ABSTRACT

The American architectural theorist and critic Charles Jencks makes the following claim in the introduction to his book, What is Post-Modernism?:

For Jencks, postmodernism is the style of our age, and a particularly contradictory one at that. From global politics to fashionable cuisine, postmodernism is ‘omnipresent’ in all aspects of contemporary culture, and particularly in the arts. Because of this ubiquity it is difficult to

categorise according to a simple set of rules or attributes. The aim of this chapter is to introduce some of the key ways in which it has manifested itself in contemporary theories and cultural practices by examining a number of important arguments that have recently been produced about architecture, art and literature.