Review of A poetics of postmodernism: history, theory, fiction by Linda Hutcheon and Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism by Frederic Jameson. This was the title given to the 1980 Venice Biennale which marked the institutional recognition of postmodernism in architecture.

The "poetics" of postmodernism offered here is drawn from these contradictions, as seen in the intersecting concerns of both contemporary theory and cultural practice. Postmodernism" is a word much used and misused in a variety of disciplines, including literature, visual arts, film, architecture, literary theory, history, and philosophy. PART I 1 Theorizing the postmodern: toward a poetics 2 Modelling the postmodern: parody and politics 3 Limiting the postmodern: the paradoxical aftermath of modernism 4 Decentering the postmodern: the ex-centric 5 Contextualizing the postmodern: enunciation and the revenge of "parole" 6 Historicizing the postmodern: the problematizing of history PART II 7 Historiographic metafiction: "the pastime of past time" 8 Intertextuality, parody, and the discourses of history 9 The problem of reference 10 Subject in/of/to history and his story 11 Discourse, power, ideology: humanism and postmodernism 12 Political double-talk 13 Conclusion: a poetics or a problematics?This was his “work of art,” one that collapsed together the “work” and the gallery so as to reveal at once their collusion and the strong but usually unacknowledged power of the gallery’s invisibility as a dominant (and dominating) cultural institution (see Kibbins 1983). What all of these words literally do (precisely by their disavowing prefixes— dis, de, in, anti) is incorporate that which they aim to contest—as does, I suppose, the term postmodernism itself. Postmodernism works to show that all repairs are human constructs, but that, from that very fact, they derive their value as well as their limitation. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. With the postmodern incredulity to the legitimacy of metanarrative, how should we construct a totalizing, “better” theory about postmodernism?

It has certainly meant a rethinking and putting into question of the bases of our western modes of thinking that we usually label, perhaps rather too generally, as liberal humanism.Along with this ironic reworking of the history of film comes a temporal historical warp: the movie is set, we are told, at 8:49 am, sometime in the twentieth century. Sometimes it is overtly measured by the clock, thereby foregrounding the unspoken conventions of theatrical time (see Pops 1984, 59).