They have in common a penchant for passing death sentences and issuing death certificates, promulgating, with either insouciant glee or ponderous gloom, the death of reason the death of the enlightenment the death of universalism the death of normativity and law the death of meaning and truth-in short, the death of almost everything that the Western intellectual tradition stands for in general and that modernity has claimed in particular. Yet for all the diffusion, there is a discernible commonality among the various branches of postmodernism. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.”2 Or nonsensical à la Lyotard: “A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. On the strength of Helen’s depicting, on a robe she is weaving, “the many struggles the Achaeans and Trojans endured for her sake at the hands of the war-god” ( Iliad 3), the late Paul de Man claimed the Homeric epic as a self-referential postmodern text! Such retroactive designation, combined with the widespread indiscriminate use of the postmodern category, threatens to render it altogether vacuous. Hardly a wonder, when one of its theorists can come up with twelve different postmodernisms.1 Compounding this difficulty, as Umberto Eco has observed in the postscript to The Name of the Rose, is the tendency of “postmodern” to become “increasingly retroactive” in the end, Eco quips, “the postmodern category will include Homer.” No longer a quip, it has already happened. Postmodernism is a diffuse phenomenon that has proved unpropitious to definers.
![glee blinded by the light glee blinded by the light](https://media1.popsugar-assets.com/files/thumbor/hgGJUG2h9Qe8FsCpoEr0V4v829A/255x0:3135x2880/fit-in/2048xorig/filters:format_auto-!!-:strip_icc-!!-/2020/08/03/762/n/1922398/fdb573d25f2846ea7bac77.87982120_/i/jenna-ushkowitz-david-stanley-are-engaged.jpg)
The Enlightenment Gone Mad (I) The Dismal Discourse of Postmodernism’s Grand Narratives