Are We Postmodern Yet?: And Were We Ever?

ISBN-13: 9783030305710 / Angielski / Miękka / 2020 / 328 str.

Reinhold Kramer

Recenzje

"This impressively wide-ranging book suggests that there is an important distinction between postmodernism (the theories) and postmodernity (the practices) - between 'literary and philosophical skepticism about foundations and reality' and 'post-war social developments.' ... the book has plenty of range, and this is one of the great pleasures of reading it." (Karl Manis, University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 91 (3), August, 2022)

Spis treści

Chapter 1: Introduction: The Contemporary Era

Naming and dating postmodernity

Just the West?

The ethical dilemma

 

Chapter 2: Truth or Truths?

Truth as a kind of fiction?                            

Emotion as the new truth?

Truth, Act II

 

Chapter 3 Ethics: “How I feel at the time”            

Moral dilemmas

Skepticism about ethical foundations

Traditionalist ethics

Science-based (modernist) ethics

Postmodern ‘other’-based ethics

Market-based ethics

Contractarian ethics

 

Chapter 4: Individualism: “I Believe in Me”          

The costs of postmodern individualism

Self-indulgence

Civility

Decline of empathy

Lack of larger commitments beyond the self

Social distancing

Pleasure

Case study: The novels of David Foster Wallace

The goods and limits of postmodern individualism

Freedom – completing the work of modernity

Blysspluss

                                               

Chapter 5: Adventures in Cyber-culture

Internet gains

Internet losses

A decline of memory and literacy

A decline of reason

Illusory gains in multi-tasking     

A decline of human connections 

More democratic?

More resolutely into simulation

                ‘Layered’ reality

                Internet addiction and mediated lives                                                   

Next step, transhuman?

Hunger for the unreal

 

Chapter 6 :The Nation                                                                                                                                   

Individualism: distrust of the political 

                Consumer, not citizen                   

Decline of the public sphere                                      

Multilateralism and globalization

                Deregulation                                                                                     

Reassertions of the national grand narrative

Global rule of law

Selective national sovereignty

 

Chapter 7 :Faith and Other Grand Narratives                                                                                      

“Evil Spirits”

Traditional beliefs diminishing in a postmodern context

Traditional beliefs continuing

New grand narratives: science, environment

The undecided middle

Ego-based personal narratives

Small narratives

Selective adherence

Pluralist adaptation

Humanism

Case study: Humanist chaplain Bart Campolo

 

Chapter 8: Conclusion

 

O autorze

Reinhold Kramer is a professor at Brandon University in Canada. He is the author of Scatology and Civility in the English-Canadian Novel and Mordecai Richler: Leaving St. Urbain (winner of a Jewish Book Award and the Gabrielle Roy Prize).

Blurb

In this book, Reinhold Kramer explores a variety of important social changes, including the resistance to objective measures of truth, the rise of “How-I-Feel” ethics, the ascendancy of individualism, the immersion in cyber-simulations, the push toward globalization and multilateralism, and the decline of political and religious faiths. He argues that the displacement, since the 1990s, of grand narratives by ego-based narratives and small narratives has proven inadequate, and that selective adherence, pluralist adaptation, and humanism are more worthy replacements. Relying on evolutionary psychology as much as on Charles Taylor, Kramer argues that no single answer is possible to the book title’s question, but that the term “postmodernity”—referring to the era, not to postmodernism— still usefully describes major currents within the contemporary world.