March 31, 2007

The Origins of Postmodernism

By James Arlandson
Does postmodernism spring out of the head of Zeus unconceived or misconceived? Or does it carry a heavy debt on its back to earlier movements and trends? This article, Part Two in the series on Postmodernism and the Bible, explores the roots of postmodernism, even though the large movement plays with origins. This article supports my claim that postmodernism is a transmogrification of the hyper-skepticism begun in the Enlightenment and given a huge impetus by such influential thinkers as Nietzsche and Freud, to name only two. (Part One explains in the section "Prefixation" why I attach the prefix "hyper.") The nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, going past WWII and into the 1960s, can be characterized as undergoing shaking and instability of the old ways of thinking and developing politics and the economy and expressing the arts. Considering the limitations of one article, we can only look at this broad and deep topic superficially. But at least we will have a...(Read Full Article)