What is post modernism?

Question

Too much has been said about this these days. some simple way / sources to understand this.

Answer 1

Perhaps the best way to understand postmodernism is to understand it as a reaction to modernism. Modernism emphasises purity, honesty, and total truth; for example, in the austerity of modern architecture, or when an artist attempts to express the essence of a whole subject with a single line. In contrast, postmodernism asserts that experience is personal (cannot be generalized) and that meaning is only for the individual to experience, not for someone to dictate. Thus, postmodernists assert the consumer of a cultural product (artwork, piece of writing, user of architecture) is free to deconstruct the meaning of a work, and that different users will come to very different, but equally valid, conclusions of what that meaning is.

Postmodernists tend to emphasize the cultural contingency or relativity of different forms of intellectual production and may be critical of those who attempt "pure," "objective," or "disinterested" intellectual endeavours. One aspect of this is the claim that there is no way for human beings to communicate in a language completely devoid of myth, metaphor, cultural bias or political content. Postmodernist artworks sometimes assert the inherently politicized nature of communication, calling attention to the ideological underpinnings of their own representations through representational play and irony. More typical, however, is self-reference, sometimes termed "meta-", for example, when a movie actor looks directly into the camera and criticises the movie he or she is in. Postmodernist scholarship and artworks, although sometimes meant for a small audience, are frequently understood as merely one reflection of the larger collective culture of postmodernity. Scholars argue that the postmodern era (or "postmodernity") is characterized by a culturally pluralistic and profoundly interconnected global society lacking any single dominant center of political power, communication, or intellectual production. Other scholars understand postmodernism as a product of late capitalism, arguing that the economic and technological conditions of our age have given rise to a media-dominated society in which there are only inter-referential representations with no real original referent. For these scholars, the postmodern emphasis on the lack of any stable or objective referent for communication is often a profoundly negative historical development.

Answer 2

Postmodernism is a complicated term, or set of ideas, one that has only emerged as an area of academic study since the mid-1980s. Postmodernism is hard to define, because it is a concept that appears in a wide variety of disciplines or areas of study, including art, architecture, music, film, literature, sociology, communications, fashion, and technology. It's hard to locate it temporally or historically, because it's not clear exactly when postmodernism begins.


Perhaps the easiest way to start thinking about postmodernism is by thinking about modernism, the movement from which postmodernism seems to grow or emerge. Modernism has two facets, or two modes of definition, both of which are relevant to understanding postmodernism.


The first facet or definition of modernism comes from the aesthetic movement broadly labeled "modernism." This movement is roughly coterminous with twentieth century Western ideas about art (though traces of it in emergent forms can be found in the nineteenth century as well). Modernism, as you probably know, is the movement in visual arts, music, literature, and drama which rejected the old Victorian standards of how art should be made, consumed, and what it should mean. In the period of "high modernism," from around 1910 to 1930, the major figures of modernism literature helped radically to redefine what poetry and fiction could be and do: figures like Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Proust, Mallarme, Kafka, and Rilke are considered the founders of twentieth-century modernism.

Answer 3

First you HAVE to look at modernism .(about 1930 to about 1980) rejected the past and was fuelled by the thought that man was moving forward and was separate from his environment

--Architecture shiny steel and square. Taller the better
--Interior Design went platic and colourful. Bolder the better
--Fine arts went very abstact and non representational.
...in Modernism all the old ways of thinking, building and creating were rejected..people thought that classic styling was ugly and backward.....That man was in control of the world..and was mastering it though technology

..okay...........................so somewhere along the way the academic minds came to the conclusion that NO...we are not separate from our environment, from the past, or from each other...that we are all interconnected in a large web of creation that trancends time and space.

This way of thinking (POSTMODERISM) is reflected in art that combines various styles or mediums....It is often interactive with the viewer in some way

........Architecture that blends various eras, cultural looks.
(giving it a hodgepodge look sometimes) or blends in with its landscape

....and in books/movies that start in the middle, jump all around from character to character with no clear story line or distiction of who is the villian and who is the hero. The book will be more about the 'connections' between the characters and it is up to the reader to 'interact' by peicing it together (The movie Pulp Fiction is a good example)

So that is what postmoderism is....a recognition of the connections between all things, all time, and all people...is is seeing the web..not just the strand you are on

Funny thing is....the elders of indegionous cultures always knew this...it just took our western culture alot longer to see it

Answer 4

It is not a doctrine belonging to an era that succeeded modern era. It is rather a set of views that reject the presuppositions, especially the dualities, of the modern era.

Answer 5

Post modernism is the era following modernism that asserts reason cannot get us to knowledge (assumes skepticism).

The modern era claimed that we can know by reason.

Answer 6

Its used when the word 'modern' gets overused. Its about time to be talking about post post modernism by now, isn't it?

Answer 7

It is the era after modernism. I am exhausted from discussing this last time I took history.