In his most wide-ranging and accessible work Fredric Jameson argues that postmodernism is the
cultural response to the latest systemic change in world capitalism. He seeks here to
crystallize a definition of a term which has taken on so many meanings that it has virtually
lost all historical significance. He presents an extensive discussion on the cultural
landscape—both ‘high’ and ‘low’—of postmodernity evaluating the political fortunes of the new
term and surveying postmodern developments in a range of different fields—from market ideology
to architecture from painting and instalment art to contemporary punk film from video art and
high literature to deconstruction. Finally Jameson revaluates the concept of postmodernism in
light of postmodern critiques of totalization and historical narratives—from the notion of
decadence to the dynamics of small groups from religious fundamentalism to hi-tech science
fiction—while touching on the nature of contemporary cultural critique and the possibilities of
cognitive mapping in the present multinational world system. This provocative book will be
fundamental to all future discussions of postmodernism.
