ABSTRACT
Terry Eagleton suggests that the postmodernist view of history as hence forward post-metaphysical, post-ideological and even post-historical, was dealt a fatal blow by the resurgence of the grand narratives we have thought we had left behind us, leaving postmodern thinkers ‘off-guard’, a state from which he doubts that we have recovered (Eagleton, 2016). At the same time, as Michael Peters points out, while ‘post’ and ‘after’ terms implicitly invoke apocalypse (the end of modernism, the end of metaphysics, the end of humanism, the end of Man, the death of God, the end of value), they also suggest an opening for ‘a new beginning’ or ‘a return’. He notes that these eschatological narratives of endings (and beginnings) are endemic to Western culture and help define both its cultural specificity and its sources of renewal, which is, of course, to say, a continuation of sorts (Peters, 2008). This last point is crucial because it raises the question of just what these culturally specific sources of renewal and continuity are.
