Post-postmodern Theories, Modernism Redux and the Post-Postmodern Framework

Since the 1990s, postmodernism has undergone the distinctively visible changes in the face of globalization and digital technology, as some theorists and critics claim that postmodernism is dead. Consequently, they have proposed many post-postmodern theories on this issue: remodernism, neomodernism, trans-postmodernism, performatism, altermodernism, digimodernism, metamodernism, transmodernism, and post-postmodernism not as a comprehensive term but as a cultural theory. As revealed from the rise and development of post-postmodern theories, they emerge as a result of the return to modernism. Therefore, modernism redux is examined to discover how it interacts with postmodernism in each theory: the return to modernism; and the integration or synthesis of modernism and postmodernism. In this context, metanarratives, one of the modern attributes, work as a common factor in the post-postmodern theories. From this study in terms of metanarratives, the post-postmodern framework, while echoing Charles Jencks’s critical modernism and Philip Galanter’s complexism, is expected to reach the goal of unveiling how the modern and postmodern attributes are integrated and synthesized into a new cultural entity on a new dimensional stage through interaction at the time of a paradigm shift. In consequence, the post-postmodern framework is revealed as an evolutionary system where the modern and postmodern attributes operate to create post-postmodernism, a new cultural environment. In addition, this mechanism of evolutionary process within the post-postmodern framework will continue to shape the cultural sensibilities years to come.