pomo

[Jedrzej Polak]

Professor Klages seems to be very wrong, at least as far as dating is
concerned. It should be pushed back at least a decade earlier (if not two)
and connected with the efforts of John Barth ("The Literature of
Exhaustion"), Irving Howe, Gerald Graff, Ihab Hassan, Robert Scholes, Philip
Stevick - to name but a few. The groundbreaking essay-cum-manifesto by John
Barth appeared in the sixties, if I remember correctly, and since that time
postmodernism (at least in literature) has become an area of academic study.
It's not a new phenomenon, though I agree "it's not clear exactly when [it]
begins". The same, however, applies to modernism, or any other artistic
movement at that. The questions is: do we really need carbon dating to cope
with such developments?

jp

> "Postmodernism is a complicated term, or set of ideas, one that has only
> emerged as an area of academic study since the mid-1980s. Postmodernism is
> hard to define, because it is a concept that appears in a wide variety of
> disciplines or areas of study, including art, architecture, music, film,
> literature, sociology, communications, fashion, and technology. It's hard to
> locate it temporally or historically, because it's not clear exactly when
> postmodernism begins. (...)"