SOURCE: "Postmodern Theory/Postmodern Fiction," in Clio, Vol. 16, No. 2, Winter, 1987, pp. 139-58.

In the following essay, Johnston surveys the theories of several postmodernist literary critics, including Brian McHale, Frederic Jameson, Patricia Waugh, and Michel Foucault.

In recent years the term "postmodernism" has acquired considerable currency, but without there being much consensus as to its meaning or even its legitimacy. For the sake of convenience, I would like to propose three categories for dealing with different versions of postmodernism: literary/aesthetic postmodernism, historical (or cultural) postmodernism, and theoretical postmodernism. In my critical remarks, however, I shall be less concerned with the periodization or the modern/postmodern break per se than with the extent to which these different approaches remain conceptually bound within a modernist domain which some contemporary works of fiction seem to have exceeded.

Probably the most familiar version of postmodernism is the literary or aesthetic one, of...