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Definition

"Postmodernism" is "a highly contested term", referring to "a particularly unstable concept", that "names many different kinds of cultural objects and phenomena in many different ways". In Western philosophy, it's considered to be a movement from the late 20th century marked by broad subjectivity, skepticism, and relativism. It involves a distrust of reason and awareness of how ideology influences economic and political power. In broad terms, postmodernism is viewed as a dismissal of many of the cultural certainties that have shaped Western society for the past 200 years.

In postmodernism we are unable to determine what is true or false, real or fake, valuable or worthless, what actions to take or avoid, or what beliefs to hold or reject. It is "diffuse, fragmentary, multi-dimensional". Critics have described it as "an exasperating term" and claim that its indefinability is "a truism". Put otherwise, postmodernism is "several things at once". It has no single definition, and the term does not name any single unified phenomenon, but rather many diverse phenomena: "postmodernisms rather than one postmodernism".

Although postmodernisms are generally united in their effort to transcend the perceived limits of modernism, "modernism" also means different things to different critics in various arts. Further, there are outliers on even this basic stance; for instance, literary critic William Spanos conceives postmodernism, not in period terms, but in terms of a certain kind of literary imagination so that pre-modern texts such as Euripides ' Orestes or Cervantes ' Don Quixote count as postmodern.

Scholar Hans Bertens offers the following:

If there is a common denominator to all these postmodernisms, it is that of a crisis in representation: a deeply felt loss of faith in our ability to represent the real, in the widest sense. No matter whether they are aesthestic, epistemological, moral, or political in nature, the representations that we used to rely on can no longer be taken for granted.