Postmodernism and Dawn of the Dead
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Seth A. Fulton
Dr. Pat Elliot
MED 570
26 April 2004
Postmodernism and Dawn of the Dead
Postmodernism is characterized as a movement of artistic, philosophical, and cultural movement of criticism that has come after the movement of modernism. But that really is not an entirely functional definition of postmodernism as it is exceedingly difficult to define what postmodernism actually is. To be able to gain an understanding of postmodernism, it must be first understood from where the term comes from: the critical theories of modernism.
Modernism is commonly associated with certain artistic movements that originally came to be about the turn of the 20th century within literature, drama, music, and painting. The basic features of modernism are listed as "an aesthetic self-consciousness and reflectiveness; a rejection of narrative structure in favor of simultaneity and montage; an exploration of the paradoxical, ambiguous and uncertain open-ended nature of reality; and a rejection of the notion of an integrated personality in favor of an emphasis upon the de-structured, de-humanized subject (qtd.in Lunn, 1985, Featherstone 7).
And from a postmodernist standpoint, modernism was the continuation of the Enlightenment, "a strive for unity, universality, certainty, and high-minded truths. These truths defined a widely-accepted boundary between what was the center or focus of society and what was the margin or periphery...