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Title: The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change by David Harvey ISBN: 0-631-16294-1 Publisher: Blackwell Publishers Pub. Date: June, 1990 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $28.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.83 (6 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Po-Mo Schmomo?
Comment: Ask ten academics about what to call our present fin-de-siecle epoch and you'll get ten different labels, but "postmodernism" seems always the default term. Although it's twelve years old, Harvey's book is the best I've read about the pluralistic fabric we daily inhabit. It's edifyingly reader-friendly (especially compared to some of the Franco-drunk rhetoricians out there trying to get a handle on our current world). In precise prose Harvey outlines the shift to our information-as-capital paradigm since the mid-sixties, and the causes of the growth of the temp sector and "just-in-time" production capabilities. Harvey traces the arrival of "flexible accumulation" to the collapse of Fordist production practices in the 1966-73 waves of recession, but covers far more than just economic factors--architecture, art, literature, cinema--without any self-conscious Neo-Marxist whistling-in-the-dark. In his project to articulate a new (meta?)narrative, Harvey's book will probably give post-structuralists a new constellation of ideas to obfuscate with hip terminology and dense prose...
Manuel Castell's "The Rise of the Network Society" is another good book along these lines.
Rating: 5
Summary: Best overview of modern/postmodern condition I have found
Comment: This is a great overview of concepts that are, by definition, very fractured. Harvey clarifies and pulls together a number of seemingly disparate elements in a masterful manner. Though this book could work as a good introduction to these concepts, I think readers with some background in the major writers of modernism and postmodernism will get more out of it. Dogmatic postmodernists may be put off that Harvey has the "temerity" to suggest that postmodernism might be an extension of modernism or that he finds some good in modernism and some excesses in postmodern approaches but, they should get over themselves and realize that their insistence that "all meta-narratives are bad" is their own meta-narrative. Overall, Harvey manages to convincingly express his ideas while maintaining a remarkably evenhanded approach. I especially enjoy the fact that he avoids the postmodernist tendency to ignore the complexities of modernism and, thus create a postmodern meta-narrative about the modernist project.
Rating: 5
Summary: Excellent overview of modernity and post-modernity
Comment: David Harvey's "Condition of Post-Modernity" provides excellent representational cases to show the differences between modernity and post-modernity. Although sometimes difficult to follow (I had problems with the chapter pertaining to architecture), Harvey uses enough examples (i.e., economics, art, cinema, etc.) to make sure one understands the differences between post-modernism and modernism. The economic chapter, "Fordism and Flexible Accumulation" is particulary good and shows the gradual transformation from a moderninst to a post-modernist economy and society. I was disappointed, however, that Harvey didn't have a complete section focused towards the differences between modernist and post-modernist lit.
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Title: Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson ISBN: 0822310902 Publisher: Duke University Press Pub. Date: 01 February, 1992 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge by Jean-Francois Lyotard ISBN: 0816611734 Publisher: University of Minnesota Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 1984 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord ISBN: 0942299795 Publisher: Zone Books Pub. Date: 23 September, 1995 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault, Alan Sheridan ISBN: 0679752552 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 May, 1995 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory by Edward W. Soja ISBN: 0860919366 Publisher: Verso Pub. Date: 01 April, 1989 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
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