LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Postmodernism: Modernism
built 203 days ago
Postmodernism is a philosophical movement in reaction to modernism. It stresses the fragmented nature of the contemporary experience. Francois Lyotard's famous definition of postmodernism is that it is simply 'incredulity towards metanarratives.'
Source:
Postmodernism is a movement of ideas arising from, but ... critical of elements of modernism. Because of the wide range of uses of the term, different elements of modernity are viewed as being coterminous; and different elements of modernity are held to be critiqued.
Source:
Postmodernism shares many aspects of earlier cultural avant-garde movements, particularly Surrealism, anarchism, and Situationism, from which its members have drawn many techniques. A striking feature is the prevalence of pastiche in Postmodern works, drawing on elements from a variety of sources, which are then juxtaposed, often ironically. Beneix's film Diva (1981) exemplifies the approach, using elements of character, plot, setting, and composition from several cinematic genres. As with earlier modernism, these highly allusive works offer a special pleasure to the initiated. Critics of Postmodernism, such as Fredric Jameson and Jürgen Habermas, have suggested that it exacerbates the problems of personal and social disintegration, bewilderment, impotence, and despair which it attempts to portray.
Source:
In “What is Postmodernism?,” which appears as an appendix to the English edition of The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard addresses the importance of avant-garde art in terms of the aesthetic of the sublime. Modern art, he says, is emblematic of a sublime sensibility, that is, a sensibility that there is something non-presentable demanding to be put into sensible form and yet overwhelms all attempts to do so. But where modern art presents the unpresentable as a missing content within a beautiful form, as in Marcel Proust, postmodern art, exemplified by James Joyce, puts forward the unpresentable by forgoing beautiful form itself... denying what Kant would call the consensus of taste. Furthermore, says Lyotard, a work can become modern only if it is first postmodern, for postmodernism is not modernism at its end but in its nascent state, that is, at the moment it attempts to present the unpresentable, “and this state is constant” (Lyotard 1984, 79). The postmodern, then, is a repetition of the modern as the “new,” and this means the ever-new demand for another repetition.
Source:
Postmodernism was first identified as a theoretical discipline in the 1980s, but as a cultural movement it predates them by many years. Exactly when modernism began to give way to postmodernism is difficult to pinpoint, if not simply impossible. Some theorists reject that such a distinction even exists, viewing postmodernism, for all its claims of fragmentation and plurality, as still existing within a larger 'modernist' framework. The philosopher J�rgen Habermas is a strong proponent of this view.
Source:
Postmodernism's critical stance is interlinked with presenting new appraisals of previous works. As implied above, the works of the Dada movement received greater attention, as did collagists such as Robert Rauschenberg, whose works were initially considered unimportant in the context of the modernism of the 1950s, but who, by the 1980s, began to be seen as seminal. Post-modernism ... elevated the importance of cinema in artistic discussions, placing it on a peer level with the other fine arts. This is both because of the blurring of distinctions between "high" and "low" forms, and because of the recognition that cinema represented the creation of simulacra which was later duplicated in the other arts.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Modernism