Few other artistic, critical or philosophical movements can have come charging out of the ivory tower of academia and into the public consciousness in the way that postmodernism has. Today one can encounter postmodern architecture, fiction, philosophy, science, politics and psychology, while confrontations with concepts such as pluralism, multiculturalism, irony and deconstruction have become commonplace. The postmodern lens is one through which we are expected to be able to view the world, but how many of us know what we are supposed to be looking at, or what 'postmodern' really means?
In the Fontana Postmodernism Reader, the world's pre-eminent practitioners of postmodern thinking – writers of the stature of Jean Baudrillard, Isaiah Berlin, Umberto Eco, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, bell hooks, Richard Rorty, Howard Gardner, Paul Feyerabend, Vaclav Havel, Charles Jencks and Thomas Kuhn – give their own unique accounts of postmodern theory and describe new and iconoclastic ways of understanding our increasingly kaleidoscopic experience.
Each contribution is prefaced by a short introduction by Walter Truett Anderson that identifies the significance of the piece and demonstrates precisely what this type of thought can tell us about the world in which we live. Provocative and refreshingly free from jargon, the Fontana Postmodernism Reader leads us through the stimulating complexities of postmodern thinking, a genre as diverse as the world it describes.
