Word: postmodern
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...heard one of several ready-made soundbites that would surely appear in the next morning's paper. Another striking moment came when she said, nonchalantly, that today's Ivy League graduates are nothing more than "little blind gnomes," two generations of students who have been crippled by postmodern professors. Her cause was the preservation of art and facts, as well as the restoration of grandeur to teaching and learning--all noble goals that, she argued, have been utterly ignored or destroyed by this thing called postmodernism...
...Harvard are "trying to take away meaning, tell students it's all meaningless"--thus producing that "gnome" effect--simply isn't true. A small fraction of our humanities classes deal with literature produced in the second half of this century, much of which has come to be labeled "postmodern." The aim of these classes, like any others, is to give students a way of understanding and appreciating the material. Paglia's previous attacks on specific Harvard professors are particularly misdirected. Is anyone else willing to make the ridiculous claim that Porter University Professor Helen H. Vendler, who has devoted...
Paglia, however, is not alone in portraying postmodernism as a negative influence on educational scholarship, or as a virus that particularly attacks the educational elite. For this reason, it is useful to ask: What the heck does "postmodern" really mean...
...sense, the word gets tossed around quite frequently. The definition of a term that is useful for understanding literature has been bent out of shape, blown full of hot air and basically stretched to such a degree that it has ceased to have any meaning at all. The real postmodern dilemma isn't figuring out how to fight off some sort of vague monster that's threatening our ability to think, write and learn. It's figuring out what the word means in the first place and grappling with its significance. If, ultimately, the term ceases to mean anything...
What I like most about these definitions is that they give us a way of looking at some of the great works of art produced in the last 40 or 50 years, strange and tricky works by Pynchon, Nabokov, Beckett and many others. The danger of talking about postmodernism as something that robs us of meaning-as Paglia says humanities scholars are trying to do to us today-is that many of these so-called "postmodern" authors are profoundly moral, presenting some of the difficulties of making meaningful literature in our time...