The Imbalanced Archipelago – Postmodernism in the Range of Critical Gunfire

Abstract

The text sets out to present a critical context where the debate surrounding the representations of postmodernism is regarded as still engaging. Virgil Nemoianu provides a troublesome image of cultural postmodernism as an epitome of chaos menacing traditional values or as a dangerous network of egalitarian views on literature, art, and religion.
His book Postmodernism and Cultural Identities (Spandugino, 2018) seems to bring forth a series of critical outlines which can be read as oppositions to Matei Calinescu’s “fifth face of modernity” (if we employ the framework of Romanian-American critical discourse as a reading background). My paper seeks to identify the “faces” of critical conservatism in Nemoianu’s discourse, to find some of their sources in the author’s previous works or in other theoretical approaches to postmodernism.