Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Maps
- Chronology
- An Age of Progress?
- Preface
- 1 A Century of Violence
- 2 Science, Technology, and the Acceleration of Change
- 3 Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism
- 4 Imperialism, Nationalism, and Globalization
- 5 Freedom and Human Rights
- 6 Changing Environments
- 7 Culture and Social Criticism
- 8 Values and Virtues
- 9 An Age of Progress?
- Notes
- Glossary
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Maps
- Chronology
- An Age of Progress?
- Preface
- 1 A Century of Violence
- 2 Science, Technology, and the Acceleration of Change
- 3 Capitalism, Socialism, and Communism
- 4 Imperialism, Nationalism, and Globalization
- 5 Freedom and Human Rights
- 6 Changing Environments
- 7 Culture and Social Criticism
- 8 Values and Virtues
- 9 An Age of Progress?
- Notes
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
Postmodernism, Culture, and Science
The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed. (2000), defines postmodernism as follows:
Term used to designate a multitude of trends—in the arts, philosophy, religion, technology, and many other areas—that come after and deviate from the many 20th-cent. movements that constituted modernism. The term has become ubiquitous in contemporary discourse and has been employed as a catchall for various aspects of society, theory, and art … In general, the postmodern view is cool, ironic, and accepting of the fragmentation of contemporary existence. It tends to concentrate on surfaces rather than depths, to blur the distinctions between high and low culture, and as a whole to challenge a wide variety of traditional cultural values.
Postmodernists rejected any absolute or objective truths, whether scientific, political, religious, or cultural, thus tending to an extreme relativism. Instead, they stressed conflicting viewpoints and the blurring of distinctions between images and reality. By the late 1980s this viewpoint was even evident in the Soviet Union under the more permissive Mikhail Gorbachev. Victor Erofeyev, a Russian writer, described the new movement in literature, “The new Russian literature has called absolutely everything into question: love, children, faith, the Church, culture, beauty, nobility of character, motherhood, and even the wisdom of the common people.”
Postmodernism spread not only to different parts of the globe, but to different fields such as literary criticism, the social sciences, and humanities. One of its most significant manifestations was deconstructionism.
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- An Age of Progress?Clashing Twentieth-Century Global Forces, pp. 225 - 248Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2008