ABSTRACT
This chapter explains number of prominent critics who were faced with the evident decline and arrival into middle-class respectability of modernism and the rise of a movement that appeared equally amorphous if much less dignified. It focuses on the European philosophies of madness that spread through academic and artistic circles in the 1970s and '80s. The chapter describes work of Fredric Jameson, America's most influential theorist of postmodernism. The debates around postmodernism that slowly gained traction after 1960 and occupied much of the terrain in the 1970s and '80s made schizophrenia and paranoia central to a phenomenon whose rejection or celebration often depended on, or went hand in hand with, the position taken on these two concepts. Perhaps the most influential cultural critic writing in the 1980s and '90s, Jameson authored a series of essays that blended psychopathology and postmodernism more closely than before or after.
