SOURCE: "Postmodernity and Hermeneutics," in boundary 2, Vol. V, No. 2, 1977, pp. 363-93.

In the following essay, Palmer defends his postulation that postmodernism is an aesthetic movement of limited duration, and that modernity indicates the era beginning with the Renaissance and continuing into the present.

I. Beyond Postmodernism to Postmodernity

"These are apocalyptic times, Doctor," says Strelnikov in Doctor Zhivago, and the same might be said today. Andrew Hacker has said that we stand at "the end of the American era,"¹ but the more sobering thought is that we stand at the end of the modern era, an era stretching back not just two hundred but five hundred years. The "storming of the mind" to which Robert Hunter refers² is the storming of the modern mind: not the mind of modernism, the modern mind.

Something like a general effort to break out of the limits of "modern" thinking is becoming...