From the late 1980s onwards, novelists, artists, critics and art historians have foreseen the death of postmodernism. Linda Hutcheon, in the second edition of The Politics of Postmodernism (2002), declared: it's over. The contemporary period – starting with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and gathering momentum throughout the 1990s and beyond – is often said to have a distinct intensity, and thus feels like a moment in which, in the words of the narrator in Ben Lerner's novel 10.04, we find the world rearranging itself.Postmodernism has taken various guises and, accordingly, there is no absolute consensus on what constituted it in the first place. Fredric Jameson characterized it in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism as the loss of historicity, a lack of depth and meaningfulness and a waning of emotional affect, while Brian McHale in Postmodernist Fiction (1987) argued that postmodernism is defined…
