Mapping Postmodernism

Helping you navigate the complex debate among Christians over postmodernism, Robert C. Greer maps four different paths marked out by Francis Schaeffer, Karl Barth, John Hick and George Lindbeck. Ultimately, he points to the true Subject who makes knowledge possible through the language of revelation and relationship with God.

The last fifty years have witnessed the growing pervasiveness of the figure of the map in critical, theoretical, and fictional discourse. References to mapping and cartography are endemic in poststructuralist theory, and, similarly, geographically and culturally diverse authors of twentieth-century fiction seem fixated upon mapping. While the map metaphor has been employed for centuries to highlight issues of textual representation and epistemology, the map metaphor itself has undergone a transformation in the postmodern era. This metamorphosis draws together poststructuralist conceptualizations of epistemology, textuality, cartography, and metaphor, and signals a shift away from modernist preoccupations with temporality and objectivity to a postmodern pragmatics of spatiality and subjectivity. Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity charts this metamorphosis of cartographic metaphor, and argues that the ongoing reworking of the map metaphor renders it a formative and performative metaphor of postmodernity.

V.1 Foundational essays -- V.2 Critical Texts -- V.3 Disciplinary texts: Humanities and social sciences -- V.4 Legal studies, psychoanalytic studies, visual arts and architecture.

In Mapping Postcommunist Cultures Chernetsky argues that Russia and Ukraine exemplify the principal paradigms of post-Soviet cultural development. In Russia this has manifested itself in the subversive dismantling of the totalitarian linguistic regime and the foregrounding of previously marginalized subject positions. In Ukraine, work in these areas shows how the traumas of centuries of colonial oppression are being overcome through the carnivalesque decrowning of ideological dogmas and an affirmation of a new type of community, most recently demonstrated in the peaceful Orange Revolution of 2004. Mapping Postcommunist Cultures also critiques the neglect of the former communist world in current models of cultural globalization.

This book explores the notion of mapping in architectural discourse. First locating, positioning and theorizing mapping, it then makes explicit the relationship between research and design in architecture through cartography and spatial analysis. It proposes three distinct modalities: tool, operation and concept, showing how these methods lead to discursive aspects of architectural work and highlighting mapping as an instrument in developing architectural form. It emphasizes the importance of place and time as fundamental terms with which to understand the role of mapping. An investigation into architectural discourse, this book will appeal to academics and researchers within the discipline with a particular interest in theory, history and cartography.

This book moves beyond conventional conceptions of space and place to explore how the spatial imagination has informed our postmodern mapping of literature, culture, history, geography and politics. In this volume, scholars from different academic fields contest new territories for critical expression, venturing into a geocritical discussion of notions of identity, borders, territory, cognitive geographies, glocal cultural mobility, gendered spaces, (post)colonial cartographies, and spaces of resistance. These brilliant discussions of the postmodern dialectics of space and place invite a reappraisal of the value of space in our social, political and historical realities, thus extending the geographical imagination beyond its physical and territorial manifestations and investigating its hitherto uncharted spiritual, psychic, emotional, literary, and symbolic terrains. Bringing together theoretical and critical contributions in the fields of culture, history, politics, and literature, this engaging work invites readers to think geocritically about the significance of space and place in the postmodern age. It represents essential reading for students, critics, and scholars from various academic fields and disciplines, including history, geography, cultural studies, anthropology, political science, literature and critical theory.

WINNER OF THE CANTEMIR PRIZE 2012 awarded by the Berendel Foundation The Map Reader brings together, for the first time, classic and hard-to-find articles on mapping. This book provides a wide-ranging and coherent edited compendium of key scholarly writing about the changing nature of cartography over the last half century. The editorial selection of fifty-four theoretical and thought provoking texts demonstrates how cartography works as a powerful representational form and explores how different mapping practices have been conceptualised in particular scholarly contexts. Themes covered include paradigms, politics, people, aesthetics and technology. Original interpretative essays set the literature into intellectual context within these themes. Excerpts are drawn from leading scholars and researchers in a range of cognate fields including: Cartography, Geography, Anthropology, Architecture, Engineering, Computer Science and Graphic Design. The Map Reader provides a new unique single source reference to the essential literature in the cartographic field: more than fifty specially edited excerpts from key, classic articles and monographs critical introductions by experienced experts in the field focused coverage of key mapping practices, techniques and ideas a valuable resource suited to a broad spectrum of researchers and students working in cartography and GIScience, geography, the social sciences, media studies, and visual arts full page colour illustrations of significant maps as provocative visual ‘think-pieces’ fully indexed, clearly structured and accessible ways into a fast changing field of cartographic research

Within the past ten years, the field of contemporary American literary studies has changed significantly. Following the turn of the twenty-first century and mounting doubts about the continued explanatory power of the category of “postmodernism,” new organizations have emerged, book series have been launched, journals have been created, and new methodologies, periodizations, and thematics have redefined the field. Postmodern/Postwar—and After aims to be a field-defining book—a sourcebook for the new and emerging critical terrain—that explores the postmodern/postwar period and what comes after. The first section of essays returns to the category of the “post-modern” and argues for the usefulness of key concepts and themes from postmodernism to the study of contemporary literature, or reevaluates postmodernism in light of recent developments in the field and historical and economic changes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These essays take the contemporary abandonments of postmodernism as an occasion to assess the current states of postmodernity. After that, the essays move to address the critical shift away from postmodernism as a description of the present, and toward a new sense of postmodernism as just one category among many that scholars can use to describe the recent past. The final section looks forward and explores the question of what comes after the postwar/postmodern. Taken together, these essays from leading and emerging scholars on the state of twenty-first-century literary studies provide a number of frameworks for approaching contemporary literature as influenced by, yet distinct from, postmodernism. The result is an indispensable guide that seeks to represent and understand the major overhauling of postwar American literary studies that is currently underway.