Abstract
Looking back over the postmodern decades from the perspective of the twenty-first century, we are now in a position to begin distinguishing internal breaks and discontinuities, as well as continuities, within the period itself. The present paper undertakes to sketch out three phases internal to the postmodern period: first, an onset phase in the Euro-American sphere in the mid-sixties; next, the major phase of "peak postmodernism" in the seventies and eighties; finally, a late-postmodernist or transitional period in the nineties, widely experienced as a pause or lull, a kind of interregnum between postmodernism and whatever comes next. The consensus view is that the onset of postmodernism in the industrialized West can be dated to the "long sixties," spanning the years from the late fifties to the early seventies, but the present paper conducts the thought-experiment of dating postmodernism's onset to a specific year, 1966. Nineteen seventy-three, another year that has often been proposed as the onset year, is here reinterpreted as the moment when postmodernism re-brands itself and acquires its name, inaugurating postmodernism's peak phase. When we think of postmodernism, we mainly think of the cultural forms and practices of its peak decades, from the emergence of the term itself in the mid-seventies through the end of the eighties. The epochal world-historical events of 1989-90 usher in the final period of postmodernism, the "long nineties," which was experienced as a kind of lull or interregnum, a "place between two deaths" as Philip Wegner calls it, no longer as fully postmodern as the peak decades had been, but not yet "post-postmodern" either.
First Page
171
Last Page
181
Recommended Citation
Brian, McHale. 2014. "Periodizing Postmodernism." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 34, (2): pp.171-181. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol34/iss2/10
