ABSTRACT
The term postmodernity is used to describe the differing strands, themes and ideas, not all interrelated, that have developed as a form of critique and reaction to modernity. It is a simply a description for the zeitgeist of our day. Such reaction has been stimulated, in general terms, by a loss of faith in the progressivist and speculative discourses characteristic of the Enlightenment programme. This stultifying legacy (according to most postmodern theorists),1 that majored upon the authoritarian nature of reason, with its inflexible, fixed and totalising agenda, is giving way to ideas from the postmodern vantage point which, in contrast, include fragmentation, diversity, instability, ephemerality, otherness and discontinuity.
