Since at least Plato & and Other Postmodernist Myths [Paperback]

'Since at Least Plato...' and Other Postmodernist Myths surveys the fields of theories of postmodernism and criticizes some of the most common claims found in them about philosophy, science, and the relationship and literary techniques to metaphysics, epistemology, and political ideologies. Devaney finds the accounts offered by these theories of concepts ranging from the law of noncontradiction to relativity and the Uncertainty Principle to be as ill-informed as they are pervasive. Devaney shows how the use to which these accounts have been put in constructing the story of the progression from realism to postmodernism to modernism flattens out both the history of ideas and the history of literature.Acknowledgements - Introduction - PART 1: POSTMODERNISM AND THE INNOCUOUS LOGIC OF BOTH/AND - The Rhetoric of the Logic of Both/And - Paradox, Undecidability, and the Novel - Logic, Politics, and Postmodernist Theory - Apparent Contradictions, True Contradictions, and Meaning - PART 2: 'MODERNITY', 'POSTMODERNITY', AND ALL THAT: THE GRAND NARRATIVES OF POSTMODERNISM - Metaphysically Underdetermined Beliefs - Myths About Literary Realism - Literature, Science, and Postmodernist Theory - Notes - Works Cited - IndexM.J.DEVANEY