Postmodernism is a range of conceptual frameworks and ideologies that are defined in opposition to those commonly associated with ideologies of modernity and modernist notions of knowledge and science, such as formalism, materialism, metaphysics, positivism, realism, reductionism, and structuralism. Postmodernism is not a philosophical movement, but rather a number of philosophical and critical methods. In other words, postmodernism is not a method of doing philosophy, but rather a way of approaching traditional ideas and practices in non-traditional ways that deviate from pre-established superstructural modes. This has caused difficulties in defining what postmodernism means and it therefore remains a controversial concept.

Postmodernism postulates that many, if not all, apparent realities are only social constructs and are therefore subject to change. It claims that there is no absolute truth and that the way people perceive the world is subjective and emphasises the role of language, power relations, and motivations in the formation of ideas and beliefs. In particular it attacks the use of sharp binary classifications such as male versus female, straight versus gay, white versus black, and imperial versus colonial; it holds realities to be plural and relative, and to be dependent on who the interested parties are and the nature of these interests. Postmodernist approaches therefore often consider the ways in which social dynamics, such as power and hierarchy, affect human conceptualizations of the world to have important effects on the way knowledge is constructed and used. In contrast to modernism, postmodernist thought often emphasizes constructivism, idealism, pluralism, relativism, and scepticism in its approaches to knowledge and understanding.

Postmodernism is generally considered to have been conceived during the late nineteenth century. Postmodernism gained significant popularity in the 1950s and dominated literature and art by the 1960s.^[1] Postmodernism has influenced many disciplines, including religion, literary criticism, sociology, linguistics, architecture, history, anthropology, visual arts, and music.

Definitional issues[link]

The term "Postmodernism" is often used to refer to different, sometimes contradictory concepts. Conventional definitions include:

• Compact Oxford English Dictionary: "a style and concept in the arts characterized by distrust of theories and ideologies and by the drawing of attention to conventions."^[2]
• Merriam-Webster: Either "of, relating to, or being an era after a modern one", or "of, relating to, or being any of various movements in reaction to modernism that are typically characterized by a return to traditional materials and forms (as in architecture) or by ironic self-reference and absurdity (as in literature)", or, finally "of, relating to, or being a theory that involves a radical reappraisal of modern assumptions about culture, identity, history, or language".^[3]
• American Heritage Dictionary: "Of or relating to art, architecture, or literature that reacts against earlier modernist principles, as by reintroducing traditional or classical elements of style or by carrying modernist styles or practices to extremes: 'It [a roadhouse] is so architecturally interesting ... with its postmodern wooden booths and sculptural clock.'"^[4]

While the term "Postmodern" and its derivatives are freely used, with some uses apparently contradicting others, those outside the academic milieu have described it as merely a buzzword that means nothing. Dick Hebdige, in his text ‘Hiding in the Light’, writes:

When it becomes possible for a people to describe as ‘postmodern’ the décor of a room, the design of a building, the diegesis of a film, the construction of a record, or a ‘scratch’ video, a television commercial, or an arts documentary, or the ‘intertextual’ relations between them, the layout of a page in a fashion magazine or critical journal, an anti-teleological tendency within epistemology, the attack on the ‘metaphysics of presence’, a general attenuation of feeling, the collective chagrin and morbid projections of a post-War generation of baby boomers confronting disillusioned middle-age, the ‘predicament’ of reflexivity, a group of rhetorical tropes, a proliferation of surfaces, a new phase in commodity fetishism, a fascination for images, codes and styles, a process of cultural, political or existential fragmentation and/or crisis, the ‘de-centring’ of the subject, an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’, the replacement of unitary power axes by a plurality of power/discourse formations, the ‘implosion of meaning’, the collapse of cultural hierarchies, the dread engendered by the threat of nuclear self-destruction, the decline of the university, the functioning and effects of the new miniaturised technologies, broad societal and economic shifts into a ‘media’, ‘consumer’ or ‘multinational’ phase, a sense (depending on who you read) of ‘placelessness’ or the abandonment of placelessness (‘critical regionalism’) or (even) a generalised substitution of spatial for temporal coordinates - when it becomes possible to describe all these things as ‘Postmodern’ (or more simply using a current abbreviation as ‘post’ or ‘very post’) then it’s clear we are in the presence of a buzzword.^[5]

British historian Perry Anderson's history of the term and its understanding, 'The Origins of Postmodernity', explains these apparent contradictions, and demonstrates the importance of "Postmodernism" as a category and a phenomenon in the analysis of contemporary culture.^[6]

In addition to the possible terms given, Kaya Yilmaz presents the idea that when studying this theory one must remember that there is not one definition, hence the multiple provided. The term itself does not allow it to own one specific definition, rather it contains specific attributes and characteristics that can be agreed upon. Yamaz also acknowledges the very important idea that this idea of postmodernism can and does alter depending on the location on the globe. There are three reasons behind the lack of concrete definition. One being that the disposition itself, is that the theory is “anti-essentialist and anti-foundationalist”. The idea of postmodernism in its entirety is not to be clearly defined or predictable. The second reason is that it is a theory that is contrasting and does not have a specific way of presenting or explaining itself. Finally, the theory is not even clearly defined by its inventors and researchers. Those scholars who first founded this ideal intentionally did not give it a clear, concrete diagnosis.^[7]

Theories and derivatives[link]

Deconstruction[link]

One of the most popular postmodernist tendencies within aesthetics is deconstruction. As it is currently used, "deconstruction" is a Derridean approach to textual analysis (typically literary critique, but variously applied). Deconstructions work entirely within the studied text to expose and undermine the frame of reference, assumptions, and ideological underpinnings of the text. Although deconstructions can be developed using different methods and techniques, the process typically involves demonstrating the multiple possible readings of a text and their resulting internal conflicts, and undermining binary oppositions (e.g. masculine/feminine, old/new). Deconstruction is fundamental to many different fields of postmodernist thought, including postcolonialism, as demonstrated through the writings of Gayatri Spivak.^{[citation needed]}

Structuralism and post-structuralism[link]

Structuralism was a broad philosophical movement that developed particularly in France in the 1950s, partly in response to French Existentialism, but is considered by many to be an exponent of High-Modernism,^{[by whom?]} though its categorization as either a Modernist or Postmodernist trend is contested. Many Structuralists later moved away from the most strict interpretations and applications of "structure", and are thus called "Post-structuralists" in the United States (the term is uncommon in Europe). Though many Post-structuralists were referred to as Postmodern in their lifetimes, many explicitly rejected the term. Notwithstanding, Post-structuralism in much American academic literature in the Humanities is very strongly associated with the broader and more nebulous movement of Postmodernism. Thinkers most typically linked with Structuralism include anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, the early writings of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the early writings of literary theorist Roland Barthes, and the semiotician Algirdas Greimas. Philosophers commonly referred to as Post-structuralists include Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze (all of whom began their careers within a Structuralist framework), Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-François Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and, sometimes, the American cultural theorists, critics and intellectuals they influenced (e.g. Judith Butler, Jonathan Crary, John Fiske, Rosalind Krauss, Hayden White).

Though by no means a unified movement with a set of shared axioms or methodologies, Post-structuralism emphasizes the ways in which different aspects of a cultural order, from its most banal material details to its most abstract theoretical exponents, determine one another (rather than espousing a series of strict, uni-directional, cause and effect relationships – see Reductionism – or resorting to Epiphenomenalism). Like Structuralism, it places particular focus on the determination of identities, values and economies in relation to one another, rather than assuming intrinsic properties or essences of signs or components as starting points.^[8] In this limited sense, there is a nascent Relativism and Constructionism within the French Structuralists that was consciously addressed by them but never examined to the point of dismantling their reductionist tendencies. Unlike Structuralists, however, the Post-structuralists questioned the division between relation and component and, correspondingly, did not attempt to reduce the subjects of their study to an essential set of relations that could be portrayed with abstract, functional schemes or mathematical symbols (as in Claude Lévi-Strauss's algebraic formulation of mythological transformation in "The Structural Study of Myth"^[9]).

Post-Structuralists tended to reject such formulations of “essential relations” in primitive cultures, languages or descriptions of psychological phenomena as subtle forms of Aristotelianism, Rationalism or Idealism, all philosophies they rejected. Another common trend among thinkers associated with the Post-Structural movement is the criticism of the absolutist, quasi-scientific claims of Structuralist theorists as more reflective of the mechanistic bias^[10] inspired by bureaucratization and industrialization than of the inner-workings of actual primitive cultures, languages or psyches. Generally, Post-structuralists emphasized the inter-determination and contingency of social and historical phenomena with each other and with the cultural values and biases of perspective. Such realities were not to be dissected, in the manner of some Structuralists, as a system of facts that could exist independently from values and paradigms (either those of the analysts or the subjects themselves), but to be understood as both causes and effects of each other.^[11] For this reason, most Post-structuralists held a more open-ended view of function within systems than did Structuralists and were sometimes accused of circularity and ambiguity. Post-structuralists countered that, when closely examined, all formalized claims describing phenomena, reality or truth, rely on some form or circular reasoning and self-referential logic that is often paradoxical in nature. Thus, it was important to uncover the hidden patterns of circularity, self-reference and paradox within a given set of statements rather that feign objectivity, as such an investigation might allow new perspectives to have influence and new practices to be sanctioned or adopted. In this latter respect, Post-structuralists were, as a group, continuing the philosophical project initiated by Martin Heidegger, who saw himself as extending the implications of Friedrich Nietzsche's work.

As would be expected, Post-structuralist writing tends to connect observations and references from many, widely varying disciplines into a synthetic view of knowledge and its relationship to experience, the body, society and economy - a synthesis in which it sees itself as participating. Structuralists, while also somewhat inter-disciplinary, were more comfortable within departmental boundaries and often maintained the autonomy of their analytical methods over the objects they analyzed. Post-structuralists, unlike Structuralists, did not privilege a system of (abstract) "relations" over the specifics to which such relations were applied, but tended to see the notion of “the relation” or of systemization itself as part-and-parcel of any stated conclusion rather than a reflection of reality as an independent, self-contained state or object. If anything, if a part of objective reality, theorization and systemization to Post-structuralists was an exponent of larger, more nebulous patterns of control in social orders – patterns that could not be encapsulated in theory without simultaneously conditioning it. For this reason, certain Post-structural thinkers were also criticized by more Realist, Naturalist or Essentialist thinkers of anti-intellectualism or anti-Philosophy. In short, Post-structuralists, unlike Structuralists, tended to place a great deal of skepticism on the independence of theoretical premises from collective bias and the influence of power, and rejected the notion of a "pure" or "scientific" methodology in social analysis, semiotics or philosophical speculation. No theory, they said – especially when concerning human society or psychology – was capable of reducing phenomena to elemental systems or abstract patterns, nor could abstract systems be dismissed as secondary derivatives of a fundamental nature: systemization, phenomena and values were part of each other.

While many of the so-called Post-structuralists vehemently disagreed on the specifics of such fundamental categories as "the real", "society", "totality", "desire" and "history", many also shared, in contrast to their so-called Structuralist predecessors, the traits mentioned. Furthermore, a good number of them engaged in a re-assessment (positive or negative) of the philosophical traditions associated with Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Because of its general skepticism of analytical objectivity and mutually exclusive oppositions in logic, its emphasis on the social production of knowledge and of knowledge paradigms, and its portrayal of the sometimes ambiguous inter-determination of material culture, values, physical practices and socio-economic life, Post-structuralism is often linked to Postmodernism.

Elements of Post-Modern Society[link]

Aside from the philosophy of post-Modernism is the emerging group within the world population who considers themself to be born into the Post-Modern Era. These world citizens can choose to model their activity from any documented stage of any period in history. Likewise, people are documenting their doings better than their parents ever could in the past. Therefore, the Post-Modern world is confounded with options. She, the post-Modernist, can choose her calling from any set of individual or collective identities. The overwhelming trait of the post-Modernist is the sense of fatalism, in that she must utilize the offerings of history and society. She fits in with a more classless and clanless culture than ever before.

Post-postmodernism[link]

Recently the notions of metamodernism, Post-postmodernism and the "death of postmodernism" have been increasingly widely debated: in 2007 Andrew Hoborek noted in his introduction to a special issue of the journal Twentieth Century Literature titled "After Postmodernism" that "declarations of postmodernism's demise have become a critical commonplace". A small group of critics has put forth a range of theories that aim to describe culture and/or society in the alleged aftermath of postmodernism, most notably Raoul Eshelman (performatism), Gilles Lipovetsky (hypermodernity), Nicolas Bourriaud (Altermodern), and Alan Kirby (digimodernism, formerly called pseudo-modernism). None of these new theories and labels have so far gained very widespread acceptance. The exhibition Postmodernism - Style and Subversion 1970-1990 at the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, 24 September 2011 - 15 January 2012) was billed as the first show ever to document postmodernism as a historical movement.

History[link]

The term "Postmodern" was first used around the 1870s. John Watkins Chapman suggested "a Postmodern style of painting" as a way to move beyond French Impressionism.^[12] J. M. Thompson, in his 1914 article in The Hibbert Journal (a quarterly philosophical review), used it to describe changes in attitudes and beliefs in the critique of religion: "The raison d'etre of Post-Modernism is to escape from the double-mindedness of Modernism by being thorough in its criticism by extending it to religion as well as theology, to Catholic feeling as well as to Catholic tradition."^[13]

In 1917, Rudolf Pannwitz used the term to describe a philosophically-oriented culture. His idea of post-modernism drew from Friedrich Nietzsche's analysis of modernity and its end results of decadence and nihilism. Pannwitz's post-human would be able to overcome these predicaments of the modern human. Contrary to Nietzsche, Pannwitz also included nationalist and mythical elements in his use of the term.^[14]

In 1921 and 1925, Postmodernism had been used to describe new forms of art and music. In 1942 H. R. Hays described it as a new literary form. However, as a general theory for a historical movement it was first used in 1939 by Arnold J. Toynbee: "Our own Post-Modern Age has been inaugurated by the general war of 1914-1918."^[15]

Portland Building, an example of Postmodern architecture

In 1949 the term was used to describe a dissatisfaction with modern architecture, and led to the postmodern architecture movement,^[16] perhaps also a response to the modernist architectural movement known as the International Style. Postmodernism in architecture is marked by the re-emergence of surface ornament, reference to surrounding buildings in urban architecture, historical reference in decorative forms, and non-orthogonal angles.

After that, Postmodernism was applied to a whole host of movements, many in art, music, and literature, that reacted against tendencies in the imperialist phase of capitalism called "modernism," and are typically marked by revival of historical elements and techniques.^[17] Walter Truett Anderson identifies Postmodernism as one of four typological world views. These four world views are the Postmodern-ironist, which sees truth as socially constructed; the scientific-rational, in which truth is found through methodical, disciplined inquiry; the social-traditional, in which truth is found in the heritage of American and Western civilization; and the neo-romantic, in which truth is found through attaining harmony with nature and/or spiritual exploration of the inner self.^[18]

Postmodernist ideas in philosophy and the analysis of culture and society expanded the importance of critical theory and has been the point of departure for works of literature, architecture, and design, as well as being visible in marketing/business and the interpretation of history, law and culture, starting in the late 20th century. These developments—re-evaluation of the entire Western value system (love, marriage, popular culture, shift from industrial to service economy) that took place since the 1950s and 1960s, with a peak in the Social Revolution of 1968—are described with the term Postmodernity, Influences on postmodern thought, Paul Lützeler (St. Louis) as opposed to Postmodernism, a term referring to an opinion or movement. Postmodernism has also be used interchangeably with the term post-structuralism out of which postmodernism grew, a proper understanding of postmodernism or doing justice to the postmodernist thought demands an understanding of the poststructuralist movement and the ideas of its advocates. Post-structuralism resulted similarly to postmodernism by following a time of structuralism. It is characterized by new ways of thinking through structuralism, contrary to the original form.^[19] "Postmodernist" describes part of a movement; "Postmodern" places it in the period of time since the 1950s, making it a part of contemporary history.

Influence on art[link]

Architecture[link]

Detail of the postmodern Abteiberg Museum in Germany.

The movement of Postmodernism began with architecture, as a response to the perceived blandness, hostility, and Utopianism of the Modern movement. Modern Architecture, as established and developed by people such as Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Philip Johnson, was focused on the pursuit of a perceived ideal perfection, and attempted harmony of form and function,^[20] and dismissal of "frivolous ornament."^[21][22] Critics of modernism argued that the attributes of perfection and minimalism themselves were subjective, and pointed out anachronisms in modern thought and questioned the benefits of its philosophy.^[23] Definitive postmodern architecture such as the work of Michael Graves and Robert Venturi reject the notion of a 'pure' form or 'perfect' architectonic detail, instead conspicuously drawing from all methods, materials, forms and colors available to architects.

Modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is associated with the phrase "less is more"; in contrast Venturi famously said, "Less is a bore." Postmodernist architecture was one of the first aesthetic movements to openly challenge Modernism as antiquated and "totalitarian", favoring personal preferences and variety over objective, ultimate truths or principles.

It is this atmosphere of criticism, skepticism, and emphasis on difference over and against unity that distinguishes the postmodernism aesthetic. Among writers defining the terms of this discourse is Charles Jencks, described by Architectural Design Magazine as "the definer of Post-Modernism for thirty years" and the "internationally acclaimed critic..., whose name became synonymous with Post-modernism in the 80s".^[24]

Urban Planning[link]

Postmodernism is a rejection of 'totality', of the notion that planning could be 'comprehensive', widely applied regardless of context, and rational. In this sense, Postmodernism is a rejection of its predecesor; Modernism. From the 1920s onwards, the Modern movement sought to design and plan cities which followed the logic of the new model of industrial mass production; reverting to large-scale solutions, aesthetic standardisation and prefabricated design solutions (Goodchild 1990). Postmodern also brought a break from the notion that planning and architecture could result in social reform, which was an integral dimension of the plans of Modernism (Simonsen 1990). Furthermore, Modernism eroded urban living by its failure to recognise differences and aim towards homogenous landscapes (Simonsen 1990, 57). Within Modernism, urban planning represented a 20th Century move towards establishing something stable, structured, and rationalised within what had become a world of chaos, flux and change (Irving 1993, 475). The role of planners predating Postmodernism was one of the 'qualified professional' who believed they could find and implement one single 'right way' of planning new urban establishments (Irving 1993). In fact, after 1945, urban planning became one of the methods through which capitalism could be managed and the interests of developers and corporations could be administered (Irving 1993, 479). Considering Modernism inclined urban planning to treat buildings and developments as isolated, unrelated parts of the overall urban ecosystems created fragmented, isolated, and homogeous urban landscapes (Goodchild, 1990). One of the greater problems with Modernist-style of planning was the disregard of resident or public opinion, which resulted in planning being forced upon the majority by a minority consisting of affluent professionals with little to no knowledge of real 'urban' problems characteristic of post-Second World War urban environments; slums, overcrowding, deteriorated infrastructure, pollution and disease, among others (Irving 1993). These were precisely the 'urban ills' Modernism was meant to 'solve', but more often than not, the types of 'comprehensive', 'one size fits all' approaches to planning made things worse., and residents began to show interest in becoming involved in decisions which had once been solely entrusted to professionals of the built environment. Advocacy planning and participatory models of planning emerged in the 1960s to counter these traditional elitist and technocratic approaches to urban planning (Irving 1993; Hatuka & D'Hooghe 2007). Furthermore, an assessment of the 'ills' of Modernism among planners during the 1960s, fuelled development of a participatory model that aimed to expand the range of participants in urban interventions (Hatuka & D'Hooghe 2007, 21). Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities published in 1961 was a sustained critique of urban planning as it had developed within Modernism and marked a transition from modernity to postmodernity in thinking about urban planning (Irving 1993, 479). However, the transition from Modernism to Postmodernism is often said to have happened at 3:32pm on the 15th of July in 1972, when Pruitt Igoe; a housing development for low-income people in St. Louis, which had been a prize winning version of le Corbusier's 'machine for modern living' was deemed uninhabitable and was torn down (Irving 1993, 480). Since then, Postmodernism has involved theories that embrace and aim to create diversity, and it exhaults uncertainty, flexibility and change (Hatuka & D'Hooghe 2007). Postmodern planning aims to accept pluralism and heighten awareness of social differences in order to accept and bring to light the claims of minority and disadvantaged groups (Goodchild 1990). It is important to note that urban planning discourse within Modernity and Postmodernity has developed in different contexts, even though they both grew within a capitalist culture. Modernity was shaped by a capitalist ethic of Fordist-Keynesian paradigm of mass, standardised production and consumption, while Postmodernity was created out of a more flexible form of capital accumulation, labor markets and organisations (Irving 1993, 60). Also, there is a distinction between a postmodernism of 'reaction' and one of 'resistance'. A postmodernism of 'reaction' rejects Modernism and seeks to return to the lost traditions and history in order to create a new cultural synthesis, while Postmodernity of 'resistance' seeks to deconstruct Modernism and is a critique of the origins without necessarily returning to them (Irving 1993, 60). As a result of Postmodernism, planners are much less inclined to lay a firm or steady claim to there being one single 'right way' of engaging in urban planning and are more open to different styles and ideas of 'how to plan' (Irving 474).

References (Urban Planning section)[link]

Goodchild, B 1990, 'Planning and the Modern'Postmodern Debate', in The Town Planning Review, vol. 61, no. 2, pp. 119-137. Hatuka, T & D'Hooghe, A 2007, 'After Postmodernism: readdressing the Role of Utopia in Urban Design and Planning', in Places: Forum of Design for the Public Realm, vol. 19, Issue 2, pp. 20-27/ Irving, A 1993, 'The Modern/Postmodern Divide and Urban Planning', in The University of Toronto Quareterly, vol. 62, no. 4, pp. 474-487. Simonsen, K 1990, 'Planning on 'Postmodern' Conditions', in Acta Sociologica, vol. 33, no. 1, pp. 51-62.

Literature[link]

Orhan Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Literary postmodernism was officially inaugurated in the United States with the first issue of boundary 2, subtitled "Journal of Postmodern Literature and Culture", which appeared in 1972. David Antin, Charles Olson, John Cage, and the Black Mountain College school of poetry and the arts were integral figures in the intellectual and artistic exposition of postmodernism at the time.^[25] boundary 2 remains an influential journal in postmodernist circles today.^[26]

Jorge Luis Borges's (1939) short story Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, is often considered as predicting postmodernism^[27] and conceiving the ideal of the ultimate parody.^[28] Samuel Beckett is also sometimes seen as an important precursor and influences. Novelists who are commonly counted to postmodern literature include Vladimir Nabokov, William Gaddis, John Hawkes, William Burroughs, Giannina Braschi, Kurt Vonnegut, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, E.L. Doctorow, Jerzy Kosinski, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Kathy Acker, Ana Lydia Vega, and Paul Auster.

In 1971, the Arab-American scholar Ihab Hassan published The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature, an early work of literary criticism from a postmodern perspective, in which the author traces the development of what he calls "literature of silence" through Marquis de Sade, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Beckett, and many others, including developments such as the Theatre of the Absurd and the nouveau roman. In 'Postmodernist Fiction' (1987), Brian McHale details the shift from modernism to postmodernism, arguing that the former is characterized by an epistemological dominant, and that postmodern works have developed out of modernism and are primarily concerned with questions of ontology. In Constructing Postmodernism (1992), McHale's second book, he provides readings of postmodern fiction and of some of the contemporary writers who go under the label of cyberpunk. McHale's "What Was Postmodernism?" (2007)[1], follows Raymond Federman's lead in now using the past tense when discussing postmodernism.

Music[link]

Composer Henryk Górecki.

Postmodern music is either music of the postmodern era, or music that follows aesthetic and philosophical trends of postmodernism. As the name suggests, the postmodernist movement formed partly in reaction to the ideals of the modernist. Because of this, Postmodern music is mostly defined in opposition to modernist music, and a work can either be modernist, or postmodern, but not both. Jonathan Kramer posits the idea (following Umberto Eco and Jean-François Lyotard) that postmodernism (including musical postmodernism) is less a surface style or historical period (i.e., condition) than an attitude.

The postmodern impulse in classical music arose in the 1960s with the advent of musical minimalism. Composers such as Terry Riley, Krzysztof Penderecki, György Ligeti, Henryk Górecki, Bradley Joseph, John Adams, George Crumb, Steve Reich, Phillip Glass, Michael Nyman, and Lou Harrison reacted to the perceived elitism and dissonant sound of atonal academic modernism by producing music with simple textures and relatively consonant harmonies, whilst others, most notably John Cage challenged the prevailing Narratives of beauty and objectivity common to Modernism. Some composers have been openly influenced by popular music and world ethnic musical traditions.

Postmodern Classical music as well is not a musical style, but rather refers to music of the postmodern era. It bears the same relationship to postmodernist music that postmodernity bears to postmodernism. Postmodern music, on the other hand, shares characteristics with postmodernist art—that is, art that comes after and reacts against modernism (see Modernism in Music).

Though representing a general return to certain notions of music-making that are often considered to be classical or romantic^{[citation needed]}, not all postmodern composers have eschewed the experimentalist or academic tenets of modernism. The works of Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, for example, exhibit experimentalist preoccupation that is decidedly anti-romantic. Eclecticism and freedom of expression, in reaction to the rigidity and aesthetic limitations of modernism, are the hallmarks of the postmodern influence in musical composition.

Influential postmodernist philosophers[link]

Douglas Kellner (born 1943)

In "Analysis of the Journey," a journal birthed from postmodernism, Kellner insists that the "assumptions and procedures of modern theory" must be forgotten. His terms defined in the depth of postmodernism is based off of advancement, innovation, and adaptation. Extensively, Kellner analyzes the terms of this theory in real life experiences and examples. Kellner used science and technology studies as a major part of his analysis; he urged that the theory is incomplete without it. The scale was larger than just postmodernism alone, it must be interpreted through cultural studies where science and technology studies play a huge role. The reality of the September Eleventh attacks on the United States of America is the catalyst for his explanation. This catalyst is used as a great representation due to the mere fact of the planned ambush and destruction of "symbols of globalization", insinuating the World Trade Centers. One of the numerous, yet appropriate definitions of postmodernism and the qualm aspect aids this attribute to seem perfectly accurate. In response, Kellner continues to examine the repercussions of understanding the affects of the September Eleventh attacks. He questions if the attacks are only able to be understood in a limited form of postmodern theory due to the level of irony. ^[29] In further studies, he enhances the idea of semiotics in alignment with the theory. Similar to the act of September Eleventh and the symbols that were interpreted through this postmodern ideal, he continues to even describe this as "semiotic systems" that people use to make sense of their lives and the events that occur in them. Kellner's adamancy that signs are necessary to understand one's culture is what he analyzes from the evidence that most cultures have used signs in place of existence. Finally, he recognizes that many theorists of postmodernism are trapped by their own cogitations. He finds strength in theorist Baudrillard and his idea of Marxism. Kellner cannot deny Marxism's end and lack of importance to his theory.

The conclusion he depicts is simple: postmodernism, as most utilize it today, will decide what experiences and signs in one's reality will be one's reality as they know it.^[30]

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)

Rejected the philosophical basis of the concepts of "subjectivity" and "objectivity" and asserted that similar grounding oppositions in logic ultimately refer to one another. Instead of resisting the admission of this paradox in the search for understanding, Heidegger requires that we embrace it through an active process of elucidation he called the "Hermeneutic Circle". He stressed the historicity and cultural construction of concepts while simultaneously advocating the necessity of an atemporal and immanent apprehension of them. In this vein, he asserted that it was the task of contemporary philosophy to recover the original question of (or "openness to") Dasein (translated as Being or Being-in-the-World) present in the Presocratic philosophers but normalized, neutered and standardized since Plato. This was to be done, in part, by tracing the record of Dasein's sublimation or forgetfulness through the history of philosophy which meant that we were to ask again what constituted the grounding conditions in ourselves and in the World for the affinity between beings and between the many usages of the term "being" in philosophy. To do this, however, a non-historical and, to a degree, self-referential engagement with whatever set of ideas, feelings or practices would permit (both the non-fixed concept and reality of) such a continuity was required - a continuity permitting the possible experience, possible existence indeed not only of beings but of all differences as they appeared and tended to develop. Such a conclusion led Heidegger to depart from the Phenomenology of his teacher Husserl and prompt instead an (ironically anachronistic) return to the yet-unasked questions of Ontology, a return that in general did not acknowledge an intrinsic distinction between phenomena and noumena or between things in themselves (de re) and things as they appear (see qualia): Being-in-the-world, or rather, the openness to the process of Dasein's/Being's becoming was to bridge the age-old gap between these two. In this latter premise, Heidegger shares an affinity with the late Romantic philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, another principal forerunner of Post-structuralist and Postmodernist thought. Influential to thinkers associated with Postmodernism are Heidegger's critique of the subject-object or sense-knowledge division implicit in Rationalism, Empiricism and Methodological Naturalism, his repudiation of the idea that facts exist outside or separately from the process of thinking and speaking them (however, Heidegger is not specifically a Nominalist), his related admission that the possibilities of philosophical and scientific discourse are wrapped up in the practices and expectations of a society and that concepts and fundamental constructs are the expression of a lived, historical exercise rather than simple derivations of external, apriori conditions independent from historical mind and changing experience (see Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Heinrich von Kleist, Weltanschauung and Social Constructionism), and his Instrumentalist and Negativist notion that Being (and, by extension, reality) is an action, method, tendency, possibility and question rather than a discreet, positive, identifiable state, answer or entity (see also Process Philosophy, Dynamism, Instrumentalism, Pragmatism and Vitalism).

Thomas Samuel Kuhn (1922–1996)

Argued that there was a rapid change of the basis of scientific knowledge to a provisional consensus among scientists; coined the term "paradigm shift" in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and in general contributed to the debate over the presumed neutrality and objectivity of empirical methodology in the Natural Sciences from disciplinarian or cultural bias.

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004)

Re-examined the fundamentals of writing and its consequences on philosophy in general; sought to undermine the language of 'presence' or metaphysics in an analytical technique which, beginning as a point of departure from Heidegger's notion of Destruktion, came to be known as Deconstruction. Derrida utilized, like Heidegger, references to Greek philosophical notions associated with the Skeptics and the Presocratics, such as Epoché and Aporia to articulate his notion of implicit circularity between premises and conclusions, origins and manifestations, but - in a manner analogous in certain respects to Gilles Deleuze - presented a radical re-reading of canonical philosophical figures such as Plato, Aristotle and Descartes as themselves being informed by such "destabilizing" notions.

Michel Foucault (1926–1984)

Introduced concepts such as 'discursive regime', or re-invoked those of older philosophers like 'episteme' and 'genealogy' in order to explain the relationship among meaning, power, and social behavior within social orders (see The Order of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality). In direct contradiction to what have been typified as Modernist perspectives on epistemology, Foucault asserted that rational judgment, social practice and what he called 'biopower' are not only inseparable but co-determinant. While Foucault himself was deeply involved in a number of progressive political causes and maintained close personal ties with members of the far-Left, he was also controversial with Leftist thinkers of his day, including those associated with various strains of Marxism, proponents of Left libertarianism (e.g. Noam Chomsky) and Humanism (e.g. Jürgen Habermas), for his rejection of what he deemed to be Enlightenment-derived concepts of freedom, liberation, self-determination and human nature. Instead, Foucault focused on the ways in which such constructs can foster cultural hegemony, violence and exclusion. In line with his rejection of such 'positive' tenets of Enlightenment-era Humanism, he was active, with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in the Anti-Psychiatry Movement, considering much of institutionalized psychiatry and, in particular, Freud's concept of repression central to Psychoanalysis (which was still very influential in France during the 1960s and 70s), to be both harmful and misplaced. Foucault was known for his controversial aphorisms, such as "language is oppression", meaning that language functions in such a way as to render nonsensical, false or silent tendencies that might otherwise threaten or undermine the distributions of power backing a society's conventions - even when such distributions purport to celebrate liberation and expression or value minority groups and perspectives. His writings have had a major influence on the larger body of Postmodern academic literature.

Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998)

Identified in The Postmodern Condition a crisis in the 'discourses of the Human Sciences' latent in Modernism but catapulted to the fore by the advent of the "computerized" or "telematic" era (see Information Revolution). This crisis, insofar as it pertains to academia, concerns both the motivations and justification procedures for making research claims: unstated givens or values that have validated the basic efforts of academic research since the late 18th Century might no longer be valid (particularly, in Social Science & Humanities research, though examples from Mathematics are given by Lyotard as well). As formal conjecture about real-world issues becomes inextricably linked to automated calculation, information storage and retrieval, such knowledge becomes increasingly "exteriorised" from its knowers in the form of information. Knowledge is materialized and made into a commodity exchanged between producers and consumers; it ceases to be either an idealistic end-in-itself or a tool capable of bringing about liberty or social benefit; it is stripped of its humanistic and spiritual associations, its connection with education, teaching and human development, being simply rendered as "data" - omnipresent, material, unending and without any contexts or pre-requisites.^[31] Furthermore, the 'diversity' of claims made by various disciplines begins to lack any unifying principle or intuition as objects of study become more and more specialized due to the emphasis on specificity, precision and uniformity of reference that competitive, database-oriented research implies. The value-premises upholding academic research have been maintained by what Lyotard considers to be quasi-mythological beliefs about human purpose, human reason and human progress - large, background constructs he calls "Metanarratives". These Metanarratives still remain in Western society but are now being undermined by rapid Informatization and the commercialization of the University and its functions. The shift of authority from the presence and intuition of knowers - from the good-faith of Reason to seek diverse knowledge integrated for human benefit or truth fidelity - to the automated database and the market had, in Lyotard's view, the power to unravel the very idea of 'justification' or 'legitimation' and, with it, the rationale for research altogether - esp. in disciplines pertaining to human life, society and meaning. We are now controlled not by binding extra-linguistic value paradigms defining notions of collective identity and ultimate purpose, but rather by our automatic responses to different species of "language games" (a concept Lyotard imports from JL Austin's theory of Speech Acts). In his vision of a solution to this "vertigo," Lyotard opposes the assumptions of universality, consensus, and generality that he identified within the thought of Humanistic, Neo-Kantian philosophers like Jürgen Habermas and proposes a continuation of experimentation and diversity to be assessed pragmatically in the context of language games rather than via appeal to a resurrected series of transcendentals and metaphysical unities.

Richard Rorty (1931–2007)

Argues in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature that contemporary Analytic philosophy mistakenly imitates scientific methods. In addition, he denounces the traditional epistemological perspectives of Representationalism and Correspondence theory that rely upon the independence of knowers and observers from phenomena and the passivity of natural phenomena in relation to consciousness. As a proponent of anti-foundationalism and anti-essentialism within a Pragmatist framework, he echoes Postmodern strains of Conventionalism and Philosophical Relativism, but opposes much Postmodern thinking with his commitment to Social Liberalism.

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007),

In Simulacra and Simulation, introduced the concept that reality or the principle of the "real" is short-circuited by the interchangeability of signs in an era whose communicative and semantic acts are dominated by electronic media and digital technologies. Baudrillard proposes the notion that, in such a state, where subjects are detached from the outcomes of events (political, literary, artistic, personal, or otherwise), events no longer hold any particular sway on the subject nor have any identifiable context; they therefore have the effect of producing widespread indifference, detachment, and passivity in industrialized populations. He claimed that a constant stream of appearances and references without any direct consequences to viewers or readers could eventually render the division between appearance and object indiscernible, resulting, ironically, in the "disappearance" of mankind in what is, in effect, a virtual or holographic state, composed only of appearances.

Fredric Jameson (born 1934)

set forth one of the first expansive theoretical treatments of Postmodernism as a historical period, intellectual trend and social phenomenon in a series of lectures at the Whitney Museum, later expanded as Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). Eclectic in his methodology, Jameson has continued a sustained examination of the role that Periodization continues to play as a grounding assumption of critical methodologies in Humanities disciplines. He has contributed extensive effort to explicating the importance of concepts of Utopianism and Utopia as driving forces in the cultural and intellectual movements of Modernity, and outlining the political and existential uncertainties that may result from the decline or suspension of this trend in the theorized state of Postmodernity. Like Susan Sontag, Jameson served to introduce a wide audience of American readers to key figures of the 20th Century Continental European intellectual Left, particularly those associated with the Frankfurt School, Structuralism and Post-Structuralism. Thus, his importance as a 'translator' of their ideas to the common vocabularies of a variety of disciplines in the Anglo-American academic complex is equally as important as his own critical engagement with them.

Criticisms[link]

Criticisms of postmodernism are intellectually diverse, including the assertions that postmodernism is meaningless and promotes obscurantism.^[32]

See also[link]

Theory

• Transmodernism
• Critical race theory
• Hypermodernity
• Media studies
• Post scarcity
• Recursionism
• Integral Theory

Culture and politics

• Decentralization
• Defamiliarization
• Remodernism
• Syncretism
• Sokal Affair

Law

• Critical legal studies

Philosophy

• Ontological pluralism
• Physical ontology
• Postmaterialism

Politics

• Post-realism

Psychology

• Postmodern psychology

Religion

• Postmodern Religion

Opposed by

• Altermodern
• Remodernism
• Remodernist film
• Stuckism

References[link]

Further reading[link]

External links[link]

Look up postmodernism in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Postmodernism

• “Love and Hatred of ‘French Theory’ in America., Borderlands e journal. Rolando Pérez. 4.1.2005.
• WSWS philosophy archives – incl. critiques of postmodernist thought
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on postmodernism
• The Christian Cadre's Postmodernism Page
• Discourses of Postmodernism. Multilingual Bibliography by Janusz Przychodzen (PDF file)
• Modernity, postmodernism and the tradition of dissent, by Lloyd Spencer (1998)
• Dueling Paradigms: Modernist v. Postmodernist Thought * Characterizing a Fogbank: What Is Postmodernism, and Why Do I Take Such a Dim View of it?
• Postmodernism and truth by philosopher Daniel Dennett
• Postmodernism is the new black: How the shape of modern retailing was both predicted and influenced by some unlikely seers (The Economist December 19, 2006)
• Gaining clarity: after postmodernism, Eretz Acheret Magazine
• Postmodernism, Style and Subversion 1970 to 1990 V&A survey exhibition on Postmodern art and design
• Would the last postmodernist please turn out the lights?, Irish Times, 29/1/12

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Umberto Eco

Born	(1932-01-05) 5 January 1932 (age 80) Alessandria, Piedmont, Italy
Era	20th / 21st-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Semiotics
Notable ideas	The "open work" ("opera aperta")
Influenced by James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, Charles Sanders Peirce, Immanuel Kant, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Theodor W. Adorno, Antonio Gramsci, Jean Piaget, Franz Kafka, Charles Baudelaire, Luigi Pareyson, Benedetto Croce, Arthur Conan Doyle
Signature

Umberto Eco Knight Grand Cross (born 5 January 1932) is an Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist. He is best known for his groundbreaking 1980 novel Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose), an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory. He has since written further novels, including Il pendolo di Foucault (Foucault's Pendulum) and L'isola del giorno prima (The Island of the Day Before). His most recent novel Il cimitero di Praga (The Prague Cemetery), released in 2010, was a best-seller.

Eco has also written academic texts, children's books and many essays. He is founder of the Dipartimento di Comunicazione at the University of San Marino, President of the Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici, University of Bologna, member of the Accademia dei Lincei (since November 2010) and an Honorary Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford.

Biography[link]

Eco was born in the city of Alessandria in the region of Piedmont in northern Italy. His father, Giulio, was an accountant before the government called upon him to serve in three wars. During World War II, Umberto and his mother, Giovanna, moved to a small village in the Piedmontese mountainside. Eco received a Salesian education, and he has made references to the order and its founder in his works and interviews.^[1] His family name is supposedly an acronym of ex caelis oblatus (Latin: a gift from the heavens), which was given to his grandfather (a foundling) by a city official.^[2]

His father was the son of a family with thirteen children, and urged Umberto to become a lawyer, but he entered the University of Turin in order to take up medieval philosophy and literature, writing his thesis on Thomas Aquinas and earning his Laurea in philosophy in 1954. During his university studies, Eco stopped believing in God and left the Roman Catholic Church.^[3][4] After this, Eco worked as a cultural editor for the state broadcasting station Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI) and also lectured at the University of Turin (1956–1964). A group of avant-garde artists, painters, musicians, writers, whom he had befriended at RAI (Gruppo 63), became an important and influential component in Eco's future writing career. This was especially true after the publication of his first book in 1956, Il problema estetico in San Tommaso, which was an extension of his doctoral thesis. This also marked the beginning of his lecturing career at his alma mater.

In September 1962, he married Renate Ramge, a German art teacher with whom he has a son and a daughter. He divides his time between an apartment in Milan and a vacation house near Urbino. He has a 30,000 volume library in the former and a 20,000 volume library in the latter.^[5] In 1992–1993 Eco was the Norton professor at Harvard University. On May 23, 2002, Eco received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Eco is a member of the Italian skeptic organization CICAP.^[6]

Works[link]

Studies on medieval aesthetics[link]

In 1959, he published his second book, Sviluppo dell'estetica medievale (The Development of Medieval Aesthetics), which established Eco as a formidable thinker in medieval philosophy and proved his literary worth to his father. After 18 months' military service in the Italian Army, he left RAI in 1959 to become the senior non-fiction editor of the Bompiani publishing house in Milan, a position he occupied until 1975. Eco's work on medieval aesthetics stressed the distinction between theory and practice.^{[citation needed]} About the Middle Ages, he wrote that there was "a geometrically rational schema of what beauty ought to be, and on the other [hand] the unmediated life of art with its dialectic of forms and intentions", the two cut off from one another as if by a pane of glass. Eco's work in literary theory has changed focus over time. Initially, he was one of the pioneers of "Reader Response".^{[citation needed]}

Literary criticism[link]

During these years,^[which?] Eco began seriously developing his ideas on the "open" text and on semiotics, writing many essays on these subjects, and in 1962 he published Opera aperta (translated into English as "The Open Work"). In it, Eco argued that literary texts are fields of meaning, rather than strings of meaning, that they are understood as open, internally dynamic and psychologically engaged fields. Literature which limits one's potential understanding to a single, unequivocal line, the closed text, remains the least rewarding, while texts that are the most active between mind and society and life (open texts) are the most lively and best—although valuation terminology is not his primary area of focus. Eco emphasizes the fact that words do not have meanings that are simply lexical, but rather, they operate in the context of utterance.^{[citation needed]} I. A. Richards and others said as much, but Eco draws out the implications for literature from this idea.^{[citation needed]} He also extended the axis of meaning from the continually deferred meanings of words in an utterance to a play between expectation and fulfilment of meaning.^{[citation needed]} Eco comes to these positions through study of language and from semiotics, rather than from psychology or historical analysis (as did theorists such as Wolfgang Iser, on the one hand, and Hans-Robert Jauss, on the other).

Studies on mass media and mass culture[link]

From the late '50s till the late '60s, before his semiotic turn, Eco engaged in studies on mass media and mass culture, which were published in various newspapers and journals.^[7] According to some^[who?] these studies were influential although he did not develop a full-scale theory in this field.^{[citation needed]}

His short 1961 essay Fenomenologia di Mike Bongiorno (Phenomenology of Mike Bongiorno, on the most popular quiz show host, Mike Bongiorno), received much notoriety among the general public, and has drawn endless questions by journalists in every public appearance by Eco; it was later included in the collection Diario minimo (1963). His book Apocalittici e integrati (1964) analyzes the phenomenon of mass communication from a sociological perspective.

In 1967 he gave the influential lecture Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare,^[8] which coined the influential term "semiological guerrilla," and influenced the theorization of guerrilla tactics against mainstream mass media culture, such as guerrilla television and culture jamming.^{[citation needed]} Among the expressions used in the essay, are "communications guerrilla warfare" and "cultural guerrilla."^[9][10] The essay was later included in Eco's book Faith in Fakes.

Semiotics[link]

Eco co-founded Versus: Quaderni di studi semiotici (known as VS among Italian academics), an influential semiotic journal. VS has become an important publication platform for many scholars whose work is related to signs and signification. The journal's foundation and activities have contributed to the growing influence of semiotics as an academic field in its own right, both in Italy and in the rest of Europe. Most of the well-known European semioticians, among them Eco, A.J. Greimas, Jean-Marie Floch, Paolo Fabbri, Jacques Fontanille, Claude Zilberberg, Ugo Volli and Patrizia Violi, have published original articles in VS. Articles by younger, less famous scholars dealing with new research perspectives in semiotics also find place in almost every issue of VS.

Action in anthropology[link]

Eco receiving the honoris causa degree in architecture at the University of Reggio Calabria from rector Alessandro Bianchi

In 1988, at the University of Bologna, Eco created an unusual program called Anthropology of the West from the perspective of non-Westerners (African and Chinese scholars), as defined by their own criteria. Eco developed this transcultural international network based on the idea of Alain Le Pichon in West Africa. The Bologna program resulted in a first conference in Guangzhou, China, in 1991 entitled "Frontiers of Knowledge." The first event was soon followed by an Itinerant Euro-Chinese seminar on "Misunderstandings in the Quest for the Universal" along the silk trade route from Canton to Beijing. The latter culminated in a book entitled The Unicorn and the Dragon, which discussed the question of the creation of knowledge in China and in Europe. Scholars contributing to this volume were from China, including Tang Yijie, Wang Bin and Yue Dayun, as well as from Europe: (Furio Colombo, Antoine Danchin, Jacques Le Goff, Paolo Fabbri, Alain Rey)^[11]

In 2000 a seminar in Timbuktu (Mali), was followed by another gathering in Bologna to reflect on the conditions of reciprocal knowledge between East and West. This in turn gave rise to a series of conferences in Brussels, Paris, and Goa, culminating in Beijing in 2007. The topics of the Beijing conference were "Order and Disorder","New Concepts of War and Peace", "Human Rights" and "Social Justice and Harmony". Eco presented the opening lecture. The following anthropologists gave presentations: from India (Balveer Arora, Varun Sahni, Rukmini Bhaya Nair); from Africa (Moussa Sow); from Europe (Roland Marti, Maurice Olender); from Korea (Cha Insuk); from China (Huang Ping, Zhao Tinyang). Also on the program were scholars from the domains of law or science: (Antoine Danchin, Ahmed Djebbar, Dieter Grimm).^[12] Eco's interest in East/West dialogue to facilitate international communication and understanding also correlates with his related interest in the international auxiliary language Esperanto.

Novels[link]

Eco's fiction has enjoyed a wide audience around the world, with many translations. His novels are full of subtle, often multilingual, references to literature and history and his dense, intricate plots tend to take dizzying turns. Eco's work illustrates the concept of intertextuality, or the inter-connectedness of all literary works. Eco cites James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges as the two modern authors who have influenced his work the most.^[13]

Eco employed his education as a medievalist in his first novel The Name of the Rose (1980), a historical mystery set in a 14th century monastery. Franciscan friar William of Baskerville, aided by his assistant Adso, a Benedictine novice, investigates a series of murders at a monastery that is to host an important religious debate. The novel contains many direct or indirect metatextual references to other sources, requiring the detective work of the reader to 'solve'. The title is unexplained in the book. As a symbol, the rose is ubiquitous enough to not confer any single meaning.^[14] There is a tribute to Jorge Luis Borges, a major influence on Eco, in the blind monk and librarian Jorge of Burgos: Borges, like Jorge, lived a celibate life consecrated to his passion for books, and also went blind in later life. William of Baskerville is a logically-minded Englishman who is a monk and a detective, and his name evokes both William of Ockham and Sherlock Holmes (by way of The Hound of the Baskervilles). Several passages describing him are strongly reminiscent of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's description of Sherlock Holmes^[15][16] . The underlying mystery of the murder is borrowed from the "Arabian Nights". The Name of the Rose was later made into a motion picture starring Sean Connery, F. Murray Abraham, Christian Slater and Ron Perlman which employs the plot rather than the philosophical and historical themes from the novel.

In Foucault's Pendulum (1988), three under-employed editors who work for a minor publishing house decide to amuse themselves by inventing a conspiracy theory. Their conspiracy, which they call "The Plan", is about an immense and intricate plot to take over the world by a secret order descended from the Knights Templar. As the game goes on, the three slowly become obsessed with the details of this plan. The game turns dangerous when outsiders learn of The Plan, and believe that the men have really discovered the secret to regaining the lost treasure of the Templars.

The Island of the Day Before (1994) was Eco's third novel. The book, set in the seventeenth century, is about a man marooned on a ship within sight of an island which he believes is on the other side of the international date-line. The main character is trapped by his inability to swim and instead spends the bulk of the book reminiscing on his life and the adventures that brought him to be marooned.

Baudolino was published in 2000. Baudolino is a knight who saves the Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates during the sack of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade. Claiming to be an accomplished liar, he confides his history, from his childhood as a peasant lad endowed with a vivid imagination, through his role as adopted son of Emperor Frederic Barbarossa, to his mission to visit the mythical realm of Prester John. Throughout his retelling, Baudolino brags of his ability to swindle and tell tall tales, leaving the historian (and the reader) unsure of just how much of his story was a lie.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2005) is about Giambattista Bodoni, an old bookseller specializing in antiques who emerges from a coma with only some memories to recover his past.

The Prague Cemetery, Eco's 6th novel, was published in 2010. It is the story of a secret agent who "weaves plots, conspiracies, intrigues and attacks, and helps determine the historical and political fate of the European Continent." The book is a narrative of the rise of Modern-day antisemitism, by way of the Dreyfus Affair, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other important 19th century events which gave rise to hatred and hostility toward the Jewish people.

Selected bibliography[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Umberto Eco

• Official Website from the Scuola superiore di studi umanistici
• Porta Ludovica: An extensive Umberto Eco resource.
• Umberto Eco Wiki - wiki annotation guide to Eco's works
• Lila Azam Zanganeh (Summer 2008). "Umberto Eco, The Art of Fiction No. 197". Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5856/the-art-of-fiction-no-197-umberto-eco. 
• Website on Umberto Eco
• Audio: Eco talk at UC Berkeley (1982): "From Aristotle to Sherlock Holmes" (online audio recording)
• "We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die" interview by Susanne Beyer and Lothar Gorris.

v t e Works of Umberto Eco Novels The Name of the Rose Foucault's Pendulum The Island of the Day Before Baudolino The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana The Prague Cemetery Non-fiction The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages The Open Work Misreadings Apocalypse Postponed The Middle Ages of James Joyce The Absent Structure Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality A Theory of Semiotics Il Superuomo di massa Dalla periferia dell'impero Lector in fabula The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts Sette anni di desiderio Postscript to The Name of the Rose Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language De Bibliotheca The Limits of Interpretation Interpretation and Overinterpretation The Search for the Perfect Language Six Walks in the Fictional Woods Incontro - Encounter - Rencontre Belief or Nonbelief?: A Dialogue Five Moral Pieces Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition Serendipities: Language and Lunacy How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays Experiences in Translation On Literature Mouse or Rat?: Translation as negotiation Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism On Beauty/History of Beauty On Ugliness Dall'albero al labirinto: studi storici sul segno e l'interpretazione The Infinity of Lists Confessions of a Young Novelist Manual Come si fa una tesi di laurea Books for children The Bomb and the General The Three Astronauts The Gnomes of Gnu