Full Description
"A Primer to Postmodernity" introduces the general reader to an emerging "postmodern" world order by giving us 'just the facts' through contemporary cultural lenses. Using TV shows, political talk shows, radio call-in shows, and popular film as points of reference, the focus is not on postmodernism as a movement in art, architecture and literature, but on postmodernity as the most wide-ranging and provocative change in how we look at the world since the Enlightenment. Natoli creates a postmodern environment in his text by incorporating starship Captain Becark and Commander Deja as our guides and interlocutors of the postmodern debate. They interrupt the text by asking questions where the reader might get stuck. They shift focus, counter arguments, deflate rhetoric, and add to the multi-voiced exposition of the Primer, dismantling anyone's hope of ever again providing the uninterrupted, monologic catechisms of modernity. This text performs postmodernity. Before going to the primary readings of postmodern theorists, students and general readers should begin with "A Primer to Postmodernity".
Contents
To The Reader. 1. Is This a Postmodern World? 2. How Do We Create a Sense of Realism? Or, Do We Just Discover it? 3. Classic Realist Formulas in Action: Film. 4. Go To Citizen Kane to Find 20th Century Modernism... On the Edge of Postmodernity. 5. Moving Across the Profound Surface of a Postmodern Life. 6. Yes, There is a Postmodern Political Struggle. 7. Postmodernity's and the Market. 8. Meditating on Postmodern Ethics and Religion. 9. Facing the Monsters: History in the Hands of Postmodernists. 10. Enacting the Postmodern: The Primer's Glossary of Cultural Studies. Index.
