In this essay, the use of postmodern rhetorical irony as a subversive strategy is explored. In particular, Susan Dorothea White's painting, The First Supper, is analyzed as a subversive, postmodern ironic reading of Leonardo da Vinci's famed work, The Last Supper. This analysis suggests that subversive irony assumes distinctive and complex technical and theoretical characteristics, most relevan...

Although western drama from Ibsen and Strindberg to the late twentieth century is often lumped together under the rubric of "modern drama," it is rare to come across a mention of "modern design." If design styles are discussed at all, it is usually when they are plainly related to identifiable art movements such as Constructivism or Surrealism or various branches of realism-suggestive realism, ...

In examining the postmodern turn in counseling and its implications for school counseling practice, it is suggested that in postmodern approaches, there is a change in the use of the narrative metaphor, a shift from the therapeutic focus on problems to solutions, and a reinterpretation of the meanings of the core counseling values that sustain the client-counselor therapeutic relationship. An i...

Although childbirth is fundamentally involved with the issue of women's bodies, it is also involved with such social values as politics, economics, medicine, and other phenomena characteristic of a particular time and culture. In this article I divide Japanese society and childbirth into pre-modern, modern, and postmodern phases, with special emphasis on the postmodern phase. I use the word "po...

Whilst the discipline of psychology has an indigenous critical and feminist tradition, postmodern feminist approaches have developed from, as well as alongside, the broader philosophical and theoretical critiques generated initially in other disciplines. The focus of postmodern feminist work in psychology is on the construction of gender and relations of power. It seeks to unpack the discursive...

Identity has become a much-used word. The term captures the dilemma of self, for it describes and seems to explain the contradictions of living in a society that appears to be in constant change. Similarly, 'postmodernism', 'postmodernity', and 'postmodern' have become widely-used terms in public life as well as in the social sciences. In this context, indentity-construction and maintenance in ...

A connection is often made between postmodernism and nihilism, but the full meaning of such a connection is rarely explored. The contemporary Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo is one of the few philosophers to have devoted much work to explaining this connection. Vattimo extrapolates the relevance of Nietzsche’s theory of nihilism for the postmodern condition, arguing that the concept of the p...