POSTMODERN

POSTMODERN (c. 1949). This term is included here not because it belongs but because too many people think it might belong. It is commonly used to characterize work that is not avant-garde at all but still purportedly contemporary, usually because of its journalistic subject matter (the assumption being that modernism has died, to be replaced by something else). My personal opinion holds that anything characterized as postmodern, whether by its author or its advocates, is beneath critical…