ABSTRACT
John Frow’s 1990 question is just as relevant today, in our new millennium, as it was when initially asked – in other words, just after The Politics of Postmodernism was first published. While Frow was already using the past tense, I can’t help noticing that I resolutely stayed with the present tense in writing the previous chapters – a reflection, no doubt, of my sense of excitement: the postmodern was in the process of defining itself before my very eyes (and ears). Today, our perspective is inevitably going to be different. Despite attempts to move ‘the postmodern critique forward’ (Allan 1998), to generalize it into a ‘theory of the contemporary’ (Connor 1989), or to pluralize it into the more descriptive postmodernisms (Altieri 1998), the postmodern may well be a twentieth-century phenomenon, that is, a thing of the past. Now fully institutionalized, it has its canonized texts, its anthologies, primers and readers, its dictionaries and its histories. (See the revised ‘Concluding note’.) We could even say it has its own publishing houses – including this one. A Postmodernism for Beginners (Appignanesi 1995) now exists; teachers’ guides proliferate. For over a decade, diagnosticians have been pronouncing on its health, if not its demise (see, for a sampling, McGowan 1991; Rose 1991; Zurbrugg 1993;
Morawski 1996), with some of the major players in the debate weighing in on the negative side: for people like Terry Eagleton (1996) and Christopher Norris (1990; 1993; 1994), postmodernism is finished, passé; indeed, for them it’s a failure, an illusion.
