This ground-breaking work offers a challenging and positive view of postmodern culture. It draws on the author's extensive interviews with a number of leading postmodern artists, writers and performers, including: * Jean Baudrillard * Samuel Beckett * John Cage * Phillip Glass The Parameters of Postmodernism focuses on both the prevailing negative theories of postmodernism, and the more positive aspects of postmodern theory and practice. The negative aspect is exemplified by the work of writers like Brecht, Beckett, Barthes and Baudrillard, who emphasise the death of artistic innovation and the lack of a permanent reality. Zurbrugg highlights the contradictions in the arguments of these writers, and examines the later works in which they qualify their earlier, more infamous, statements. The positive aspect is characterised by artists such as Cage, Glass and Monk - who interweave the new postmodern media with confidence and invention, and Eco, Grass and Wolf - who revive mythological and folkloric traditions. The Parameters of Postmodernism argues that in each case - high-tech or revivalist - postmodern creativity culminates in a highly positive synthesis of past, present and futuristic materials.

In Complexity and Postmodernism, Paul Cilliers explores the idea of complexity in the light of contemporary perspectives from philosophy and science. Cilliers offers us a unique approach to understanding complexity and computational theory by integrating postmodern theory (like that of Derrida and Lyotard) into his discussion. Complexity and Postmodernism is an exciting and an original book that should be read by anyone interested in gaining a fresh understanding of complexity, postmodernism and connectionism.

First published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Containing more than fifty essays by major literary scholars, International Postmodernism divides into four main sections. The volume starts off with a section of eight introductory studies dealing with the subject from different points of view followed by a section that deals with postmodernism in other arts than literature, while a third section discusses renovations of narrative genres and other strategies and devices in postmodernist writing. The final and fourth section deals with the reception and processing of postmodernism in different parts of the world. Three important aspects add to the special character of International Postmodernism: The consistent distinction between postmodernity and postmodernism; equal attention to the making and diffusion of postmodernism and the workings of literature in general; and the focus on the text and the reader (i.e., the reader's knowledge, experience, interests, and competence) as crucial factors in text interpretation. This comprehensive study does not expressly focus on American postmodernism, although American interpretations of postmodernism are a major point of reference. The recognition that varying literary and cultural conditions in this world are bound to produce endless varieties of postmodernism made the editors, Hans Bertens and Douwe Fokkema, opt for the title International Postmodernism.

Working through the issue of representation, in art forms from fiction to photography, Linda Hutcheon sets out postmodernism's highly political challenge to the dominant ideologies of the western world.