Postmodern Times - A Critical Guide to the Contemporary (Hardcover)

These fifteen new essays engage topics from architecture to politics and from fast food to film, revealing the problems and potential of postmodern cultural criticism. Resisting the temptation to use "postmodern" as a catch-all label. Postmodern Times offers a clear and engaging reading of the value and limits of postmodernist approaches to present-day society and culture.

Contributors include some of the most preeminent critics and scholars working today. Linda Hutcheon defines opera's postmodern moment"; Henry Giroux decodes postmodern education; Charles Jencks inspects the foundations of contemporary architecture; Thomas Docherry confronts postmodernn politics; Michael Zeitlin places psychoanalysis on the postmodern couch; and Diane Elam reconsiders the intersections and collisions between feminist and postmodern theory. Other essays consider the culture wars within literary criticism, the new aesthetics of electronic media, and the direction of the "linguistic turn" in the sciences.

Postmodern Times provides a comprehensive survey that accessibly and concretely applies postmodern insights to the contemporary world. Interdisciplinary in scope, it will be a valuable critical guide for those interested in art, politics, literature, popular culture, and the new media, and for everyone seeking to understand our postmodern times.