What Comes After Postmodernism?

ne of the earliest appearances of the term postmodern can be found in Leslie Fiedler's essay “Cross the Border—Close the Gap,” published in Playboy in 1969. Fielder used the term to describe a paradigm shift from “the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism” to “quite another time, apocalyptic, antirational, blatantly romantic and sentimental; an age dedicated to joyous misology and prophetic irresponsibility; one . . . distrustful of self-protective irony and too great self-awareness.” In this new age, notions of taste—high and low, classic and popular—melted like the last snows of winter. They were followed by a sort of omni-cultural spring in which the “exploitative” genres of the written word—science fiction, the western, horror, and pornography—could be mined for the purpose of forging capital-L Literature.