Discuss the Social Tensions that Led to Postmodernism and Describe Its Long-Lasting Effects on Contemporary Literature

Introduction

Postmodernism has been described as many things: a style, an era, a symptom, a condition. Most broadly, it is an ontology composed of numerous interrelated critiques targeted toward the theories and practices of modernism or, perhaps more accurately, toward contemporary conceptions of the Enlightenment project and its continuing dysfunctions. This project is commonly characterized as the imposition of social action, guided by presumed unitary truths, from the top downward for the purpose of making progress through linear time toward some superior end state. This paper discusses the social tensions that led to postmodernism and describe its long-lasting effects on contemporary literature in a concise and comprehensive way.

Discussion

Perkins and Barbara (pp. 34-69) mention there were lots of social tensions when the postmodernism developed. In the contemporary literature, the term often denotes the cultural phase following Modernism or a heterogeneous, unorganized intellectual movement challenging Modernism. It is a term that designates a turning point, a rupture from the past, and the phenomenon of encountering a new cultural, historical, and social realm. Throughout its history, Postmodernism has gained divergent meanings and has become a subject of long-lasting disputes in art, architecture, literature, theology, geography, anthropology, philosophy, history, and all other branches of social sciences, among other disciplines.

In the philosophical literature, Postmodernism has been generally equated with the claim that Western metaphysics comes to an end. Referring especially to Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, philosophers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Richard Rorty repeatedly announced either the end of Western metaphysics or the end of philosophy in general. Several of the issues that came to the fore with this announcement are (1) the rejection of analytical distinctions like subject-object, self-other, fact-value, or body-mind in a deconstructive, hermeneutical, or anti-foundational way; ...