#modernism

The best way to measure the loss of intellectual sophistication - this "nerdification," to put it bluntly - is in the growing disappearance of sarcasm, as mechanic minds take insults a bit too literally. ↗

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#intellectual-sophistication #internet #irony #nerd #nerdery

Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' conscience; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding the mirror." I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves. Mephi replied, "History suggests, not until they are made to. ↗

— David Mitchell

#cloud-atlas #disgust #hate #history #postmodern

The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#literature #postmodernism #humor

A "modern" man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the dead limb of time like lice. ↗

— Elias Canetti

#because #dead #drop #lice #like

If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and those who claim to be the bearers of objective immortal truth, then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, we Fascists conclude that we have the right to create our own ideology and to enforce it with all the energy of which we are capable. ↗

— Benito Mussolini

#postmodernism #attitude

Postmodernism is an academic theory, originating in academia with an academic elite, not in the world of women and men, where feminist theory is rooted. ↗

— Catharine MacKinnon

#academic #elite #feminist #men #originating

Postmodernism refuses to privilege any one perspective, and recognizes only difference, never inequality, only fragments, never conflict. ↗

— Elizabeth Wilson

#conflict #difference #fragments #inequality #never

Hell hath no fury like a coolly received postmodernist. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#postmodernism #humor

Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals. ↗

— Jean Baudrillard

#postmodernity #nostalgia

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men. ↗

— Jeffrey Eugenides

#literary-criticism #literary-theory #narrative #nineteenth-century #novels