Showing posts with label criticism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label criticism. Show all posts

Tuesday, 1 February 2011

Further Criticisms Of Postmodernism

Rosenau (1993) Rosenau identifies seven contradictions in Postmodernism:

1. Its anti-theoretical position is essentially a theoretical stand.
2. While Postmodernism stresses the irrational, instruments of reason are freely employed to advance its perspective.
3. The Postmodern prescription to focus on the marginal is itself an evaluative emphasis of precisely the sort that it otherwise attacks.
4. Postmodernism stress intertextuality but often treats text in isolation.
5. By adamently rejecting modern criteria for assessing theory, Postmodernists cannot argue that there are no valid criteria for judgment.
6. Postmodernism criticizes the inconsistency of modernism, but refuses to be held to norms of consistency itself.
7. Postmodernists contradict themselves by relinquishing truth claims in their own writings.

Yet More Criticism Of Postmodernism

Schematic Differences between
Modernism and Postmodernism
Modernism
Postmodernism
romanticism/symbolism
paraphysics/Dadaism
purpose
play
design
chance
hierarchy
anarchy
matery, logos
exhaustion, silence
art object, finished word
process, performance
distance
participation
creation, totalization
deconstruction
synthesis
antithesis
presence
absence
centering
dispersal
genre, boundary
text, intertext
semantics
rhetoric
paradigm
syntagm
hypotaxis
parataxis
metaphor
metonymy
selection
combination
depth
surface
interpretation
against interpretation
reading
misreading
signified
signifier
lisible (readerly)
scriptible
narrative
anti-narrative
grande histoire
petite histoire
master code
idiolect
symptom
desire
type
mutant
genital, phallic
polymorphous
paranoia
schizophrenia
origin, cause
difference-difference
God the Father
The Holy Ghost
Metaphysics
irony
determinacy
indeterminacy
transcendence
immanence

(SOURCE: Hassan "The Culture of Postmodernism" Theory, Culture, and Society, V 2 1985, 123-4.)