ABSTRACT
The very use of the term postmodern in application to so many aspects of the contemporary experience and life, as well as the ease with which we have come to accept as blandly descriptive a term that initially sounds oxymoronic, suggests that we are at a point in cultural development that can only be viewed as a major watershed. Across the arts, humanities, and human sciences, one detects a sense of intellectual crisis: in particular, a crisis of paradigms (Lyotard 1984). Indeed, the very term postmodern appears to be descriptive of broad ranging recapitulation, refurbishment, and reordering of our cultural past; collage and pastiche become the basis for the appearance of novelty. Disciplines and sciences alike seem incapable of either consensus, discovery, or consolidation; it is not that there is little that is new, but that there is little suggestive of the freshly innovative.
