Defining Literary Postmodernism for the Twenty-First Century (Matthias Stephan, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)

Observing that the new millennium has seen a surge in considerations of the demise or mutation of postmodernism, in Defining Literary Postmodernism Stephan raises a fundamental question: how can one argue for the end of postmodernism if there has never been a definitive definition of what it is (or was)? In the first four chapters of the book, he surveys and evaluates various critical concepts that prominent scholars have previously used to try and define postmodernism, highlighting the paradoxes and problems of these ideas so as to set his own argument in motion. This argument consists of his attempt to establish a properly “reductive” definition of literary postmodernism: one simple and capacious enough that all texts that meet it can be called “postmodernist.” This he does mainly by drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical concept of the rhizome, as the metaphor for what he calls a “postmodern structure of consciousness”: this is “a structureless structure and is best epitomized by the metaphor of the rhizome” as an expansive, yet centerless, system which does not privilege one part over another (6).