What's Wrong with Postmodernism

📖 The Scoop

What's Wrong with Postmodernism collects seven of Christopher Norris's reviews of recent work in literary theory. Throughout, Norris appears to assume that his readers possess substantial background knowledge in politics and philosophy as well as literary theory. He clearly deserves his reputation as the most philosophically astute of British literary theorists and, considering the abstruseness of the topics under consideration, he also manages to be surprisingly clear. Two purposes permeate the collection. The first is to criticize postmodernism, described as "the upshot of a generalized incredulity with regard to all theories, truth-claims, or 'scientific' notions of system and method." Through discussion of Jean Baudrillard's Selected Writings and Stanley Fish's Doing What Comes Naturally, Norris argues that in addition to its obvious intellectual flaws, postmodernism leads in the political sphere to malaise, cynicism, and apathy. The appeal of postmodernism, he suggests, is due to the failure of literary theories based on Ferdinand de Saussure's structuralism; fortunately, because there are approaches to the philosophy of language other than Saussure's, the postmodernist turn is not irresistible. -- Description from http://bookstore.autonomedia.org (April 16, 2012).

Genre: Literary Criticism / Semiotics & Theory (fancy, right?)