linguistic:translation, structural:summarization, information:highlighting, information:classification
In literary and architectural theory

According to scholar Ian Buchanan, the Black Mountain poets Charles Olson and Robert Creeley first introduced the term "postmodern" in its current sense during the 1950s. Their stance against modernist poetry – and Olson's Heideggerian orientation – were influential in the identification of postmodernism as a polemical position opposed to the rationalist values championed by the Enlightenment project.

During the 1960s, this affirmative use gave way to a pejorative use by the New Left, who used it to describe a waning commitment among youth to the political ideals socialism and communism. The literary critic Irving Howe, for instance, denounced postmodern literature for being content to merely reflect, rather than actively attempt to refashion, what he saw as the "increasingly shapeless" character of contemporary society.

In the 1970s, this changed again, largely under the influence of the literary critic Ihab Hassan 's large-scale survey of works that he said could no longer be called modern. Taking the Black Mountain poets an exemplary instance of the new postmodern type, Hassan celebrates its Nietzschean playfulness and cheerfully anarchic spirit, which he sets off against the high seriousness of modernism.

(Yet, from another perspective, Friedrich Nietzsche 's attack on Western philosophy and Martin Heidegger 's critique of metaphysics posed deep theoretical problems not necessarily a cause for aesthetic celebration. Their further influence on the conversation about postmodernism, however, would be largely mediated by French poststructuralism.)

If literature was at the center of the discussion in the 1970s, architecture is at the center in the 1980s. The architectural theorist Charles Jencks, in particular, connects the artistic avant-garde to social change in a way that captures attention outside of academia. Jenckes, much influenced by the American architect Robert Venturi, celebrates a plurality of forms and encourages participation and active engagement with the local context of the built environment. He presents this as in opposition to the "authoritarian style" of International Modernism.