Introducing Postmodernism

What on earth is postmodernism? Here, at last, is the perfect audio guide to the maddeningly enigmatic concept that has been used to describe our cultural condition in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries.

Postmodernism claims that "modernity," which grew from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century through the Industrial Revolution and on to Marxism, has collapsed, its great project of human liberation suffocated under its own contradictions. For some, this is a good thing, a liberation from a repressive and authoritarian culture; for others, it is an abdication of responsibility that shows how far we have declined.

If there is a "real" postmodernism, it needs to be identified in all of the many fields of culture in turn, and this is exactly what Richard Appignanesi does here. As author of the bestselling book Introducing Postmodernism, he takes the listener on a roller-coaster ride through the key areas of postmodern debate in art, philosophy, architecture, literature, science, anthropology, sociology, and much else besides. Along the way, he explains the essentials of structuralism, semiotics, and deconstruction as developed by Foucault, L├®vi-Strauss, Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, and others. This is a crucial guide for anyone wanting to understand the kaleidoscope of competing perspectives that is postmodernism.