THE PROGRAMME moves ahead on the assumption that the postmodern project is the most recent efflorescence stimulated in the first place in the Enlightenment--particularly in the post-Medieval belief that the truth about the world, including humans on it, could be ascertained through the rigorous exercise of rationality. Until the rise of the postmodern temper, it was normal to think of the real as real. For a maddening variety of reasons we now cannot accept a simple notion of the real. In the critical theory of the postmodern, evidence of these " problematizing " avenues of thought emerge to be examined and evaluated.
Meanwhile, we look to our own life experience for evidence of what postmodernism is coping with. We were brought up on the already-challenged belief that the objective truth sought in modern science-based thought could be attained. Our adult life has taken place during the rise of the challenge to that Enlightenment ideal. Yet our education did not acknowledge the challenge. The professoriate of our time and place did not deal with it. Our experience of life in America as a young adult in the 1950s gave us a sense of something terribly out of kilter. The great modern pieties sounded right; men and women whom we respected had told us of them, and we trusted them. The disaster that the twentieth century became on a world scale could not be explained satisfactorily on the older terms. Those tagged " modernist " as opposed to " postmodern " seemed to preserve deep in their text a residual attachment to an order copied, at least, from the older truths. Their manner, in the teeth of the disaster, however, could be said to have altered that subject matter to the point of its disappearance, even before the idea of the postmodern came forth. We think of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner in this way. So on our own, as an outsider, feeling somehow in an alien terrain, we looked around for a different way at least to explain the situation. The discoveries in books and in conversation from that search we feel validate our claim to be representative of a postmodern sensibility. At the heart of it lies a satisfaction with the disappearance of a total justification and, with it, the disappearnce of a sense of personal guilt for something not our fault. This feeling requires analysis.
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