In this original and eye-opening study, Stefan Morawski sheds light on the often confused debate about postmodernism, postmodernity and human values. Drawing upon a wide range of evidence from the experience of everyday life in the sciences, religion, visual arts, literature, film, television and contemporary music, The Troubles with Postmodernism is an indispensable guide to our understanding and evaluation of contemporary literature.

In this original and eye-opening study, Stefan Morawski sheds light on the often confused debate about postmodernism, postmodernity and human values. Drawing upon a wide range of evidence from the experience of everyday life in the sciences, religion, visual arts, literature, film, television and contemporary music, The Troubles with Postmodernism is an indispensable guide to our understanding and evaluation of contemporary literature.

"A critique of postmodernism and poststructuralism and an examination of their impact on higher education. Argues that students influenced by these trends in philosophy produce radically incoherent ideas about language, meaning, truth, and reality"--Provided by publisher.

A radical new history of a dangerous idea Post-Modernity is the creative destruction that has shattered our present times into fragments. It dynamited modernism which had dominated the western world for most of the 20th century. Post-modernism stood for everything modernism rejected: fun, exuberance, irresponsibility. But beneath its glitzy surface, post-modernism had a dirty secret: it was the fig leaf for a rapacious new kind of capitalism. It was also the forcing ground of the 'post truth', by means of which western values got turned upside down. But where do these ideas come from and how have they impacted on the world? In his brilliant history of a dangerous idea, Stuart Jeffries tells a narrative that starts in the early 1970s and continue to today. He tells this history through a riotous gallery that includes David Bowie, the Ipod, Frederic Jameson, the demolition of Pruit-Igoe, Madonna, Post-Fordism, Jeff Koon's 'Rabbit', Deleuze and Guattari, the Nixon Shock, The Bowery series, Judith Butler, Las Vegas, Margaret Thatcher, Grand Master Flash, I Love Dick, the RAND Corporation, the Sex Pistols, Princess Diana, the Musee D'Orsay, Grand Theft Auto, Perry Anderson, Netflix, 9/11 We are today scarcely capable of conceiving politics as a communal activity because we have become habituated to being consumers rather than citizens. Politicians treat us as consumers to whom they must deliver. Can we do anything else than suffer from buyer's remorse?

'Charles Lemert is one of the most thoughtful and interesting of sociology's postmodernists. He recurrently finds new angles of vision and is especially helpful for overcoming the pernicious opposition of 'micro' and 'macro' perspectives.' -Craig Calhoun, New York University (on the first edition) Highly readable, the second edition of Postmodernism Is Not What You Think responds to the widespread claim that postmodernism is over. It explains the historical connections between the postmodern and globalization. Those who wish to kill the term postmodernism still must face the facts that the former nationalistic world-system has collapsed and is slowly being replaced by a more global set of structures. The book is completely revised and updated with an entirely new section on globalization. The media and popular culture, identity politics, the science wars, politics and cultural studies, structuralism and poststructuralism, and the new sociologies are also put in perspective as signs of the new social formations dawning at the end of the modern age. Lemert shows that the postmodern is less a theory than a condition of social life brought about by the trouble modernity has gotten itself into.

Develops a naturalistic postmodern perspective to make constructive proposals about a wide range of topics now in public discussion.