No one has ever been able to come up with a good definition of
“postmodernism,” though plenty of ink and hot air has been expended
in the attempt. Fredric Jameson, writing back in 1983, tried and
failed; Ihab Hassan, four years later, finally gave up and made do
with vague descriptive terms like “indeterminacies” and
“immanences.” The best anyone seems to be able to do is to compile
lists of attributes or tendencies: postmodernism is not unified,
after all; it
is not so much a movement as a state of
mind.

The editors of the new Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton
Anthology
have fared no better than Hassan and Jameson in their attempt to
define postmodernism, finally deciding simply to run through
various properties that can generally be agreed upon as being
postmodern. “In the arts,” they write in their introduction,
“postmodern traits include pastiche, the incorporation of different
textual genres and contradictory ‘voices’ within a single work;
fragmented or ‘open’ forms that give the audience the power to
assemble the work and determine its meaning; and the adoption of a
playful irony as a stance that seems to prove itself endlessly
useful.”
In philosophy, postmodernism is concerned with “the
problematic relationship between the real and the unreal; the
constructedness of meaning, truth, and history; and the
complexities of subjectivity and identity. All of these are marked
by a thoroughgoing skepticism toward the foundations and structures
of knowledge.”

As we now know after enduring some thirty years