Postmodernism, Postmodernity and the Postmodern: Telling Local Stories at the End of Time

Abstract

When I was an undergraduate, there was a moment in a seminar when I was asked who the Pre-Raphaelites were. I had probably just about heard of them, but that did not stop me and I thought I could just bluff. I suggested that they were a group of artists who came before the Raphaelites. (Naturally I did not know what a Raphaelite was.) The Pre- Raphaelites turned out to be a group of nineteenth-century artists who wished to return to a style that existed prior to the work of Raphael Sanzio (1483–1520). The exchange left me with a residual distrust of chronologies, of terms such as pre- and post-, and of linear notions of history, even those inferred in reverse (or ‘traditions’ as wre call them). This distrust has informed all of my teaching and writing on postmod- ernism, postmodernity and the postmodern. Indeed, I would push the phenomenon of postmodernism back to the writings of Heraclitus and the pre-Socratics - some of whom, confusingly, post-dated Socrates and clearly pre-dated modernism.