142 Quotes About Postmodernism

And I wasn’t playing a role – I was trying to be myself.But the harder I was striving, the more I was realizing that I had probably lost that ‘myself’ somewhere between two perfectly performed roles...

So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?

What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.

Obi-Wan Kenobi once said ‘your eyes can deceive you, don’t trust them.’ It seems to be getting harder. Distinguishing reality from the illusions people make for us, or the ones we make for ourselves. I don’t know, maybe that’s part of the plan, to make me think I’m crazy…it’s working.

[Both high art and industrially produced consumer art] bear the stigmata of capitalism, both contain elements of change. Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up.

Don't believe that the book is losing sight of you, Reader. The you that was shifted to the Other Reader can, at any sentence, be addressed to you again. You are always a possible you. Who would dare to sentence you to the loss of the you, a catastrophe as terrible as the loss of the I. For a second-person discourse to become a novel, at least two you's are required, distinct and concomitant, which stand out from the crowd of he's, she's and they's.

After one postmodern doorstopper, you’ve read them all. Pynchon got there first, really… and it was good… but most of the others have been pure drivel. Modern life is very complicated and overwhelming and it is advisable to be anxious about it all… Well, obviously!

As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.