ABSTRACT
Steven Connor’s Postmodernist Culture has by now established itself as a lucid and wide-ranging introduction to the debates around the theory and practice of postmodernism. Of the myriad array of expository books available on this hyperseminal subject, Connor’s is among those ‘most likely to succeed’ in making it on to reading lists. This is partly because of the usefulness of Part II of the book, which begins by anatomizing the analyses of the specificity of our fin-de-siècle moment propounded by Lyotard, Jameson, and Baudrillard. Connor demonstrates that for all three of these Big Names, ‘postmodernity may be defined as those plural conditions in which the social and the cultural become indistinguishable’ (p. 61)—in which theory ineluctably collapses into its object. The remainder of Part II then narrates the emergence of postmodernism across the regions of architecture, the visual arts, drama, TV, video, cinema, pop music, and fashion.
