Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. ;The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate a wide range of phenomena currently gathered under the rubric of "postmodernism". Though many commentators have drawn attention to the importance of the postmodern in contemporary life and thought, there has yet to emerge a satisfactory account of what the tem designates and of the nature of the relation which exists between modernity and postmodernity. ;In the introduction I propose a critical approach which assumes a plurality of postmodernisms and then sets about the preliminary task of discriminating various modernist paradigms. In doing so, the aim is to establish certain affinities between philosophical, aesthetic and literary modernism. My argument is that the postmodern is a critical examination, a post-mortem, of the practising body of modernity. By examining the writings of postmodern thinkers from various disciplines, I demonstrate the thesis that postmodernity is not an epoch but a radical interrogation of the concepts and principles upon which the discourse of modernity staked its claim. In particular, it involves a progressive deconstruction of the knowing subject and the philosophy of consciousness which supports that discursive formation. I take issue with the notion that postmodernism is antirational and apolitical. Utilizing the writings of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Italo Calvino, and Jorge Luis Borges, I indicate the continuities and discontinuities between philosophical, literary, and political thought. The writings of the major contenders in this postmodern debate, Richard Rorty, Jurgen Habermas, and Jean-Francois Lyotard constitute the theoretical starting-point for these various diagnostic accounts. My own reading of their work, however, argues for a different understanding of what it means to be postmodern. ;The thesis consists of nine chapters whose order, though not arbitrary, might be regarded as just one way of assembling the material in broadly narrative form. Such is the aim of this work as a whole: to provide a perspective on postmodernism without reducing it to a unitary phenomenon