I still see many people saying that we are Postmodern writers, but I believe that Postmodernism left us in the mid-seventies. What do the rest of you think?

The label-maker seems to be more the tool of marketing industry or as a convenient shorthand for reducing an otherwise complex and diverse group of writers/painters/media-workers, etc., for mostly pedagogical purposes. Conceptually, I find the term 'postmodernism' highly problematic since, as its name seems to suggest, we are creating "after" modernism as if some of the perennial problems associated with modernism have been resolved or muffled. To further complicate matters, the timeline for what is considered "the postmodern" does not have a stable coherence among different disciplines; i.e., what the visual arts will temporally dub postmodern occurs at a different time than, say, literature or sociology. Furthermore, we could complicate this more by considering that different geographical locales "experience" the onset of what is considered postmodernity at different times. For my money, I like what Foucault says about attempting to bracket historical periods in that we cannot really lay claim to knowing the quiddity of a period until the fat lady sings. Without consensus on a textbook definition of the term, it is difficult to speak of it with any precision, but by the same token a readymade definition would be a reductionist oversimplification.

--Kane Faucher