Postmodernism

One might consider postmodernism, as a genre and topic, as part of a long and diffuse set of polemics in the West concerning both the status of the modern and of the attributes of the Enlightenment. Where questions of the modern and modernism were pitched, in the name of reason, against nature, religion, the ancients, and superstition, those of the postmodern and postmodernity have focused on the meaning and value of the modern and modernity. Postmodernism in the past forty years has launched polemics against the conformist ethics and aesthetics of modernist styles of architecture and cultural practice, as well as social, political, and legal thought. It is associated with the flamboyant denunciation of Western rationality and representation, attempts to outflank and redefine the authority ...