Postmodernism: a very short introduction
by Christopher Butler
A skeptical but intelligent survey of postmodern thought. Butler assumes that postmodernism is over and concludes that, overall, it lost its argument with liberal realism while teaching important lessons about gender, identity, and power. He is, interesting, quite sympathetic to postmodern literature while clearly well out of sympathy with much postmodern art; I’d have liked a bit more discussion of architecture and (especially) cinema, where Louis Menand’s article on Pauline Kael seems very much at odds with Butler’s emphasis on politics rather than anti-formalism.