Postmodernism: a new sensitivity

Abstract

The avant-garde spirit that characterized modernity weakens at the end of World War II. At this juncture Postmodernism is born as a response to the canonization of modernism, as a new sensibility and a reaction that transformed the aesthetic models and life patterns. Its influence was widespread, affecting many aspects of social life and changing both the perception people had of the history and time, as the value it had the notion of progress and the
idea of perfectibility as a facilitator of human activity into the future. It was a movement that challenged the ideals of modernity, globalization of tastes, rationalism and pragmatism that inspired a social function of art, as the functionality that imposed on some of the arts a non decorative style. It was also a movement that, from eclecticism, erased the differences between the arts, and the gulf between high art and popular art. The article has three parts: the first covers generally the issue of Postmodernism, the break that this new episteme generated, and the changes that occurred both in philosophical thought
and in the way of understanding and take of everyday existence, in aesthetic experience and other areas of society. In the second part, it deals with some
characteristics of postmodern literature. And, third, the analysis of two novels by Elena Poniatowska, “Hasta no verte Jesus Mio” and “La noche de Tlatelolco”, which can serve as examples or illustration of some of the features already set.