How can we define "postmodernism"? How does the term different from
'modernism' which innovated what the precursors had done through the
19th century?
To define the contextual term, critics and scholars have been distinguishing it in different ways. Fredric Jameson's remarks
defining postmodernism during his lecture at the Whitney Museum in 1982 has
been one of the initial theoretical treatments of postmodernism as an
intellectual trend and a socio-economic phenomenon as well as a historical
period. In "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," Fredric Jameson declares two
qualities of postmodernism to be antithetical to modernism: (i) postmodernism
reacts against the structural "high modernism" that conquered higher education,
art, and philosophy; and (ii) eliminates what distinguished "high culture" and "mass
or popular culture." Jameson clarifies that the generation from the 1960s has
to "destroy" the dominant abstract styles of "high modernism," which conquered
the academics and popular culture.
If we accept the theoretical treatment of Jameson, how has the so-called "postmodernism" been antithetical to
modernist literature? How have writers, artists, and philosophers been postmodernist? How have critics and scholars responded? If it is not an antithesis to modernism, how could it be separated from modernism to be called post-modernism? Or is it just another phase of modernism? Drawing on a range of perspectives across disciplines in literature, philosophy, and art, this panel aims at
discussing literature and theories that respond to the vagueness and relativism of postmodernism in contemporary world.