User:Patrick Welsh/postmodernism draft

The problem of definition
"Postmodernism" is "a highly contested term", referring to "a particularly unstable concept", that "names many different kinds of cultural objects and phenomena in many different ways". Critics have described it as "an exasperating term" and claim that its indefinability is "a truism". Put otherwise, postmodernism is "several things at once". It has no single definition, and the term does not name any single unified phenomenon, but rather many diverse phenomena: "postmodernisms rather than one postmodernism".

Although postmodernisms are generally united in their effort to transcend the perceived limits of modernism, "modernism" also means different things to different critics in various arts. Further, there are outliers on even this basic stance; for instance, literary critic William Spanos conceives postmodernism, not in period terms, but in terms of a certain kind of literary imagination so that pre-modern texts such as Euripides' Orestes or Cervantes' Don Quixote count as postmodern.

Nevertheless, attempting to generalize, scholar Hans Bertens offers the following:

If there is a common denominator to all these postmodernisms, it is that of a crisis in representation: a deeply felt loss of faith in our ability to represent the real, in the widest sense. No matter whether they are aesthestic [sic], epistemological, moral, or political in nature, the representations that we used to rely on can no longer be taken for granted.

Historically, this has taken many forms.

Usage
The term first appeared in print in 1870, but it only began to enter circulation with its current range of meanings in the 1950s—60s.

Early appearances
The term "postmodern" was first used in 1870 by the artist John Watkins Chapman, who described "a Postmodern style of painting" as a departure from French Impressionism. Similarly, the first citation given by the Oxford English Dictionary is dated to 1916, describing Gus Mager as "one of the few 'post' modern painters whose style is convincing".

Episcopal priest and cultural commentator J. M. Thompson, in an 1914 article, uses the term to describe changes in attitudes and beliefs in the critique of religion, writing, "the raison d'être of Post-Modernism is to escape from the double-mindedness of modernism by being thorough in its criticism by extending it to religion as well as theology, to Catholic feeling as well as to Catholic tradition". In 1926, Bernard Iddings Bell, president of St. Stephen's College (now Bard College) and also an Episcopal priest, published Postmodernism and Other Essays, which marks the first use of the term to describe an historical period following modernity. The essay criticizes lingering socio-cultural norms, attitudes, and practices of the Enlightenment. It is also critical of a purported cultural shift away from traditional Christian beliefs.

The term "postmodernity" was first used in an academic historical context as a general concept for a movement by Arnold J. Toynbee in an 1939 essay, which states that "Our own Post-Modern Age has been inaugurated by the general war of 1914–1918".

In 1942, the literary critic and author H. R. Hays describes postmodernism as a new literary form. Also in the arts, the term was first used in 1949 to describe a dissatisfaction with the modernist architectural movement known as the International Style.

Although these early uses anticipate some of the concerns of the debate in the second part of the 20th century, there is little direct continuity in the discussion. Just when the new discussion begins, however, is also a matter of dispute. Various authors place its beginnings in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

Later developments
Critical discussion about the postmodern in the second part of the 20th century was most articulate in areas with a large body of critical discourse around the modernist movement; in particular, the visual arts, architecture, and literature. Even here, however, there continued to be disagreement about such basic issues as whether postmodernism is a break with modernism, a renewal and intensification of modernism, or even, both at once, a rejection and a radicalization of its historical predecessor.

According to scholar Ian Buchanan, the Black Mountain poets Charles Olson and Robert Creeley first introduced the term "postmodern" in its current sense during the 1950s. Their stance against modernist poetry – and Olson's Heideggerian orientation – were influential in the identification of postmodernism as a polemical position opposed to the rationalist values championed by the Enlightenment project.

During the 1960s, this affirmative use gave way to a pejorative use by the New Left, who used it to describe a waning commitment among youth to the political ideals socialism and communism. The literary critic Irving Howe, for instance, denounced postmodern literature for being content to merely reflect, rather than actively attempt to reshape, what he saw as the "increasingly shapeless" character of contemporary society.

In the 1970s, this changed again, largely under the influence of the literary critic Ihab Hassan's large-scale survey of works that could no longer be called modern. Taking the Black Mountain poets an exemplary instance of the new postmodern type, Hassan celebrates its Nietzschean playfulness and cheerfully anarchic spirit, which he sets off against the high seriousness of modernism. It is also in the 1970s that postmodern criticism increasingly comes to incorporate the theories of French poststructuralism, particularly the deconstructive approach to texts most strongly associated with Jacques Derrida. During this period, postmodernism comes to be equated with a kind of anti-representational self-reflexivity.

In the 1980s, postmodern criticism takes an increasing interest in the work of Michel Foucault, and this introduces an expressly political concern social power-relations, which had previously been more in the background. If literature was at the center of the discussion in the 1970s, architecture is at the center in the 1980s. The architectural theorist [Charles Jencks]], in particular, connects the artistic avant-garde to social change in a way that captures attention outside of academia.

This period was the beginning of the affiliation of postmodernism with feminism and multiculturalism. Charles Owens

Although there were multiple threads of development across various arts, the most theorized were literature and architecture, with the first dominating discussion in the 1970s and the second in the 1980s.

Charles Jencks connects artistic issues to social change

Although postmodern criticism and thought drew on philosophical ideas from early on, "postmodernism" was only introduced to the expressly philosophical lexicon by Jean-François Lyotard in his 1979 The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. In this influential work, Lyotard offers the following definition: "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives". In a society with no unifying narrative, he argues, we are left with heterogeneous, group-specific narratives (or "language games") with no universal perspective from which to adjudicate among them. -->legitimacy crisis

In the 1990s, along such lines, postmodernism became increasingly identified with critical and philosophical discourse directly about postmodernism itself. No longer centered on any particular art, it instead turns to address the more general problems posed to society in general by a new proliferation of cultures and forms.

Around this time, postmodernism also begins to be conceived in popular culture as a general "philosophical disposition" associated with a loose sort of relativism. In this sense, the term also starts to appear as a "casual term of abuse" in non-academic contexts.

Cut material
Postmodernism in architecture was initially marked by a re-emergence of surface ornament, reference to surrounding buildings in urban settings, historical reference in decorative forms (eclecticism), and non-orthogonal angles. Most scholars today agree postmodernism began to compete with modernism in the late 1950s, and gained ascendancy over it in the 1960s.

In 1942, the literary critic and author H. R. Hays describes postmodernism as a new literary form.