Postmodernism Quotes

• Postmodernism was a reaction to modernism. Where modernism was about objectivity, postmodernism was about subjectivity. Where modernism sought a singular truth, postmodernism sought the multiplicity of truths.

  Miguel Syjuco

  Objectivity, Subjectivity, Reactions

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• Postmodernism entices us with the siren call of liberation and creativity, but it may be an invitation to intellectual and moral suicide.

  Gertrude Himmelfarb

  Suicide, Creativity, History

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• The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, I love you madly, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.

  Umberto Eco

  Love, Attitude, Past

  Umberto Eco (1984). “Postscript to The name of the rose”, Harcourt

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• Postmodernism, the school of 'thought' that proclaimed 'There are no truths, only interpretations' has largely played itself out in absurdity, but it has left behind a generation of academics in the humanities disabled by their distrust of the very idea of truth and their disrespect for evidence, settling for 'conversations' in which nobody is wrong and nothing can be confirmed, only asserted with whatever style you can muster.

  Daniel Dennett

  School, Ideas, Disrespect

  "Liberals and the New McCarthyism" by Derrick Jensen, www.counterpunch.org. August 10, 2015.

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• Postmodernism surely requires an even greater grasp of symbolism, as it's increasingly an art of gesture alone.

  Andrew Eldritch

  Art, Symbolism, Gestures

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• Tolerance is not a spiritual gift; it is the distinguishing mark of postmodernism; and sadly, it has permeated the very fiber of Christianity. Why is it that those who have no biblical convictions or theology to govern and direct their actions are tolerated and the standard or truth of God's Word rightly divided and applied is dismissed as extreme opinion or legalism?

  John Stott

  Spiritual, Biblical, Tolerance

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• Postmodernism has not overcome the problems of modernism, but only compounded them with a dosis of cynicism, relativism and indifference.

  John Walford

  Art, Overcoming, Problem

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• Postmodernism shifts the basis of the work of art from the object to the transaction between the spectator and the object and further deconstructs this by negating the presence of a representative objective viewer.

  Arnold Aronson

  Art, Bases, Spectators

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• Post-modernism is modernism with the optimism taken out.

  Robert Hewison

  Taken, Optimism, Modernism

  Robert Hewison (1987). “The heritage industry: Britain in a climate of decline”, Methuen

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• Postmodernism represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.

  Lyman Abbott

  Future, Past, Batteries

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• Postmodernism does not help us understand good art. It encourages art that can be easily understood and throws in something catchy to cover the loss of mystery.

  Walter Darby Bannard

  Art, Loss, Understanding

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• Can postmodernism hold the perpetrators of genocide accountable?

  Catharine MacKinnon

  Genocide, Perpetrators, Post Modernism

  Catharine A. MacKinnon (2007). “Are Women Human?”, p.58, Harvard University Press

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• Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism.

  Terry Eagleton

  Sick, Revolutionary, Modernism

  "Capitalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism". Essay by Terry Eagleton, 1985.

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• Postmodernism cost literature its audience.

  Scott Turow

  Cost, Literature, Audience

  "'To hell with Perry Mason'". Interview with Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. November 24, 2002.

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• What postmodernism gives us instead is a multicultural defense for male violence - a defense for it wherever it is, which in effect is a pretty universal defense.

  Catharine MacKinnon

  Giving, Males, Defense

  Catharine A. MacKinnon (2007). “Are Women Human?”, p.54, Harvard University Press

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• A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Firsts, Modern, Ends

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• Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism's high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.

  Gilbert Adair

  Past, Principles, Batteries

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• There's this expression called postmodernism, which is kind of silly, and destroys a perfectly good word called modern, which now no longer means anything.

  Twyla Tharp

  Stupid, Silly, Mean

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• Postmodernism is an academic theory, originating in academia with an academic elite, not in the world of women and men, where feminist theory is rooted.

  Catharine MacKinnon

  Men, Feminist, Academia

  Catharine A. MacKinnon (2007). “Are Women Human?”, p.62, Harvard University Press

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• The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.

  Christopher Hitchens

  People, Boredom, Tyranny

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• Modernism is about space. Postmodernism is about communication. You should do what turns you on.

  Robert Venturi

  Communication, Space, Should

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• Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Style, Unapologetic, Architecture

  Ada Louise Huxtable (1986). “The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered: The Search for a Skyscraper Style”, Pantheon

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• A 'modern' man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the dead limb of time like lice.

  Elias Canetti

  Men, Lice, Add

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• You are born modern, you do not become so.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Modern, Born, Modernism

  Jean Baudrillard (1989). “America”, p.73, Verso

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• Postmodernism is silly and joyless at the same time.

  Walter Darby Bannard

  Silly, Modernism

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