In this rigorous and challenging analysis of American postmodernity, Anthony Woodiwiss re-examines the political, economic and social life of the United States over the past 60 years. Exploring the rise and fall of modernism as a social ideology, he offers a distinctive and original interpretation of the unique experience of American modernity and the arrival of the postmodern world. The result is both a novel history of postwar America and a significant contribution to the idea of postmodernism as a social and cultural form. Postmodernity USA also carries lessons for the understanding of class, culture and politics in late industrial societies in general. Offering an innovative synthesis of postmodernist and Marxist approache

In this rigorous and challenging analysis of American postmodernity, Anthony Woodiwiss re-examines the political, economic and social life of the United States over the past 60 years. Exploring the rise and fall of modernism as a social ideology, he offers a distinctive and original interpretation of the unique experience of American modernity and the arrival of the postmodern world. The result is both a novel history of postwar America and a significant contribution to the idea of postmodernism as a social and cultural form. Postmodernity USA also carries lessons for the understanding of class, culture and politics in late industrial societies in general. Offering an innovative synthesis of postmodernist and Marxist approache

An evaluation that tracks American culture's shift from modernism into postmodernism

The term postmodern is generally used to refer to current work in philosophy, literary criticism, and feminist thought inspired by Continental thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Derrida. In this book, Nancey Murphy appropriates the term to describe emerging patterns in Anglo-American thought and to indicate their radical break from the thought patterns of Enlightened modernity.The book examines the shift from modern to postmodern in three areas: epistemology, philosophy of language, and metaphysics. Murphy contends that whole clusters of terms in each of these disciplines have taken on new uses in the past fifty years and that these changes have radical consequences for all areas of academia, especially in philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, and ethics.

This book brings together nine original essays from Pynchon scholars around the world whose work furthers the debate concerning the nature of perceived shifts in the sensibility, style and subject-matter of Pynchon's fiction from The Crying of Lot 49 to Mason & Dixon. Of particular concern is the complex relationship between Pynchon's challenging and evolving oeuvre and notions of postmodernity which this volume's focus on Pynchon's most recent fiction helps bring up-to-date. Five of the collection's essays examine the writer's achievement in Mason & Dixon and were first presented in 1998 as papers at King's College, London, as part of International Pynchon Week. The volume includes contributions from renowned Pynchon scholars such as David Seed, David Thoreen and Francisco Collado Rodríquez, and offers perspectives on Pynchon's achievement in The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland and Mason & Dixon which view those works in relation to a fascinating variety of subjects such as hybridity, mapmaking and representation, the work of Marshall McLuhan, American comic traditions, metafiction, madness in American fiction, science and ethics. Reconfirmed throughout is the ethical seriousness of a writer who remains one of American literature's most fascinating, important and ever elusive figures.

The Poetry of Postmodernity reappraises key Anglo/American poets of the last fifty years in the light of debates about the postmodern situation. It offers fresh critical insights into how their literary contribution gives cogent expression to both the socio-cultural possibilities and the global problems of our recent past, our apparent present and our probable future. The poets considered are late Auden, Ginsberg, Plath, Berryman, Hughes, Hill, Ashbery and late R.S. Thomas.

Postmodernity in Latin America contests the prevailing understanding of the relationship between postmodernity and Latin America by focusing on recent developments in Latin American, and particularly Argentine, political and literary culture. While European and North American theorists of postmodernity generally view Latin American fiction without regard for its political and cultural context, Latin Americanists often either uncritically apply the concept of postmodernity to Latin American literature and society or reject it in an equally uncritical fashion. The result has been both a limited understanding of the literature and an impoverished notion of postmodernity. Santiago Colás challenges both of these approaches and corrects their consequent distortions by locating Argentine postmodernity in the cultural dynamics of resistance as it operates within and against local expressions of late capitalism. Focusing on literature, Colás uses Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch to characterize modernity for Latin America as a whole, Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman to identify the transition to a more localized postmodernity, and Ricardo Piglia’s Artificial Respiration to exemplify the cultural coordinates of postmodernity in Argentina. Informed by the cycle of political transformation beginning with the Cuban Revolution, including its effects on Peronism, to the period of dictatorship, and finally to redemocratization, Colás’s examination of this literary progression leads to the reconstruction of three significant moments in the history of Argentina. His analysis provokes both a revised understanding of that history and the recognition that multiple meanings of postmodernity must be understood in ways that incorporate the complexity of regional differences. Offering a new voice in the debate over postmodernity, one that challenges that debate’s leading thinkers, Postmodernity in Latin America will be of particular interest to students of Latin American literature and to scholars in all disciplines concerned with theories of the postmodern.