Post-Modernism

A movement in literature that attempts to communicate the instability of truth and the ways in which meaning is largely a matter of personal perspective. In the absence of a reliable or universal code of ethics, we must make do with the truth as we see it instead of pretending that there is a set truth out there waiting to be discovered. Post-Modernist literature tends to emphasize the broken condition of the present world without passing judgment on it; the world may be falling apart, but there is not much we can do about it. Language itself becomes less and less stable in this movement because authors begin to think that the older conventions of storytelling were based on a false confidence in the ability of language to get at the truth.