Book contents
- Frontmatter
- POLITICS: Détente and Multipolarity: The Cold War and German-American Relations, 1968-1990
- SECURITY: German-American Security Relations, 1968-1990
- ECONOMICS: Cooperation, Competition, and Conflict: Economic Relations Between the United States and Germany, 1968-1990
- CULTURE: Culture as an Arena of Transatlantic Conflict
- 1 American Cultural Policy Toward Germany
- 2 The Third Pillar of Foreign Policy: West German Cultural Policy in the United States
- 3 The Study of Germany in the United States
- 4 American Studies in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945-1990
- 5 In the Shadow of the Federal Republic: Cultural Relations Between the GDR and the United States
- 6 American Literature in Germany
- 7 The American Reception of Contemporary German Literature
- 8 The Americanization of the German Language
- 9 Between Blight and Blessing: The Influence of American Popular Culture on the Federal Republic
- 10 Popular Music in Germany: Experimentation and Emancipation from Anglo-American Models
- 11 Hollywood in Germany
- 12 New German Cinema as National Cinema
- 13 Transatlantic Reflections: German and American Television
- 14 Performance Theater in the Age of Post-Drama
- 15 Beyond Painting and Sculpture: German-American Exchange in the Visual Arts
- 16 The Rediscovery of the City and Postmodern Architecture
- 17 Modernity and Postmodernity in a Transatlantic Perspective
- 18 Confrontations with the Holocaust in the Era of the Cold War: German and American Perspectives
- SOCIETY: German-American Societal Relations in Three Dimensions, 1968-1990
- 1 “1968”: A Transatlantic Event and Its Consequences
- OUTLOOK: America, Germany, and the Atlantic Community After the Cold War
- Index
17 - Modernity and Postmodernity in a Transatlantic Perspective
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
- Frontmatter
- POLITICS: Détente and Multipolarity: The Cold War and German-American Relations, 1968-1990
- SECURITY: German-American Security Relations, 1968-1990
- ECONOMICS: Cooperation, Competition, and Conflict: Economic Relations Between the United States and Germany, 1968-1990
- CULTURE: Culture as an Arena of Transatlantic Conflict
- 1 American Cultural Policy Toward Germany
- 2 The Third Pillar of Foreign Policy: West German Cultural Policy in the United States
- 3 The Study of Germany in the United States
- 4 American Studies in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945-1990
- 5 In the Shadow of the Federal Republic: Cultural Relations Between the GDR and the United States
- 6 American Literature in Germany
- 7 The American Reception of Contemporary German Literature
- 8 The Americanization of the German Language
- 9 Between Blight and Blessing: The Influence of American Popular Culture on the Federal Republic
- 10 Popular Music in Germany: Experimentation and Emancipation from Anglo-American Models
- 11 Hollywood in Germany
- 12 New German Cinema as National Cinema
- 13 Transatlantic Reflections: German and American Television
- 14 Performance Theater in the Age of Post-Drama
- 15 Beyond Painting and Sculpture: German-American Exchange in the Visual Arts
- 16 The Rediscovery of the City and Postmodern Architecture
- 17 Modernity and Postmodernity in a Transatlantic Perspective
- 18 Confrontations with the Holocaust in the Era of the Cold War: German and American Perspectives
- SOCIETY: German-American Societal Relations in Three Dimensions, 1968-1990
- 1 “1968”: A Transatlantic Event and Its Consequences
- OUTLOOK: America, Germany, and the Atlantic Community After the Cold War
- Index
Summary
Translated by Tradukas
THE CONCEPT OF POSTMODERNITY
Attempts to define the present epoch have identified the symptoms of a shift from modernity to postmodernity in the most varied phenomena. These range from urban planning and architecture to various stylistic features in literature, theater, film, music, dance, and painting, to MTV, CNN, and the Internet. Computers, microtechnology, cyberspace, and cyborg fantasies are deemed to be just as postmodern as the threat of nuclear and ecological self-destruction, the morbid projections of Generation X, or a hedonistic yuppie lifestyle. Neoliberal economic concepts such as globalization and deregulation have also been called postmodern. So, too, have the revisionist philosophies deriving from the crisis of reason and dialectics from the passing of historical metanarratives and the concept of the autonomous subject. A growing skepticism toward systematic thought and binary oppositions has led to the rejection of concepts and terms of reference such as origin, center, structure, and causality, which are seen as “arbitrary acts of modernity.” But traditional historical periodizations - romanticism, realism, modernism, the avant-garde, and postmodernism itself - have also been called into question on account of their elusive and blurred parameters.
Given the plurality of possible interpretations, it is hardly surprising that the new zeitgeist is often accused of being arbitrary and confused. But the simple fact that it is possible to use modernist categories to explain these phenomena clearly shows that it cannot be postmodernity itself that is responsible for this arbitrariness and lack of clarity.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War, 1945–1990A Handbook, pp. 394 - 401Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004