In the West, the term “postmodernist” became increasingly fashionable in the 1970s and 1980s to describe the dominant trend in art and architecture in the late twentieth century, or even the dominant spirit of the age. The term has become a widely used but poorly understood “umbrella adjective” covering a wide range of mainly American and French post-Structuralist theories of language, history, philosophy, art and society, each of which may be emphasised or de-emphasised in any given case. To over-simplify, these theories share an extreme sense of doubt regarding the authority of the word; in linguistic terms, the sign has become dislocated from the referent, with the result that words are no longer understood to name a pre-existing, and implicitly malleable world of things, but…
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Citation: Chitnis, Rajendra. "Russian Postmodernism". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 23 January 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1365, accessed 21 November 2024.]
