Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Any style in art, architecture, literature, philosophy, etc., that reacts against an earlier modernist movement.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun genre of art and literature and especially architecture in reaction against principles and practices of established modernism

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From post- +‎ modernism.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word postmodernism.

Examples

  • According to Charles Jencks, the man who applied the term "postmodernism" or Post-Modernism, as he likes to write it to architecture, it never went away, and he has published a book, The Story of Post-Modernism, to prove it.

    PoMo power: the return of postmodernism 2011

  • While the term postmodernism is often used to describe an aesthetic, artistic worldview characterized by a distrust of theories and ideology, I think it usefully applies (or rather should apply) to the "certainties" on both sides in the religion vs. atheism debate.

    Frank Schaeffer: The "New Atheist" Crusade and Me 2009

  • There's a re-creation of the entrance to Garagia Rotunda, the garage studio in Cape Cod, Mass., designed by architecture critic and historian Charles Jencks, who purportedly coined the term postmodernism.

    History, Repeating Itself Julie V. Iovine 2011

  • There's no doubt that "postmodernism" is now overloaded with the connotations of cultural change brought to it by the likes of Lyotard and Jameson, so much so that its utility in measuring the continuity of 20th/21st century fiction -- or its disruptions -- probably has been lost.

    Postmodernism 2010

  • * Mike Tomasky wonders whether Christine O'Donnell's interest in "postmodernism in the new millenium" has something to do with her dabbling into witchcraft.

    Happy Hour Roundup Greg Sargent 2010

  • I actually agree with Genoways that there are too many litmags publishing too much perfunctory work, but that these magazines have proliferated because the demand for postmodernism is so insistent seems to me patently absurd.

    Writing and Publishing 2010

  • I haven't read those books, and note only that they show the comics world's unabashed happiness with adaptations and spin-offs of other people's work, an enterprise that the world of literary fiction tends to look down on (unless, of course, it's an exercise in postmodernism).

    No Escape 2009

  • I actually agree with Genoways that there are too many litmags publishing too much perfunctory work, but that these magazines have proliferated because the demand for postmodernism is so insistent seems to me patently absurd.

    January 2010 2010

  • I have more or less come to the conclusion that the only way an otherwise conventional narrative (and Skunk is, depite its unconventional subject and eccentric characters, essentially a narrative-driven novel, without much in the way of purely formal experimentation) can succeed, post-modernism and post-postmodernism, is through first-person narrative.

    Point of View in Fiction 2009

  • I actually agree with Genoways that there are too many litmags publishing too much perfunctory work, but that these magazines have proliferated because the demand for postmodernism is so insistent seems to me patently absurd.

    Rescuing Public Discourse 2010

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • My favourite phrase to describe this — or rather a common view of it — is a passing one I've actually just come across in the current revision of its article: “ultimately meaningless rhetorical gymnastics”!

    December 20, 2007

  • While postmodernism does indeed employ a lot of obscure and "meaningless" rhetorics, the ideology itself is simply a reaction to the 20th century modernism. Let's not make it a new boogeyman.

    August 25, 2008

  • Great Chomsky quote (something I don't think I've ever said before), also on the Wikipedia page sarra links to below:

    "He asks why postmodernist intellectuals won't respond as "people in physics, math, biology, linguistics, and other fields are happy to do when someone asks them, seriously, what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn't already obvious, etc? These are fair requests for anyone to make. If they can't be met, then I'd suggest recourse to Hume's advice in similar circumstances: to the flames.".

    May 24, 2009