Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a mode of discourse that is characterized by philosophical skepticism toward the grand narratives offered by modernism; that rejects epistemological certainty and the stability of meaning; and rejects the emphasis on ideology as the means of maintaining political power. Postmodernism dismisses claims that facts are objective as naïve realism, given the conditional nature of knowledge. The investigative perspective of Postmodernism is characterized by self-reference, epistemological relativism, and moral relativism, pluralism, irony, and eclecticism; and dismisses the universal validity of the principles of binary opposition, the stablility of identity, hierarchy, and categorization. Postmodernism emerged from literary criticism and developed in the mid-twentieth century as an intellectual rejection of modernism, and has been observed across many disciplines. Postmodernism is associated with the disciplines deconstruction and post-structuralism.