A Return to Aesthetics confronts postmodernism's rejection of aesthetics by showing that this critique rests on central concepts of classical aesthetic theory, namely autonomous form, disinterest, and symbolic discourse. The author argues for the value of these concepts by recovering them through a historical reinterpretation of their meaning prior to their distortion by twentieth-century formalism. Loesberg then applies these concepts to a discussion of two of the most significant critics of the ideology of Enlightenment, Foucault and Bourdieu. He argues that understanding the role of aesthetics in the postmodern critique of Enlightenment will get us out of the intellectual impasse wherein numbingly repeated attacks upon postmodernism as self-contradictory match numbingly repeated defenses. Construing postmodern critiques as examples of aesthetic reseeing gives us a new understanding of the postmodern critique of the Enlightenment.

Revisiting Postmodernism offers an engaging, wide-ranging and highly illustrated account of postmodernism in architecture from its roots in the 1940s to its ongoing relevance today. This book invites readers to see Postmodernism in a new light: not just a style but a cultural phenomenon that embraces all areas of life and thrives on complexity and pluralism, in contrast to the strait-laced, single-style, top-down inclination of its predecessor, Modernism. While focusing on architecture, this book also explores aspects such as urban masterplanning, furniture design, art and literature. Looking at Postmodernism through the lens of examples from around the world, each chapter explores the movement in the UK on the one hand, and its international counterparts on the other, reflecting on the historical movement but also how postmodernism influences practices today. This book offers the insider’s view on postmodernism by the author, a recognised pioneer in the field of postmodern architecture and a prestigious and authoritative participant in the postmodern movement.

A lucid exploration of the key features of postmodernism and the most important authors from Beckett to DeLillo.

Tracing the emergence and re-emergence of the agrarian myth in the past century the argument in this book is that at the centre of the discourse about the cultural identity of "otherness/difference" lies the concept of an innate "peasant-ness".

Postmodernism has often been presented as a new theory of liberation that promotes pluralism and gives representation to the marginalised peoples of the non-west and 'other' cultures.In this major assessment of postmodernism from a non-western perspective, Ziauddin Sardar offers a radical critique of this view. Covering the salient spheres of postmodernism - from architecture, film, television and pop music, to philosophy, consumer lifestyles and new age religions - Sardar reveals that postmodernism in fact operates to further marginalise the reality of the non-west and confound its aspirations.By tracing postmodernism's roots in colonialism and modernity, Sardar demonstrates that the dominant contemporary intellectual fashion, peddling an insidiously oppressive and subtle revisionism, is the most comprehensive onslaught on the non-west ever experienced. In stern retort, the author offers ways in which the peoples of the non-west can counter the postmodern assault and survive with their identities, histories and cultures intact.

Postmodernism Rightly Understood is a dramatic return to realism--a poetic attempt to attain a true understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the postmodern predicament. Prominent political theorist Peter Augustine Lawler reflects on the flaws of postmodern thought, the futility of pragmatism, and the spiritual emptiness of existentialism. Lawler examines postmodernism by interpreting the writings of five respected and best selling American authors--Francis Fukuyama, Richard Rorty, Allan Bloom, Walker Percy, and Christopher Lasch. Lawler explains why the alternatives available in our time are either a "soulless niceness," which Fukuyama, Rorty, and Bloom described as the result of modern success, or a postmodern moral responsibility that accompanies love in the ruins, as articulated by Percy and Lasch. This is a fresh and compelling look at the crisis of the human soul and intellect accompanied by the onset of postmodernity.

Post-Postmodernism begins with a simple premise: we no longer live in the world of "postmodernism," famously dubbed "the cultural logic of late capitalism" by Fredric Jameson in 1984. Far from charting any simple move "beyond" postmodernism since the 1980s, though, this book argues that we've experienced an intensification of postmodern capitalism over the past decades, an increasing saturation of the economic sphere into formerly independent segments of everyday cultural life. If "fragmentation" was the preferred watchword of postmodern America, "intensification" is the dominant cultural logic of our contemporary era. Post-Postmodernism surveys a wide variety of cultural texts in pursuing its analyses—everything from the classic rock of Black Sabbath to the post-Marxism of Antonio Negri, from considerations of the corporate university to the fare at the cineplex, from reading experimental literature to gambling in Las Vegas, from Badiou to the undergraduate classroom. Insofar as cultural realms of all kinds have increasingly been overcoded by the languages and practices of economics, Nealon aims to construct a genealogy of the American present, and to build a vocabulary for understanding the relations between economic production and cultural production today—when American-style capitalism, despite its recent battering, seems nowhere near the point of obsolescence. Post-postmodern capitalism is seldom late but always just in time. As such, it requires an updated conceptual vocabulary for diagnosing and responding to our changed situation.