and poststructuralism were being initially examined and the effort to formulate a critical sense of the postmodern was underway. In this volume, Paul A. Bové, the current editor of boundary 2, has gathered many of those foundational essays and, as such, has assembled a basic text in the history of postmodernism. Essays by noted cultural and literary theorists join with Bové's contemporary preface to represent the important and unique moment in recent intellectual history when postmodernism was no longer seen primarily as an architectural term, had not yet come to describe the wide range of culture it does now, but was finding power and place in the literary realm. These essays show that the history of postmodernism and its attendant critical theories are both more complex and more deeply bound with literary criticism than often is acknowledged today. Early Postmodernism demonstrates not only the significance of these literary studies, but also the role played by literary critical postmodernism in making possible newer forms of critical and cultural studies. Contributors. Barry Alpert, Charles Altieri, David Antin, Harold Bloom, Paul A. Bové, Hélène Cixous, Gerald Gillespie, Ihab Hassan, Joseph N. Riddel, William, V. Spanos, Catharine R. Stimpson, Cornel West