The text ‘Postmodernism is Everywhere,’ taken from Postmodernism by Glenn Ward, features in B.Ed. 1st Year’s General English book (Tribhuvan University). The key takeaways from the text are as follows:
1. The term ‘postmodernism’ started to make its appearance mainly as an academic category concerned with certain developments in the arts, but soon became a descriptive term for all sorts of proposed shifts and changes in contemporary society and culture.
2. The term ‘postmodernist’ was thought an apt description of our new period of disillusionment. However, by the mid-1980s, postmodernism had blossomed into what can sometimes seem like a catch-all term for just about anything.
3. Though today the deluge of books on postmodernism has slowed to a steady drizzle, and heated debate has cooled into sober reassessment, postmodernism persists to the extent that we might almost say, with a little exaggeration, that it has become part of everyday speech.
4. Postmodernism is not, strictly speaking, a school of thought. Unlike psychoanalysis theory propounded by Sigmund Freud, it is not a unified intellectual movement with definite goal or perspective, and it does not have a single dominant theoretician or spokesperson.
5. Taken on board in so many different fields, where it can refer to so many different things, its meanings have multiplied.
6. Postmodernism is a complicated term. There are several postmodernisms in existence, or at least many variations of it.
7. Postmodernism is a flexible term. It can mean:
- an actual state of affairs in society
- the set of ideas which tries to define or explain this state of affairs
- an artistic style, or an approach to the making of things
- a word used in many different contexts to cover many different aspects of all the above
8. Rather than attempt to offer one all-embracing definition, postmodernism is most fruitfully viewed as a variety of perspectives on our contemporary situation [second option in the above list]. Postmodernism is not so much as a thing, but more as a set of concepts and debates.
9. Despite its great flexibility, postmodernism is not meaningless. There are a number of identifiable themes which run consistently through the different versions of postmodernism. These themes propose that society, culture and lifestyle today are shaped by the developments in mass media, consumer culture and information technology, and hence are significantly different from what they were 10, 15 or even 30 years ago. Thus it being the case, old styles of analysis are no longer useful, and that new approaches and new vocabularies need to be created in order to understand the present.
Characteristics of Postmodernism:
- An artistic, architectural, literary, and cultural movement characterized by skepticism toward established styles and conventions; post-WWII era; came after modernism (late 19th century to mid-20th century)
- Deconstruction of grand narratives, traditional meanings, and binaries
- Fragmentation, pastiche, intertextuality, cultural pluralism
- Subjectivity, relativism, meta-fiction
- Irony, playfulness, celebration of chaos
- Simulacra, hyper-reality
Ramrowriter 
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