The Postmodern Turn

by Steven Best, Douglas Kellner

This book presents a groundbreaking analysis of the emergence of a postmodern paradigm in the arts, science, politics, and theory. From the authors of POSTMODERN THEORY, the much-acclaimed introduction to key postmodern thinkers and themes, THE POSTMODERN TURN ranges over diverse intellectual and artistic terrain--from architecture, painting, literature, music, and politics, to the physical and biological sciences. Critically engaging postmodern theory and culture, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner illuminate our momentous transition between a modernist past and a future struggling to define itself.

Winner of the Michael Harrington Award for the best book of 1998

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction, Criticism, Sociology

306 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1997

About the author

Steven Best is an American animal rights advocate, author, and associate professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at El Paso. A writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education described him in 2005 as "one of the leading scholarly voices on animal rights."

Best is co-founder of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies (ICAS), formerly known as the Center on Animal Liberation Affairs (CALA). His academic interests are continental philosophy, postmodernism, and environmental philosophy. He is known for his post-structuralist notions of revolution, based equally in animal rights and sexual liberation. He is the editor, with Anthony J. Nocella, of Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? Reflections on the Liberation of Animals (2004), which has a foreword by Ward Churchill, and the companion volume on revolutionary environmentalism, Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth (2006).

In December 2004, Best co-founded the North American Animal Liberation Press Office, which acts as a media office for a number of animal rights groups, including the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), though he has said that he is not himself an ALF activist. He came to public attention in 2005, when the British Home Office told him it intended to use counter-terrorist measures adopted in light of the July 2005 London bombings to prevent him from addressing an animal rights rally in the UK. Best responded by alleging that Britain was becoming a police state.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Ali.cheaib · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of essays about enlightenment, post-enlightenment, modernity, and post modernity. Delves into the turn from a modern to a postmodern world in which powerful information systems, open media, and breakthroughs in our understanding of own bodies and the world within which we constantly move have conspired to produce a new world. This new post-industrial world is much aesthetically sophisticated but much softer and permeable. It is a constantly evolving creative sphere of possibilities spurred by rapidly-evolving societies with changing social orders, values, and realities.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book if you are interested in the Philosophical and Cultural background for the beginnings of postmondernity.