Postmodernism

For nearly three quarters of a century, the modernist way of reading has been the only way of reading Joyce - useful, yes, and powerful but, like all frameworks, limited. This book takes a leap across those limits into postmodernism, where the pleasures and possibilities of an unsuspected Joyce are yet to be found. Kevin J. H. Dettmar begins by articulating a stylistics of postmodernism drawn from the key texts of Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Read within this framework, Dubliners emerges from behind its modernist facade as the earliest product of Joyce's proto-post-modernist sensibility. Dettmar exposes these stories as tales of mystery, not mastery, despite the modernist earmarks of plentiful symbols, allusions, and epiphanies. Ulysses, too, has been inadequately served by modernist critics. Where they have emphasized the work's ingenious Homeric structure, Dettmar focuses instead upon its seams, those points at which the narrative willfully, joyfully overflows its self-imposed bounds. Finally, he reads A Portrait of the Artist and Finnegans Wake as less playful, less daring texts - the first constrained by the precious, would be poet at its center, the last marking a surprising retreat from the constantly evolving, vertiginous experience of Ulysses.

First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The intellectual development of American legal thought has progressed remarkably quickly form the nation's founding through today. Stephen Feldman traces this development through the lens of broader intellectual movements and in this work applies the concepts of premodernism, modernism, and postmodernism to legal thought, using examples or significant cases from Supreme Court history. Comprehensive and accessible, this single volume provides an overview of the evolution of American legal thought up to the present.

Offers readable case studies in postmodern economics, philosophy, literary criticism, feminism, pedagogy, poetry, painting, historiography, and cultural studies, showing disorganization as characteristic of postmodern times.

Jonathan Franzen is one of the most influential, critically-significant and popular contemporary American novelists. This book is the first full-length study of his work and attempts to articulate where American fiction is headed after postmodernism. Stephen Burn provides a comprehensive analysis of each of Franzen's novels - from his early work to the major success of The Corrections - identifying key sources, delineating important narrative strategies, and revealing how Franzen's themes are reinforced by each novel's structure. Supplementing this analysis with comparisons to key contemporaries, David Foster Wallace and Richard Powers, Burn suggests how Franzen's work is indicative of the direction of experimental American fiction in the wake of the so-called end of postmodernism.

Analyzes contemporary texts that bond together two seemingly antithetical sensibilities: the sentimental and the postmodern. This book presents case studies of audience responses to "The Piano", "Kiss of the Spider Woman", and "Northern Exposure". It argues that sentimental postmodernism deepened leftist political engagement.

A marvellous and accessible guide to one of the great issues in the world today. If you have been puzzled and bewildered by the mixed messages abounding in the relations between Islam and the western world, this is the book for you.

'a pre-eminently sane, lucid, and concise statement about the central issues, the key examples, and the notorious derilections of postmodernism. I feel a fresh wind blowing away the miasma coiling around the topic. ' -Ihab Hassan, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee'the most intellectually incisive, coherent and comprehensive meditation upon the history and significance of postmodernism that I have yet encountered.' -Patricia Waugh, University of Durham'easily the best introduction to postmodernism currently available' -Hans Bertens, Utrecht University