Postmodernism

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /pəʊstˈmɑdɚnɪzəm/

Definitions

1. A cultural and intellectual movement that rejects unified theories and absolute truth, emphasizing irony, pastiche, and the deconstruction of traditional distinctions between art forms and meaning
2. An artistic and philosophical approach questioning grand narratives and objective reality while celebrating fragmentation, intertextuality, and the collapse of hierarchies between popular and elite culture
3. A philosophical stance that challenges established truths and ideologies, advocating for complexity, style diversity, and the merging of high and low culture across disciplines

Etymology: Postmodernism is one of the few words in this family whose history is mostly a story about a label: the movement it names was argued over before anyone agreed on what it was. The word itself is a plain compound. It joins the prefix "post-", meaning "after", to "modernism", so it literally means "after modernism," a name that presupposes the thing it follows. The prefix is an ordinary English formation from Latin "post", "after," and "modernism" builds on "modern," which came from late Latin "modernus," itself from "modo," "just now." The "-ism" ending carries the idea of a doctrine or movement, descending from Greek "-ismos," which is how English gained a large family of names for artistic and intellectual programmes. Here the suffix does the same job it does in "modernism," so the compound reads as a movement defined by its relation to an earlier one. That relation is the heart of the word: postmodernism criticises the assumptions of modernism, such as faith in progress and in a single, objective account of reality, while also borrowing from the very tradition it rejects.

Synonyms: postmodernity, deconstructivism

Antonyms: modernism