ABSTRACT
Postmodernism is a term current inside and outside the academic study of popular culture. It has entered discourses as different as pop music journalism and Marxist debates on the cultural conditions of late or multinational capitalism. This chapter focuses on the development of postmodern theory from its beginnings in the United States and Britain in the early 1960s, through its theorization in the work of Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson. Although the term ‘postmodern’ had been in cultural circulation since the 1870s, it is only in the 1960s that we see the beginnings of what is now understood as postmodernism. The chapter considers the responses of two French cultural theorists to the debate on the ‘new sensibility’, before returning to America and Fredric Jameson’s account of postmodernism as the cultural dominant of late capitalism. It concludes with a discussion of general aspects of postmodernism.
