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What Does Postmodernism Really Amount To? - Claremont Review of Books

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Even its practitioners don’t know.

If you want to know what postmodernism is, or just what the word means, you don’t get much help from either its advocates or interpreters. Most words that label theories bear some relation to their content: words like “evolution” or “Communism” give you at least the beginning of an understanding of what they are about. But words, like “modernism,” that refer only to an unspecified time have the drawback not only of omitting any kind of descriptive content, but also of allowing the passage of time to make their meaning increasingly uncertain. “Postmodernism” is doubly uninformative, referring…

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