Date: Thu, 21 Sep 1995 07:39:18 -0500 From: H-GERMAN EDITOR Dan Rogers To: Multiple recipients of list H-GERMAN Subject: Origins of "Postmodernism" Submitted by: Bert Gordon In response to John Conway's query, I would like to note the following: usage of the term "modo" in the 5th and 6th centuries AD in Rome, referred to the "new," as in the writings of Cassiodorus, preferring the "old" Romans to the "new" or "modo" Germano-Romans of his time. By logical extension, if the term "modo," from which, presumably, "modern" is derived, refers to what is new and current, another way of saying, life, then the meaning of "postmodern" becomes clear. Umberto Eco and Ihab Hassan have both argued that "modern" and "postmodern" are styles without relation to chronology. It is therefore possible to have a "postmodern" that precedes the "modern," and, in fact, Jean-Francois Lyotard (in "Postmodern for Children") argued that postmodern, rather than being the end of the modern, was the permanent birth of the modern. The "Historisches Worterbuch der Philosophie" refers to a 1984 definition of the postmodern as the rejection of the present in the name of the future, which sounds a bit like the justifications of the Stalin purge trials. Things get even muddier in the usage of these terms. For anyone wanting more, I offer my own little article, "Modernism and Postmodernism: Some Historical Reflections," in the Proceedings of the 17th European Studies Conference, in the European Studies Journal, 1992, pp. 169-183. Bert Gordon, History Mills College .