ABSTRACT
The meaning and function of postmodernism is to operate at places of closure, at the limits of modernist productions and practices, at the margins of what proclaims itself to be new and a break with tradition, and at the multiple edges of these claims to self-consciousness and auto-reflection. Postmodernist thinking involves rethinking—finding the places of difference within texts and institutions, examining the inscriptions of indecidability, noting the dispersal of signification, identity, and centered unity across a plurivalent texture of epistemological and metaphysical knowledge production. Postmodernism brings the modernist hegemony to closure. It examines the ends, goals, hopes of modernist activity, situating it in its context of premodernist frameworks. The postmodernist text is by its difference from other productions—including critical writings and alternate aesthetic or cultural genres. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book addresses the very question of the limitations and delimitations that postmodernism marks out.
