Has anyone heard from Mamawho since she moved? I was just wondering about her and the whole Who family and hoping they're doing ok.

Dude, I know HBD actually got to meet with Whos.

MW - if you're out there we're totally cyber stalking you! And miss you something awful! Hellllloooo? *cups ear - hears echo*

Last I talked to her they were settling in and unpacking. That was last Wed. Big O's been asking about GirlWho a lot.

Come back, MW, come back!

See...this is the hive mind at work...I was just wondering about our lovely mamawho and the rest of the who family. Hopefully everything is going smoothly!

Hee, I was too. Come back soon, MW!

Me three. i was thinking the other day, dude, i totally need someone who has read some Umberto Eco, and she was the first person i thought of, as being most likely to know anything about post-modernism in literature. even if she doesn't, i bet she can at least sympathise that i have to study it. :P

I've read some, Bol! Which novel are you doing? Some are better than others. He's WAY into semiotics, that guy.

I miss mamawho too.

I was thinking about her too. The OS is a hivemind.

I was just writing about postmodernism! And also missing MW.

I could not make it more than 50 pages into Foucault's Pendulum. I liked The Name of the Rose and even more so, The Island of the Day Before. I was into Latitute/Longitude when I read the later, so that's why I dug it.

It was The Name of the Rose, specifically. The essay topic (out of three, i chose this one, and i frequently wished i hadn't) was along the lines of 'eco uses a medieval setting to comment on 20th century ideologies, obsessions and something or others. - is this an accurate assessment?' (Not accurate). I started out thinking "well, heck no." then went pretty quick to "ok i can see it." and then got sidelined down in to a whole diatribe on structuralism and existentialism, and came around eventually into a huge blob of postmodernism, which had to be sort of beaten into submission before i knew what to do with it. And even now, after submitting it, i'm not sure i was that successful. Three weeks ago, everythign i knew about postmodernism could have been written on the back of a postage stamp. (I could spell it, and i was fairly confident it was a 20thC. thing, that was it.) But 3000 words later (with a lotta offcuts) i'm a different woman.

This guy pretty much summed up how i felt by the end:

(Dick Hebdige, ‘Hiding in the Light’):

"When it becomes possible for a people to describe as ‘postmodern’ the décor of a room, the design of a building, the diegesis of a film, the construction of a record, or a ‘scratch’ video, a television commercial, or an arts documentary, or the ‘intertextual’ relations between them, the layout of a page in a fashion magazine or critical journal, an anti-teleological tendency within epistemology, the attack on the ‘metaphysics of presence’ a general attenuation of feeling, the collective chagrin and morbid projections of a post-War generation of baby boomers confronting disillusioned middle-age, the ‘predicament of reflexitivity, a group of rhetorical tropes, a proliferation of surfaces, a new phase in commodity fetishism, a fascination for images, codes and styles, a process of cultural, political or existential fragmentation and/or crisis, the ‘de-centring’ of the subject, an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’, the replacement of unitary power axes by a plurality of power/discourse formations, the ‘implosion of meaning’, the collapse of cultural hierarchies, the dread engendered by the threat of nuclear self-destruction, the decline of the university, the functioning and effects of the new miniaturised technologies, broad societal and economic shifts into a ‘media’, ‘consumer’ or ‘multinational’ phase, a sense (depending on who you read) of ‘placelessness’ or the abandonment of ‘placelessness’ (critical regionalism) or (even) a generalised substitution of spatial for temporal coordinates: when it becomes possible to describe all these things as ‘postmodern’ (or more simply using a current abbreviation as ‘post’ or ‘very post’) then it’s clear we are in the presence of a buzzword."

This is why i had so much damn trouble - postmodernism apparently has no boundaries, it's like the matrix. It's all around. :/

dammit, i just saw "the decline of the university" in that list - why didn't that jump out at me a fortnight ago, i could'a used that.

but i still don't think i can define postmodernism.

Bol - I love you, and I swear I'm not stupid, but I have no idea what the fuck that dude was saying in your post three above mine. And I excelled at BSing in philosophy. In fact, philosophy was one of the few classes I actually did well in during college.

I am way too white trash to even read that post. Damn. I need to brush up on my Lope de Vega or something. Oh, my poor brain. It hurteth me.

Ellie, it's just a mega definition of post modernism, I think. Basically every way the author has seen it defined, which is so huge, that like BoL says, ultimately makes it not terribly useful.

Also, while I loved Foucault's Pendulum and Island of the Day Before, I never managed to make it all the way through The Name of the Rose. I don't know why, I just kept giving up.

Doctor Mac is right. what the guy is saying, is that there are FAR too many things you can call "postmodern" for it to be able to definitively mean anything. Like, if you can use the same word to describe a billion very different aspects of arts and culture, then the word itself is either very overused to the point of daft, or very unmeaningful. Both of which have the same result - that the word itself means nothing.

And to an extent this is true. I don't think it will mean anything until some other poor sap has to study it in 2050 when the definition will have either narrowed to something more manageable, or the timeframe being used will have narrowed... i don't think it's particularly easy to quantify an era that is still occurring - much much easier to talk about it once you know for sure it's ended. Which it probably has, since either new millennium or 9/11 (some say it's the same thing - as in, 9/11 was the defining moment in the western psyche when we went from one era to another, in a way that just clicking over the clock never did.)

I didn't want to read Name of the Rose. The movie is great, i've seen it many times... but the book and I didn't get along. I got to page 50, and wanted to throw it at the wall. But i didn't want to fail, so i kept going. Reeeeaaaallly slowly for a while there. I would rather have been reading almost anything else. It was an absolute drudge for me. So much that I volunteered to read "Mists of Avalon" again, just to get out of it. And i totally meant it.

I'm fully aware that Eco is a genius and a brilliant mind and all that, he's just so far above my method of thought that i can't keep up. Also, Ego non agnosco latin. O_o?

Apropos I think Mamawho would be secretly pleased to know that a discussion of her whereabouts detoured into a discussion on Umberto Eco and Postmodernism.

In art the postmodern is anything that is in contradiction to 'modern' art. Contemporary is a blanket term really for anything made after 1950. And Modernism started in the very un modern 1870s.

It's confusing and pigeon holing BS anyway. There is a universal set of basic 'rules' to the aesthetic of art (ie color, composition). The artists that can't do that are bad. The artists who bend or break them intentionally and intelligently are genius. Art is 90% thinking really hard and 10% execution.

Here's what I was writing about postmodernism, in this particular section of my paper:

Post-modern political theory (or "critical theory") seeks to understand and explore the erasure of non-hegemonic influences and storylines in political society. Springing from post-modern literary analysis, critical theory began as an examination of written language. Using post-modern insights about language as a starting point, critical theory posits an identification between human political experiences and textual representations of the world. In other words, critical theorists would note that just as one individual story line in a written work is the “main story” and more important and legitimate than other story lines which could be observed in the work, certain kinds of people (or states) are hegemonic in a political society and are legitimized over other people (or states.) Groups and states that are hegemonic get to speak and interpret history, or narrate contemporary events, while subordinate groups are silenced. The way that hegemonic groups silence subordinate groups makes the process difficult to detect because the silencing is itself so quiet: in the context of written work, writers and readers of hegemonic storylines silence non-hegemonic storylines by simply not including or acknowledging them, so a casual consumer of these works doesn't know what is left out if he or she doesn't know what to look for. In the context of political life, critical theorists point out how hegemonic groups and institutions -- like the established news media -- regularly silence non-hegemonic groups by failing to address their needs, respond to their expressed preferences, or mention their perspectives. They then logically deduce what kinds of effects this silencing might have on powerful and powerless individuals, as well as the political community at large.

that makes my eyes water. :)

No seriously, what is your paper on? And when you say paper, what does that mean, exactly?

I'd post part of my assignment on Umberto Eco, but i'm afraid i'd sound like an idiot. Scared that ten people on here would then pipe up and say "oh, bol, you dick, that's not postmodernism, that's post-structuralism or something. :/

also, does postmodernism in politics owe much debt to post structuralism and existentialism? just curious...

I was totally just thinking the same thing for a little while after posting that - how does postmodernism relate to poststructuralism in the context of critical political theory? Then I thought, well, I'm not focusing on it to the extent of needing to really differentiate those things. I think post-structuralism is more about linguistics and post-modernism is a little more catch-all and directly applicable to different fields. What's interesting, though, is that just like in linguistics there was an important movement in international relations (my field) called "structuralism", and a lot of the work I use could be called "post-structuralist" in that it is a repudiation of structuralism - but since it really doesn't map on to the literary post-structuralism, it doesn't seem like a good idea to bring that up.

I think post-modernism in political analysis does owe a tremendous debt to the literary/philosophical movements. Political science in general is a pretty derivative field, so interesting ideas that have been fleshed out in other disciplines often find their way, eventually, to our little pool. And my paper is my dissertation - part of the theory chapter. I just thought it sounded pretentious to say that, so I said "paper" instead.

And you should totally post your thoughts on Eco. I don't think you've ever sounded like an idiot, it would probably be really awesome to read.

Sure why not. i have to tell you though, by the time i got to writing it, the research on postmodernism had turned my brain into camembert. This was my intro, and since i was also doing it kind of late (i.e. the night before the deadline), i never really did more than the one draft. So if sounds unpolished, it's because i'm slack and have no time management skillz.

Umberto Eco’s novel, “The Name of the Rose”, is a post-modern text that draws together many of the social, political and individual obstacles and objectives of the twentieth century. There is a strong emphasis on logic, reason and rhetoric within the character-driven plot. Yet at times these elements serve to obfuscate meaning and overshadow any conclusions, acting instead as secondary devices to emphasize the lack of any true, inherent meaning of words and of the text itself, while reinforcing the concept that interpretation is dependent upon context and the individual experience. The action of the novel focuses on medieval murder and mystery, religious debate and the breakdown of structure, morality and order within the Abbey. These themes may be read as metaphors; symbolic of the breakdown of social cohesion, the rise of the postmodernist movement, and exposure and subsequent deconstruction of the fundamental flaws within structuralism, an ideology that has been extremely influential in the second-half of the twentieth century.

As suspected, awesome. I've never read The Name of the Rose and this actually makes me want to go put it on my library list.

When EM Forster urged us to "connect, only connect," he was railing against what would come to be known as post-modernism. Much like religion, it's hard to define - ineffable- but you know it when you see it.

I read The Name of the Rose as a kid. I think it contributed to how twisted my poor little mind is.

You have no idea how it warms the cockles of my black, little heart to see this thread and that it derailed into a discussion of postmodernism and Eco. I didn't major in English and Philosophy for the fame and chicks.

I love you guys.