ABSTRACT
The definition of postmodernism includes a fourfold vision of complementarities, embracing continuity and discontinuity, diachrony and synchrony. Postmodernism, again like modernism or romanticism, is no exception; it requires both historical and theoretical definition. In 1959 and 1960, Irving Howe and Harry Levin wrote of postmodernism rather disconsolately as a falling off from the great modernist movement. Postmodernism veers toward all these yet implies a different, if not antithetical, movement toward pervasive procedures, ubiquitous interactions, immanent codes, media, and languages. This chapter explores the question of postmodernism itself by acknowledging the psycho politics, if not the psychopathology, of academic life. Modernism and postmodernism are not separated by an Iron Curtain or a Chinese wall. More generally, on a certain level of narrative abstraction, modernism itself may be rightly assimilated to romanticism, romanticism related to the Enlightenment, the latter to the Renaissance, and so back, if not to the Olduvai Gorge, then certainly too ancient Greece.
