Post Modernism Quotes

• Postmodernism was a reaction to modernism. Where modernism was about objectivity, postmodernism was about subjectivity. Where modernism sought a singular truth, postmodernism sought the multiplicity of truths.

  Miguel Syjuco

  Objectivity, Subjectivity, Reactions

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• Post-modernism is modernism with the optimism taken out.

  Robert Hewison

  Taken, Optimism, Modernism

  Robert Hewison (1987). “The heritage industry: Britain in a climate of decline”, Methuen

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• Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism.

  Terry Eagleton

  Sick, Revolutionary, Modernism

  "Capitalism, Modernism, and Postmodernism". Essay by Terry Eagleton, 1985.

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• Can postmodernism hold the perpetrators of genocide accountable?

  Catharine MacKinnon

  Genocide, Perpetrators, Postmodernism

  Catharine A. MacKinnon (2007). “Are Women Human?”, p.58, Harvard University Press

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• The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, I love you madly, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.

  Umberto Eco

  Love, Attitude, Past

  Umberto Eco (1984). “Postscript to The name of the rose”, Harcourt

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• I think the adjective post-modernist really means mannerist. Books about books is fun but frivolous.

  Angela Carter

  Fun, Book, Mean

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• Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

  John Berger

  Mean, Cutting, Past

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• I teach art at a famous art school, and yet I don't have really the least notion what post-modernism means, but we have people in the letters and science department that understand it quite well and the students go there if they want to understand what this term that is being bandied about is all about, but I've never understood it.

  Lawrence Jordan

  Art, School, Mean

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• Post-modernism is dead because it didn't address human needs.

  David Guterson

  Needs, Literature, Addresses

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• Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature, and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science.

  Larry Wall

  Science, Thinking, Literature

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• One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures.

  Larry Wall

  Power, Ideas, People

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• The collaboration which sometimes follows is seldom based on good will: usually on desire, rage, fear, pity or longing. The modern illusion concerning painting (which post-modernism has done nothing to correct) is that the artist is the creator. Rather he is a reciever. What seems like creaton is the act of giving form to what he has recieved.

  John Berger

  Artist, Giving, Desire

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• Amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatans.

  Noam Chomsky

  Self, Amusing, Conscious

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• I started thinking that if post modernism is about people opening up all their skeletons, I'm going the other way. I don't want anyone knowing anything about me anymore.

  Billy Corgan

  Thinking, Skeletons, Opening Up

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