1. Against Post-Modernism
   A Marxist Critique
   Resource Type: Book
   Published: 1982
   Callinocos argues that the relativism preached by post-modernist leaves us with no objective criteria by which to reject those who would falsify the past.
2. An Annotated Bibliography of Nonsense
   Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
   Published: 1998
   Academic critics today not only question the impact of science upon society, but they also question the very idea of scientific rationality.
3. Bad Marxism
   Capitalism and Cultural Studies
   Resource Type: Book
   Published: 2004
   Cultural Studies commonly claims to be a radical discipline. This book thinks that's a bad assessment. After an introduction critiquing the 'Marxism' of the academy, Hutnyk provides detailed critical analyses of the approaches and theorists of cultural studies.
4. Deconstruction and the Interests of Theory
   Resource Type: Book
   Published: 1988
   
5. Deconstruction: Theory and Practice
   Resource Type: Book
   Published: 1982
   
6. Descent into Discourse
   The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History
   Resource Type: Book
   Published: 1990
   Critique of postmodernist and poststructuralist approaches in history.
7. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science
   Resource Type: Book
   Published: 1998
   The authors criticize postmodernism in academia for its misuses of scientific and mathematical concepts in postmodern writing. Fashionable Nonsense examines two related topics: (1) The incompetent and pretentious usage of scientific concepts by a small group of influential philosophers and intellectuals; (2) the problems of cognitive relativism, the idea that "modern science is nothing more than a 'myth', a 'narration' or a 'social construction' among many others". The stated goal of the book is not to attack "philosophy, the humanities or the social sciences in general...[but] to warn those who work in them (especially students) against some manifest cases of charlatanism," and in particular to "deconstruct" the notion that some books and writers are difficult because they deal with profound and difficult ideas. "If the texts seem incomprehensible, it is for the excellent reason that they mean precisely nothing." The book includes long extracts from the works of Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, and Jean Baudrillard who are considered by some to be leading academics of Continental philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis or social sciences. Sokal and Bricmont set out to show how those intellectuals have used concepts from the physical sciences and mathematics incorrectly. The extracts are intentionally rather long to avoid accusations of taking sentences out of context.
   Published in French as Impostures Intellectuelles and in the United Kingdom as Intellectual Impostures.
8. Harter's Precept: Review of The Social Misconstruction of Reality: Validity and Verification in the Scholarly Community
   Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
   Published: 1997
   Hamilton gives three major examples of erroneous theses that gained the status of fact in social science despite the absence of evidentiary support: (1) Max Weber's thesis that the Protestant Ethic spurred the advance of capitalism; (2) the widely accepted thesis that Hitler's main electoral support came from the lower middle classes (the despised petit bourgeoisie of Marxism); and (3) Michel Foucault's thesis that the modern prison evolved not as a more humane alternative to the cruel physical punishments of earlier centuries, but as part of a wide-ranging scheme by sinister forces to enforce a pervasive social conformity.
9. The Illusions of Postmodernism
   Resource Type: Book
   Published: 1996
   Eagleton explores the origins and emergence of postmodernism, revealing its ambivalences and contradictions. His primary concern is less with the more intricate formulations of postmodern philosophy than with the culture or milieu of postmodernism as a whole. Above all, he speaks to a particular kind of student, or consumer, of popular "brands" of postmodern thought.
10. In the Tracks of Historical Materialism
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1984
    
11. Logics of Disintegration
    Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1987
    
12. Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1992
    An explanation of the foundation of recent post-modern theory which also criticises the misogynist and patriarchal work of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Francois Lyotard.
13. The Origins of Post-Modernity
    Resource Type: Book
    Perry Anderson's book outlines the cultural changes that have accompanied the victory of global capitalism.
14. Postmodern Disrobed
    Review of Intellectual Impostures
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    Published: 1998
    An admirable job of exposing the daffy absurdity of postmodernism intellectuals.
15. Postmodernism and the Left
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    Published: 1997
    Barabara Epstein provides an overview of the approach and subculture of postmodernism and how they relate to, or conflict with, leftwing ideas.
16. Rationality/Science
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    Published: 1995
    Chomsky writes: "It strikes me as remarkable that the left today should seek to deprive oppressed people not only of the joys of understanding and insight, but also of tools of emancipation, informing us that the "project of the Enlightenment" is dead, that we must abandon the "illusions" of science and rationality--a message that will gladden the hearts of the powerful, delighted to monopolize these instruments for their own use."
17. The Social Misconstruction of Reality
    Validity and Verification in the Scholarly Community
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1996
    Analyzes erroneous theses that gained the status of fact in social science despite the absense of evidentiary support, and examines why this happened.
18. Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    Published: 1996
    Alan Sokal submitted this parody of postmodernism, poststructuralist theory, deconstruction, and political moralism to the journal Social Text. The editors failed to spot the hoax and published it as a serious article. The hoax caused a fierce debate between the postmodernists and those who consider postmodernism reactionary nonsense.
19. The Trouble with Theory
    The Educational Costs of Postmodernism
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2008
    Postmodern theory has engaged the hearts and heads of the brightest students because of its apparent political and social radicalism. Yet Kitching writes: "At the heart of postmodernism is very poor, deeply confused, and misbegotten philosophy. As a result even the very best students who fall under its sway produce radically incoherent ideas about language, meaning, truth, and reality."
20. Where Do Postmodernists Come From?
    Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
    Published: 1995
    Eagleton argues that left intellectuals have adopted postmodernism out of a sense of having been badly defeated, a belief that the left as a political tendency has little future. Culturalism, he argues, involves an extreme subjectivism combined with a deep pessimism, a sense that it isn't worth the effort to learn about the world, to analyze social systems, for instance, because they can't be changed anyway.

Experts on Post-Modernism in the Sources Directory

1. Connexions Library/Archive
2. MoMA Museum of Modern Art
3. Radical Digressions