Making a Script for ENGL presentation Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Making a Script for ENGL presentation - Essay Example In the late 1950s and 1960s, the beginning of postmodernism came into scene as a ‘new sensibility’ by attacking modernism’s official status and through canonization in the museum and the academy, as the high culture of the modern capitalist world. It was therefore a populist attack on the elitism of modernism and signaled a refusal of what Andreas Huyssen (1986) calls ‘the great divide’. The American and the British pop art of the 1950s and 1960s also presented a clear rejection of the ‘great divide’, preferring William’s social definition of culture as ‘a whole way of life’. This was proven in the late 1970s when the debate about the postmodernism crossed the Atlantic. Different cultural theorists also debated on the advent of postmodernism in various aspects. For Lyotard, the postmodern condition is the collapse of certainty and the dissolution of the metanarrative of ‘truth’. God, knowledge, higher education, science, the working class, all have lost their authority as centers of authenticity and truth. Popular culture of the postmodern condition is therefore, a culture of ‘slackening’, where taste is irrelevant and money is the only sign of value. For Baudrillard, postmodernism is a culture of the ‘simulacrum’ i.e. an identical copy without an original. Over the years we have seen a historical shift from a metallurgic society to a semiurgic society; destroying the very distinction between the original and copy. The result of this is not a treat from the ‘real’, but the collapse of the real into hyperrealism, where reality and stimulation are experienced as without difference, e.g. Disneyland, for it allows a concentrated experience of ‘real’ America. For Fredic Jameson, postmodernism is theorized from within a Marxist or neo-Marxist framework. It is referred to as the ‘cultural