The Post-everything Generation

I never expected to gain any new insight into the nature of my generation, or the changing landscape of American colleges, in Literature Theory. Literature Theory is supposed to be the class where you sit at the back of the room with every other jaded（疲惫的）sophomore wearing skinny jeans, thick-framed glasses, an ironic tee-shirt and over-sized retro（复古的）headphones, just waiting for lecture to be over so you can walk to lunch while listening to Wilco. That' s pretty much the way I spent the course, too; through structuralism, formalism, gender theory, and post-colonialism, I was far too busy shuffling through my Ipod to see what the patriarchal world order of capitalist oppression had to do with Ethan Frome. But when we began to study postmodernism, something struck a chord with me and made me sit up and look anew at the seemingly blase（冷漠的） college-aged literati（文人，文学 界）of which I was so self-consciously one.

According to my textbook, the problem with defining postmodernism is that it's impossible. The difficulty is that it is so...post. It defines itself so negatively against what came before it-naturalism, romanticism and the wild revolution of modernism—that it , s sometimes hard to see what it actually is. It denies that anything can be explained neatly or even at all. It is parodic（模仿的）, detached, strange, and sometimes menacing to traditionalists who do not understand it. Although it arose in the post-war west (the term was coined in 1949), the generation that has witnessed its ascendance （优越）hasn't yet come up with an explanation of what postmodern attitudes mean for the future of culture or society. The subject intrigued me because, in a class otherwise consumed by dead-letter theories, postmodernism remained an open book, tempting to the young and curious.