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 of the late-20th and early-21st centuries. Postmodernism claims that 'modernity', which grew from the Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution and Marxism, has collapsed. We now live in an endlessly 'contemporary' culture, a virtual world of 'hyperreality' containing such strange phenomena as post-Holocaust amnesia, Disneyland, cyberspace, and Fukuyama's proclaimed 'end of history'. Richard Appignanesi, author of the best-selling book Introducing Postmodernism, takes the listener on a roller-coaster ride through the key areas of postmodern debate and explains the essentials of structuralism, semiotics, and deconstruction as developed by Foucault, Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, and others. It is a crucial guide for anyone wanting to understand the hall of mirrors that is postmodernism.