Postmodernism for Beginners

What on earth is postmodernism? Here, at last, is a long overdue guide to the maddeningly enigmatic concept used to define our cultural condition in the late twentieth century.

Postmodernism claims that ‘modernity’, which grew from the Enlightenment, to the Industrial Revolution and Marxism has collapsed. We now live in an endlessly ‘contemporary’ culture, a virtual world of ‘hyperreality’ containing such strange phenomena as post-Holocaust amnesia, Disneyland, cyberspace and Fukuyama’s proclaimed ‘end of history’. The book traces the three pedigrees of postmodernity, art, theory and history, and explains the essentials of structuralism, semiotics and deconstruction as developed by the postmodern icons including Foucault, Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Derrida, Lacan and Lyotard Richard Appignanesi’s brilliant text and the inspired illustrations of Christ Garratt, the Guardian’s ‘Biff’ cartoonist, provide a crucial guide of anyone fascinated or exasperated by the hall of mirrors that is postmodernism.