Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Imaginary Review

For our book study group, I am re-reading Explaining Postmodernism, by Stephen Hicks, which is now available for free in PDFs on his web page.

It's a dense summary of a strand of intellectual history from Rousseau onward, but I think the book is very handy at explaining the decline of our level of partisan political discourse.

Anyway, I was amusing myself by writing a review of the book - a negative review by an imaginary postmodernist writer. It would start like this:
Isn't explaining intrinsically a form of oppression, a privileging of the speaker's viewpoint over that of the listener's? Shouldn't we accept that postmodernism defies any single explanation - that it demands a diversity of explanations to reflect its nuanced polarities?
Oops, I fear
that's way too clear.

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