Part I Postmodernism: a new representation? Paradigms of the Postmodern, Using this book, Modern, modernity, moderniz: Economic transformation, commodity and consumption; Modernism and Its Consequences: Continuity or Break? The forms of art ; The genders of modernism ; The impact of war ; Rationality or the unconscious? Formal experiment or conventional form? Elite modernism versus popular taste ; Modernism- a limiting paradigm: Modernisms aftermath ; Postmodernism: from Elite to Mass Culture? Architecture, mother of the arts ; Representation in crisis? A lexicon of postmodern technique ; Subjectivity and subjection, history and nature ; Conclusion: Resisting the Postmodern: The use of paradigms: renaissance and postmodernity; Culture and the debt bomb Part II Essays on Postmodernism, One: Popular Culture: Rock on: the popular front against postmodernism LA: the city as postmodern future shock ; 1 Popular Music and Postmodern Theory In search of the postmodern text; But is it Art? ; Coda: hyper-marketing postmodernism ; 2 Recognizing a 'human-Thing': Cyborgs, Robots and Replicants in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner ; Dick's dystopia: the death of species ; Visualizing novels, thinking in pictures: Blade Runner as optical philosophy ; Epilogue: the Director's Cut, the cruellest cut ; Two: Architecture and Visual Arts; Postmodernism and the visual arts: the end of painting? ; Art of the women's movement feminist and/ or postmodernist? ; Tom Phillips: painterly skill and postmodern technique ; 3 Melancholy Meanings: Architecture, Postmodernity and Philosophy; 4 'The World Is Indeed a Fabulous Tale'; Yve Lomax- a Practice around Photography; HILARY GRESTY in dialogue With YVE LOMAXs Televising Hell: Tom Phillips and Peter Greenaway's TV Dante; Painting language; 5 Televising Hell; Theorizing text and image; Three: Literature: John Ashbery: postmodernity's laureate? It was and it was not so:· the politics of fiction Violent misreading; Gayatn· Spivak: deconstruction and postcolonial fiction 6 A New Subjectivity? John Ashbery's Three Poems; Ashbery's postmodern successors; In conclusion: a pre-modern Homeric truth 7 Reading The Satanic Verses: Four: The Real and the True: Documentary Film; Documentary: how is reality represented? Trinh T. Minh-ha and the critique of documentary 8 The Totalizing Quest of Meaning