Source: A review of The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, in Southern Humanities Review, Vol. XIX, No. 4, Fall, 1985, pp. 874-77.

In the following review of The Postmodern Condition, Conroy outlines and evaluates the principal concepts of postmodernism.

Although there is considerable evidence that the phenomenon known as modernism has yet to be adequately grasped by those who would make cultural analysis their business, and that the current obsession with fin-de-siècle Vienna among other indices reveals an awareness of this inadequacy, nevertheless the pitiless onrush of events now deposits something called postmodernism for our consideration. The term thus far is as ill-defined as it is un-aesthetic: a colleague vowed once that he would not become interested in postmodernism “until they decided to call it something else.” This fact has not kept the problematic from assuming ever greater prominence; and the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, ever sensitive...