Encyclopedia of Postmodernism (Routledge World Reference) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415308860 ISBN 13: 9780415308861

Publisher: Routledge, 2003

Synopsis

The Encyclopedia of Postmodernism provides comprehensive and authoritative coverage of academic disciplines, critical terms and central figures relating to the vast field of postmodern studies. With three cross-referenced sections, the volume is easily accessible to readers with specialized research agendas and general interests in contemporary cultural, historical, literary and philosophical issues.
Since its inception in the 1960s, postmodernism has emerged as a significant cultural, political and intellectual force that many scholars would argue defines our era. Postmodernism, in its various configurations, has consistently challenged concepts of selfhood, knowledge formation, aesthetics, ethics, history and politics. This Encyclopedia offers a wide-range of perspectives on postmodernism that illustrates the plurality of this critical concept that is so much part of our current intellectual debates. In this regard, the volume does not adhere to a single definition of postmodernism as much as it documents the use of the term across a variety of academic and cultural pursuits.
The Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, it must be noted, resists simply presenting postmodernism as a new style among many styles occuring in the post-disciplinary academy. Documenting the use of the term acknowledges that postmodernism has a much deeper and long-lasting effect on academic and cultural life. In general, the volume rests on the understanding that postmodernism is not so much a style as it is an on-going process, a process of both disintegration and reformation.

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Review

'This encyclopedia follows others from the Routledge stable in showing a sure scholarly understanding of the ideas and critical cross-currents in the field' - Reference Reviews

'If postmodernism is about anything goes, and I do not think it is , the existence of this encyclopedia indicates that something stays, and that something is this stimulating reference work.' - Reference Reviews [April 2001]

Synopsis

Postmodernism has emerged as a critical cultural, political and intellectual concept and has significantly altered our understanding of every discipline from architecture to ethics, and history to politics. This new Encyclopedia of Postmodernism is structured with biographical entries on all the key contributors to the postmodernism debate, including Mikhail Bakhtin, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Jurgen Habermas and Wittgenstein. Providing an all-encompassing and welcome addition to the field, the Encyclopedia contains entries on foundational concepts of postmodernism which have revolutionized thinking in every intellectual discipline. Entries include: canonicity; deconstruction; grammatology; historicism; intertextuality; modernism; semiotics. Terminology and concepts are drawn from right across the disciplines from anthropology, sociology, linguistics and geography to film, French, gay and lesbian and critical legal studies. Advisory Board: Ales Debeljak ,University of Ljubliana, Sweden. Sander L. Gilman, University of Chicago, USA. E. Ann Kaplan, SUNY Stony Brook, USA. Charles H. Long, University of California at Santa Barbara, USA. Theresa Sanders, Georgetown University, US

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0415308860
• ISBN 13: 9780415308861
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 480
• Editor: Taylor Victor E., Winquist Charles E.