Postmodernism and Freudian Analysis Alison Smith

Write a concise analytical description of 'Postmodernism' in no more than 200 words.

Postmodernism was a movement which took place in the Arts from the 1930's to 1980's, which sought not just to act as a continuation of modernism, but to attempt to reform its modes, which had themselves become conventional, as well as breaking away from elite high art to forms of mass culture, such as television, advertising, cartoons, and popular music.

Western morale was threatened by the world-wide economic crisis and political division of the 1930's this was later exacerbated by the experiences of Nazi totalitarianism, mass extermination, and the threat of the atomic bomb. In 1984, Orwell depicted society's fear of a totalitarian regime, as a mass consumer culture and centralised economy developed in the post-war period. There was a rejection of old ideals such as Marxism, Freudianism, and the Enlightenment Project.

The literature of the period by authors such as Pynchon, Barthes, and Nabokov blended genres so as to avoid traditional classification, and the movement was also seen in Warhol's pop art, the musical compositions of John Cage, and the films of Jean-Luc Godard.

The value of the term is debated; some...