What on earth is postmodernism? Here, at last, is the perfect audio guide to the maddeningly enigmatic concept that has been used to describe our cultural condition of the late-20th and early-21st centuries.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".
Richard Appignanesi, author of the best-selling book Introducing Postmodernism, takes the listener on a roller-coaster ride through the key areas of postmodern debate and explains the essentials of structuralism, semiotics, and deconstruction as developed by Foucault, Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, and others. It is a crucial guide for anyone wanting to understand the hall of mirrors that is postmodernism.