In The Portable Postmodernist, Arthur Asa Berger introduces key concepts written by postmodernism's leading theorists including Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Jameson. This collage of influential writing is followed by Berger's concise, accessible comments. Written for the newcomer, Berger's lucid explanations define the postmodernism's most elusive ideas. Organized in fifty segments, the book runs the gamut from postmodern architecture to feminism to punk music.
'Cultural Identity and Postmodern Writing' seeks to ascertain the relationship obtaining between the specific form postmodernism assumes in a given culture, and the "national narrative" in which that culture traditionally recognizes itself. Theo D'haen provides a general introduction to the issue of "cultural identity and postmodern writing." Jos Joosten and Thomas Vaessens take a look at Dutch literature, and particular Dutch poetry, in relation to "postmodernism."
Gramsci had been in prison for almost eight years when Lukács, in 1934, published two essays which are crucial for understanding the state of Marxist aesthetics in the 1930s. The first, entitled ‘Art and Objective Truth’, displays the epistemological foundations of Lukács’ aesthetic theory.1 And the second focuses on what he calls the ‘greatness and decline’ of expressionism.
Jean Baudrillard is not only one of the most famous writers on the subject of postmodernism, but he somehow seems to embody postmodernism itself. He is a writer and speaker whose texts are performances, attracting huge readerships or audiences. At the same time, his work is highly contentious, attracting a great deal of vitriolic criticism.
The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture explores the re-invention of the early European Baroque within the philosophical, cultural, and literary thought of postmodernism in Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Gregg Lambert argues that the “return of the Baroque” expresses a principle often hidden behind the cultural logic of postmodernism in its various national and cultural incarnations, a principal often in variance with Anglo-American modernism.
