Postmodernism: An Art Style

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Recommended: Literary prospective of postmodernism

Postmodernism is a style of art that first became popular in the late 20th century. When seeing the word postmodernism, it might have to do with any one medium of art-- literature, philosophy, history, economics, architecture, fiction, and literary criticism. Lyotard, a founder of postmodernism in philosophy, is quoted as saying, “Simplifying to the extreme, I define the postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.” By saying this, Lyotard simply meant that, as a postmodernist, he was against the ways of thinking of modernists and wanted to see something new philosophically and artistically. Postmodernity demonstrates a departure from the art style modernism.
Lyotard was quoted trying to define postmodern. He is credited as coining this term and making it philosophical jargon, because it first became popular with the publication of The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge in 1979. This book contains Lyotard’s thoughts on many subjects, including the computer age, avant-garde art, and creative experimentation, among other things. Jean-François Lyotard is considered (philosophically) a founder of postmodernism. Other founders of postmodernism include Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida.
Something all of these men have in common are that they are all far left on the political spectrum. Also, these philosophers did not agree with capitalism in a bourgeois society. Bourgeois means conventional, as in middle-class people, or capitalist, according to Marxist theory. Although they did not agree with capitalism, they predicted how capitalism would change throughout the 1980s and 1990s (The Economist, 2006). This group foresaw that businesses that catered to one certain niche would prosper the most. Today, one-stop stores...

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...ostmodernism”, Arts Magazine, 58 : 6, Feb 1984, p. 69.
Barr, Marleen, “Food for Postmodern Thought: Isak Dinesen’s Female Artists as Precursors to Contemporary Feminist Fabulators”, in Jones, Libby-Falk, Goodwin, Sarah-Webster (eds.), Pfaelzer, Jean (response), Elshtain, Jean Bethke (response), Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990, pp. 21-33.

Felluga, D. (n.d.). General Introduction to Postmodernism. College of Liberal Arts : Purdue University. Retrieved August 16, 2013, from http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/postmodernism.

Jones, P. (2011). Introducing social theory. (2nd ed.). Polity.
McHale, B. (2013). Afterword: Reconstructing Postmodernism.Narrative, 21(3), 357-364.
Shopping and philosophy: Postmodernism is the new black. (2006, December 19). The Economist, Retrieved from http://www.economist.com/node/8401159.

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