Features of Postmodernism Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Features of Postmodernism - Essay ExampleThe modernist believed that science had shaken the foundations of traditional authorities and truths. red-brick man could find a new, rational foundation for universal truth science, particularly, would reveal new truth, which, when applied to modern society and institutions, would literally remake the world. contemporaneousness ... held the extravagant expectation that the arts and sciences would further not only the control of the forces of nature but also the understanding of self and world, moral progress, justice in social institutions, and even human happiness. 2. Looking to man and not God, the optimism of modernism has proven itself ill-founded. The response has been postmodernism. Postmodernism can be illustrated as a worldview by feel at five presuppositions inherent in the postmodern worldview (1) The quest for truth is a lost cause. It is a search for a holy grail that doesnt embody and never did. Postmodernists argue that object ive, universal, knowable truth is mythical all we have ever found in our agonized search for Truth are truths that were cause only in their own time and culture, but true Truth has never been ours. Furthermore, if we make the mistake of claiming to know the Truth, we are deluded at best and flagitious at worst. (2) A persons sense of identity is a composite constructed by the forces of the surrounding culture. Individual consciousness--a vague, decentered collection of unconscious and conscious beliefs, knowledge, and intuitions about oneself and the world--is malleable and arrived at through interaction with the surrounding culture. ... Individual consciousness--a vague, decentered collection of unconscious and conscious beliefs, knowledge, and intuitions about oneself and the world--is malleable and arrived at through interaction with the surrounding culture. Postmodernism then, in bare contrast to modernism, is about the dissolving of the self. From the postmodernist perspecti ve, we should not think of ourselves as unique, unified, self-conscious, autonomous persons.(3) The languages of our culture (the verbal and visual signs we use to represent the world to ourselves) literally construct what we think of as real in our everyday existence. In this sense, mankind is a text or composite of texts, and these texts (rather than the God-created reality) are the only reality we can know. Our sense of self--who we are, how we think of ourselves, as well as how we see and interpret the world and give ourselves meaning in it--is subjectively constructed through language.(4) naturalism is created by those who have power. One of postmodernisms preeminent theorists, Michel Foucault, combines the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsches ideas about how those in power shape the world with a theory of how language is the primary instrument for reservation culture. Foucault argues that whoever dominates or controls the official use of language in a society holds the key to social and political power. (Think, for example, of how official political spin control of item words and phrases can alter the public perception of political decisions, policies, and events.) Put simply, Nietzsche said all reality is someones willful, powerful construction Foucault says language is the primary tool in