Morning Thanks

Garrison Keillor once said we'd all be better off if we all started the day by giving thanks for just one thing. I'll try.

Monday, September 19, 2022

Postmodernism 101


Postmodernism is a movement that focuses on the reality of the individual, denies statements that claim to be true for all people and is often expressed in a pared-down style in arts, literature and culture. An example of a thought of postmodernism is the idea that not all people would see stealing as negative.
Which is to say that 
postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse defined by an attitude of skepticism toward what it characterizes as the "grand narratives" of modernism, opposition to notions of epistemic certainty or the stability of meaning, and emphasis on the role of ideology in maintaining systems of socio-political power. Claims to objective fact are dismissed as naïve realism, with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses. Thus, the postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization.

All of that has its origins in the post-professorial part of my brain, along with the memory (not a nightmare either) of trying to "teach" post-modernism to undergraduates, not a particularly easy task.

Of course, a decade ago, when I was still in the classroom, what I didn't have was this picture of my granddaughter--isn't she a doll?--in which, you may note, she utterly engages in some healthy epistemological relativism and therewith destroys (deconstructs) prevailing myths about witches and deviltry simply by drinking from her bottle.

POW! a picture worth a thousand words.

She's goofy, isn't she? Smart?--wow. Thoroughly defining post-modernism before her third birthday. 


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