Postmodernism

Postmodernism: A late 20th-century style in the arts, architecture, and criticism that represents a departure from modernism.

Criticism of postmodernism:Criticisms of postmodernism are intellectually diverse, including the assertions that postmodernism is meaningless and promotes obscurantism. For example, Noam Chomsky has argued that postmodernism is meaningless because it adds nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge. He asks why postmodernist intellectuals do not respond like people in other fields when asked, "what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn't already obvious, etc?...If [these requests] can't be met, then I'd suggest recourse to Hume's advice in similar circumstances: 'to the flames'

Other Definitions

• genre of art and literature and especially architecture in reaction against principles and practices of established modernism.

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.

What is postmodernism?Postmodernism is a term which defines the postmodernist movement in the arts, its set of cultural tendencies and associated cultural movements. It is in general the era that follows Modernism. It frequently serves as an ambiguous overarching term for skeptical interpretations of culture, literature, art, philosophy, economics, architecture, fiction, and literary criticism. It is often associated with deconstruction and post-structuralism because its usage as a term gained significant popularity at the same time as twentieth-century post-structural thought.
The most well known postmodernist concerns consist of the deconstruction within the arts and cultural tendencies. Postmodernism is a concern for philosophy, literary criticism, and textual analysis developed by Jacques Derrida. The notion of a "deconstructive" approach implies an analysis that questions the already evident deconstruction of a text in terms of presuppositions, ideological underpinnings, hierarchical values, and frames of reference. A deconstructive approach further depends on the techniques of close reading without reference to cultural, ideological, moral opinions or information derived from an authority over the text such as the author.  

The compact Oxford English Dictionary refers to postmodernism as ‘a style and concept in the arts characterized by a distrust of theories and ideologies and by the drawing of attention to conventions.’Postmodernists claim that in a media-saturated world, where we are constantly immersed in media 24/7 and on the move, at work, at home- the distinction between reality and the media representation of it becomes blurred or even entirely invisible to us. In other words we no longer have any sense of difference between real things and images of them, or real experiences and simulations of them. Media reality is the new reality.Some see this as a historical development the modern period came before, during which artist experimented with the representation of reality and the postmodern comes next where this idea of representation gets remixed.