Publisher's Synopsis
Introduction 1.1 The Postmodern Condition: The Paradox of the postmodernist, postindustrial world is that while on one hand, the world is becoming closer than ever, with greater integration, interaction among cultures and peoples of the world, with the greater transmission of ideas, values and a shared sense of history there is also, on the other hand, significant fragmentation, differences, disintegration, uncertainty, and disillusionment. A condition which is referred to as the 'Postmodern condition', a phrase first coined by Jean-François Lyotard in his classic book, The Postmodern Condition: A Report of Knowledge published in 1979. Critiquing the monotonization1 of the world, he states that "In contemporary society and culture-postindustrial society, postmodern culture-the question of legitimation of knowledge is formulated in different terms. The grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses, regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation." (1984, 37) Here the grand narrative also called a 'master narrative' or 'metanarrative' is an abstract idea which gives a comprehensive explanation of historical experience or knowledge, it is the story about the story. A grand narrative2 is "the global or totalizing narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience."(Stephens and Mc Cullum 1998, 6). It is the great, big story of our society, examples of such narratives would be Enlightenment, Democracy, Hegelian notion of integrated moral state, Marxism, Globalization etc. Here 'narrative' as we know is a story and narrative knowledge is acquired through storytelling. These narratives when applied to social relations of societies, the myths legitimize existing power relations and customs legitimizing narrative knowledge, many religious traditions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam etc, religion itself is a metanarrative. The postmodern society which is characterized by the collapse, denial or rejection of grand narratives, it is not the totality, unity, the centralized enlightened subject, the large narratives but the 'differences', the plurality of small narratives, the decentralized subject which replaces the grand narratives. The 'difference', the plurality, and the 'fragmentation' are thought to be both inevitable but also desirable in a postmodern society because they are opposed to any kind of totalitarianism or authoritarianism.
