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The Postmodern Adventure: Science, Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium
 
 

The Postmodern Adventure: Science, Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium [Paperback]

Steven Best PhD , Douglas Kellner
4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
Price: CDN$ 27.50 & this item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. Details
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"For the past decade, Best and Kellner have been our guides to postmodernity. Now they turn their attention to the new century: its challenges and prospects for radical democracy. Their combination of clear prose, insightful analysis, and theoretical mastery is as imposing as it is welcome. Bravo!"--Toby Miller, Department of Cinema Studies, New York University

"This is an exceptional and absolutely essential book for anyone concerned with the interface of science, technology, the new electronic media, and the promise of cultural studies. It is a 'must read' for teachers, students, and others seeking to critically engage the complexity of a world that demands a new vocabulary, cultural pedagogy, and politics."--Henry Giroux, Waterbury Chair Professor, Penn State University

"Best and Kellner are philosophers with a difference: they write brilliantly about the real world. The Postmodern Adventure articulates what is really new and strange about contemporary culture, without the hyperbole and jargon that is so off-putting in most postmodern writing. The book is politically engaged, clearly written, and sparkling with provocative analyses of current events and ideas. There's nothing else like it--read this book and enjoy!"--Andrew Feenberg, San Diego State University

"This pathbreaking book provides a view of postmodernism through the lenses of critical social theory, science and technology studies, and cultural studies--a unique achievement in itself. Best and Kellner subvert many guiding assumptions underlying the modern academic division of labor. Above all, they show how a deeply refined critical social theory can be a powerful weapon in the service of intellectual critique, political understanding, and social change. I highly recommend this text."--Carl Boggs, School of Arts and Sciences, National University

Product Description

Massive geopolitical shifts and dramatic developments in computerization and biotechnology are heralding the transformation from the modern to the postmodern age. We are confronted with altered modes of work, communication, and entertainment; new postindustrial and political networks; novel approaches to warfare; genetic engineering; and even cloning. This compelling book explores the challenges to theory, politics, and human identity that we face on the threshold of the third millennium. It follows on the success of Best and Kellner s two previous books: Postmodern Theory, acclaimed as the best critical introduction to the field, and The Postmodern Turn, which provides a powerful mapping of postmodern developments in the arts, politics, science, and theory. In The Postmodern Adventure, Best and Kellner analyze a broad array of literary, cultural, and political phenomena--from fiction, film, science, and the Internet, to globalization and the rise of a transnational image culture. They use the best of modern and postmodern perspectives to illuminate contemporary life and to strive for a just and viable future.

Inside This Book (Learn More)
First Sentence
The alleged end of modernity and the rise of postmodernity has been much debated, but sustained analysis and grounding of claims for a postmodern divide in society and history are rarely advanced. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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3 Reviews
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4.3 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars ForeWord's Gold Medal 2001 Book of the Year in Philosophy, May 16 2002
By 
Richard Kahn (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Postmodern Adventure: Science, Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium (Paperback)
Simply put: this book is an award winner from the two guys who have published the classic survey text Postmodern Theory, and who then followed up with the book that pretty much inaugurated the field of Critical Postmodernism in America, The Postmodern Turn, in which they mapped the emerging intersections of critical theory, art and aesthetics, philosophy, cultural studies, and the quantum changes in the sciences. That book won the Michael Harrington Award for the Best Book of 1998, New Political Science Section.

I can honestly say that The Postmodern Adventure is twice the book that the last in the series was (and that book was clearly no slouch!). Best & Kellner clearly (but sophisticatedly) chart the complex novelties of our present moment -- illuminating the relationships between such diverse phenomena as Virtuality and the Internet-work, American war and terrorism, Cosmology, Animal Rights, and Biotechnology and Cloning. All of this is seen through the guiding lens of Thomas Pynchon's multiplicitous vision of the Rocket in Gravity's Rainbow.

At the end, Best & Kellner point thinkers and scholars alike toward a future which is fast emerging everywhere at the extremes of Utopia/Dystopia. It is our Adventure to fight creatively and constructively for the former, while critically analyzing the latter, to make of theory a space of practice, and to open our narrow frameworks for living up and out toward the cosmic whole in the name of social justice.

Yes, if you are looking for salon-swinging Frenchmen, their cigarettes held dramatically aloft as they speak incomprehensible oaths to the end of metaphysics, then this is not the Postmodernism for you. This is Critical Postmodernism -- an analysis and a synthesis, a great college text and an interesting read after work, a political statement and a theoretical foundation for others to make their own. Think Deep Ecology meets Cyberpunk meets the Fight for Democracy and you may begin to appreciate just what's going on here...do you think that's a Frankenstein's monster? Good -- that's in there too: go ahead and read!

We live in a revolutionary time -- this book awakens the Postmodernisms afoot in both American soil and abroad to the grander narrative of this amazing moment: counselling the age-old wisdom that "Philosophy begins in wonder," but to this we must add the Postmodern element of flow, of "wander." Adding wonder to wander, Best & Kellner arrive at "Adventure" -- the Postmodern Adventure.

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5.0 out of 5 stars A cross-section of disciplines is revealed, Oct 11 2001
This review is from: The Postmodern Adventure: Science, Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium (Paperback)
This college-level survey of science, technology and cultural studies provides challenges to theory, politics and issues which we face in modern times. A cross-section of disciplines is revealed in a title which is billed as philosophy but which includes a strong examination of science and culture. Students within many scientific disciplines will find its discussions intriguing - and scholarly.
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3.0 out of 5 stars All the Trendy Horses, Sep 11 2001
This review is from: The Postmodern Adventure: Science, Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium (Paperback)
Part of the fun of reading postmodern criticism is its outlandishness,its attacks on conventional modern modes of thought. Best and Kellner, well-versed in the theories of Derrida, Lacan, Baudrillard, Bordieu and the other wild beasts of France and their worldwide acolytes, manage to take much of the fun right out them. In a style that is pendantic, dull, but full of insight, they trace the interpenetration of the modern with the postmodern and talk reasonably about the irreasonable. Good content, bad style.
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