ABSTRACT
Within the nebulous field of contemporary academic discourse, the once hotly-contested debates on ‘the postmodern’ have all but faded completely. For many, this is a good thing. As those who agree with this sentiment would have it, the debates surrounding ‘the postmodern’, ‘postmodernism’ and ‘postmodernity’, though they provided some temporary excitement within intellectual circles, ended up confusing a lot more people than helping them to understand anything. For them, this is due to, among other things, the ‘obtuse’ writing-style of many authors and scholars with postmodern sympathies. And, indeed, for the adherents of the postmodern backlash, the eventual fizzling out of the postmodern wave was well overdue. Likewise, those who were not necessarily stalwart defenders of the postmodern, but had believed there to be something substantive in its philosophy, have equally shied away from the concept. It is very difficult to find, among theorists today, those who would welcome the label of ‘postmodernist’.
