Top 10 postmodern books

Stuart Jeffries is a journalist and author. He was for many years on the staff of the Guardian, working as subeditor, TV critic, Friday Review editor and Paris correspondent. He now works as a freelance writer, mostly for the Guardian, Spectator, Financial Times and the London Review of Books.

Jeffries's latest book is Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern.

[P]ostmodernism," Jeffries writes, is "the slippery successor to modernism which seems to be an expression of neoliberal economics as much as it is an effort to dismantle cultural hierarchies."

At the Guardian he tagged ten top postmodern books. One title on the list:

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler

Is this randomly generated, syntactically correct nonsense or the book we need if we are to overturn the heteronormative patriarchy? You decide. Postmodern artists such as Cindy Sherman, David Bowie and Madonna had already playfully demonstrated the idea that gender is scripted and performed. Butler expanded on this theme in scandalously duff prose, eulogising drag for challenging “the exclusion of those who fail to conform to unspoken normative requirements of the subject”. Which is the thing to say if someone challenges you about watching Danny La Rue or RuPaul.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue