THEORIES OF THE POSTMODERN PART ONE Texts and Textuality The phenomenon that would be known by the 1980s as Postmodern theory or “theory” consisted of servings of a French Potée from the 1950s and 1960s, full of different ingredients, a stew of linguistic...
THEORIES OF THE POSTMODERN From Mauss to Lévi-Strauss to Lacan, the Signifier Floated The search for origins are always futile but the process often turns up interesting moments in time. For example, when did Postmodernism begin? The answer depends upon the place one...
ROLAND BARTHES PART THREE Towards Structuralism The goal of all structuralist activity, whether reflexive or poetic, is to reconstruct an object so as to manifest the rules of its functioning. In 1980, Edith Kurzweil published a still-indespensible book, The Age of...
ROLAND BARTHES (1914 – 1980) PART ONE Writing Degree Zero (1953) One of the most interesting facts of the life of Roland Barthes was that he was struck by a laundry van and, after lingering for a month, died of his injuries. “The Painter of Modern...
COMPARING MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM The comparison of these two time periods was an inevitable result of the desire of Postmodern theorists to critique Modernist theory. But comparison was an early impulse trapped in the very polarities of Modernism that...
