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.
Harvey presents an illuminating and powerful critique of postmodernism, arguing that it represents the cultural manifestation of late capitalism and specifically that it emerges from a transformation of time and space to accommodate a shift from a political economy based on Fordism to one based on flexible accumulation. Harvey moves with ease and authority over a wide range of cultural forms from architecture and urban planning to painting and literature. He is well versed in currents of postmodernist theory but avoids the pitfalls of jargon and obscurity. The book is both penetrating and accessible, an important contribution to the postmodernist debate.
Gothic-postmodernism: Voicing the Terrors of Postmodernity
Being the first to outline the literary genre, Gothic-postmodernism, this book articulates the psychological and philosophical implications of terror in postmodernist literature, analogous to the terror of the Gothic novel, uncovering the significance of postmodern recurrences of the Gothic, and identifying new historical and philosophical aspects of the genre. While many critics propose that the Gothic has been exhausted, and that its significance is depleted by consumer society's obsession with instantaneous horror, analyses of a number of terror-based postmodernist novels here suggest that the Gothic is still very much animated in Gothic-postmodernism.
From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century
In this overview of twentieth-century American poetry, Jennifer Ashton explores the complex currents of poetic and intellectual interest linking contemporary poets with their modernist forebears, including Stein, Williams and Pound. She develops important ways to read modernist and postmodernist poetry through their similarities as well as their differences.
