Essays on Postmodernism

During the 20th century, a design movement has surfaced, it has been named Postmodernism. The art movement started around the 1940s then peaked around the 1960s and 1970s, and the term was then officially introduced around the 1970s, which associated with the concepts of universal...

Postmodernism redefined the meaning and purpose of narratives through its rebellious approach to storytelling, which gave composers the freedom to construct narratives that don’t abide by the traditional conventions of the medium. This resulted in the creation of narratives that challenged the traditional paradigms of...

Postmodernism can be broadly defined as a late 20th century philosophy which rejects the western philosophies adopted by the society primarily during The Enlightenment (18th century). Therefore, while modernism preaches the existence of reality, absolute truth, individuality, objectivity, and free markets; postmodernism preaches relativism, collectivism,...

With large scale changes in technology and society, the narrative of architecture in the twentieth century is that of the birth of Modernism, and the several responses to it. Essentially, the term “modern” emphasizes a focus on the present, but this definition differs from that...

This paper is about the postmodern IR theory with the ideas of Michael Foucault and the movie The Matrix (1999). In first place postmodernism explained as a critical IR theory and its assumptions discussed. Secondly The Matrix (1999) will be summarized. After that the movie...

There is no absolute truth! Postmodernism states that there is no real truth because all people see and identify the truth based on their own knowledge and beliefs. The movie, Stranger than fiction, belongs to a recent cycle of postmodern movies with a philosophical significance...

The word post-modernism is composed of two parts, post and modernism. Post is a Latin word which means “after” and modernism refers to the modern period. So the word post modernism means the time period after modernism. To understand post modernism first of all we...

Literature is always considered as a faithful representation of the society. In Wordsworthian terms Literature can be sorted as a way of “man speaking to men”, with every reader it prompts out various layers of interpretation. It can be quite natural for a writer to...

Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being outlines a richly detailed world of philosophical and metaphysical exploration. The novel projects and addresses a variety of sociocultural, political and ideological issues of the period of publication, with many of the events serving to draw parallels between...

A Cultural artifact is a modern or an ancient object that may offer significant insight to a societies economic development, social structure, archaeology, agriculture, ideologies, technological advances, and many other its of information that can tell us more about the specific lifestyle by the people...

Post-modernism emerged in the 20th century to displace and undermine values introduced by modernism. Postmodernism can be interpreted as “the cultural logic of late capitalism” emphasising his Marxist and post-industrial perspective. Therefore, the stiffness of modernism evolved into the indeterminacy of the post-modern aesthetic that...

In his 1985 novel White Noise, Don DeLillo paints a modern society that is composed of systems too great to comprehend, putting control out of the hands of individuals. Don DeLillo crafts a postmodern society governed by cryptic systems, a world in which individuals are...

Ross Murfin defines postmodernism as, “A term referring to certain radically experimental works of literature and art after World War II” (Murfin 397). According to Murfin, postmodernism, like modernism that preceded it, involves separation from dominant literary convention via the “experimentation with new literary devices,...

When the essay was first written during the 1990’s, the main point was that postmodernism was probably the most well-known trend with scholars and different academic people for its thoughts of “heterogeneity, the decentered subject…recognition of Otherness” which was just a number of different ways...

Just before the morning rush hour, she got out of a jitney whose ancient driver ended each day in the red, downtown on Howard Street, began to walk toward the Embarcadero. She knew she looked terrible – knuckles black with eye-liner and mascara from where...

In addition to addressing the premonitory electricity of death, the title of Don DeLillo’s White Noise alludes to another, subtler, sort of white noise the muted death of suburban white identity. College-on-the-Hill is not only an elite academic promontory, but also a bastion for white...

America: a land of freedom, opportunity, and prosperity; a country that highly advocates the amalgamation of conglomerating cultures. Ironically, however, in Gary Shteyngart’s novel Absurdistan, the Russians transcend Americans in their pursuit for wealth, status, and size. The protagonist, Misha Vainberg, is a 30-year-old Russian...

One cannot refute nor ignore the importance of post-postmodern discourse in the context of the contemporary exhibition. While Modernism and Postmodernism prove possible to define and identify, what comes afterwards – what is happening now – is near impossible by its very nature to pigeon-hole...

In The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon expresses a very interesting view of entropy through the actions of Oedipa Maas. In communication theory, entropy is a measure of the efficiency of a system, as a code or language, in transmitting information. Otherwise, the definition...

‘Toyota Celica / A long moment passed before I realized this was the name of an automobile…The utterance was beautiful and mysterious, gold-shot with looming wonder. It was like the name of an ancient power in the sky.’ The twentieth century was characterized by a...

“Postmodern Blackness” is one of several essays that bell hooks has written. It is, by its nature, a philosophical essay in which the Afro-American writer mixes what is literary with what is racial. Hence, in it she attempts at evoking the exclusionary role that the...

Many literary pieces were written during the Victorian era, often revolving around the concepts of death and love. The Victorian era saw the unequal treatment of women and huge technological advances. It was considered an important literary period with romanticism at the forefront. However, the...

Near the end of Thomas Pynchon’s 1965 novel The Crying of Lot 49, the protagonist Oedipa finds herself at a crossroads after trying to unravel the mystery of W.A.S.T.E., a conspiratorial underground postal system, without finding many tangible results. “It was now like walking among...

Paula Geyh writes that “the term [postmodernism] is used by so many people in so many disparate ways, that it seems almost to mean or describe everything–and therefore, some of the critics of postmodernism would say, it means nothing” (1-2). Although the postmodern perspective is,...

World War II had a profound impact on American culture. Essentially every person in the country was affected in some way, but the war’s impact of African Americans was unique. Although African Americans were indeed Americans they were often treated like the enemy on the...

Postmodernism was a time where architecture and design began to move away from the traditional design that came before it. Design started to become more subjective, and diverse. When looking at postmodern design the argument of which represents postmodernism more as a design comes into...

In Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, standard hierarchical structures are abandoned in a setting of postmodern cultural chaos. The use of fragmented pop culture contributes to many aspects of the book, namely the sense of combined freedom in the search for meaning. Moreover,...

Walter Benjamin’s work as a philosopher and theorist speaks at length of mechanical reproduction and the impact it has on society. Benjamin’s work can therefore be applied to the society depicted in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, illuminating it as one of reproduction illustrated in...

So here you are now, ready to attack the first lines of the first page. You prepare to recognize the unmistakable tone of the author. No. You don’t recognize it at all. But now that you think about it, who ever said this author had...

Postmodernism states that there is no real truth because all people see and identify the truth basing on their own knowledge and beliefs. The movie, “Stranger than fiction,” belongs to a recent cycle of postmodern movies with a philosophical significance that explore important issues of...