Critical essay postmodernism

He argues that postmodernism ought to be thought of as the apologetic or justificatory cultural discourse of the third stage of capitalism, namely, late or multinational capitalism. In fact, Jameson periodizes capitalism into various phases.

Reacting specifically to the argument about a legitiniation crisis (the collapse of our grand narratives) in Lyotard’s philosophical critique of Enlightenment, Habermas’ most frequently cited critique of postmodernism, ‘Modernity: An Incomplete Project’, initiates one of the most prominent debates about the politics of postmodernism.

Iconoclastic and irreverent, the postmodern novel is by definition a radical experiment that emerges when a writer feels the customary tropes of fiction have been exhausted. For the postmodernist, the well-worn genre of the novel is insufficient and no longer capable of conveying the imagination of the writer or the magnitude of historical events.

Time is often conveyed as random and disjointed; commonplace situations are depicted alongside surreal and fantastic plot developments, and the act of writing itself becomes a major focus of the subject matter. Many works feature multiple beginnings and endings.