Postmodern Literary Theory: An Introduction

When I was young I sometimes lay in bed and tried to imagine infinity. In the Critique of Judgment (1790) Kant suggested that when we attempt this sort of thing we confront an empty abstraction: what we are experiencing here is “the sublime”. In an essay appended to the English version of The Postmodern Condition Jean‐François Lyotard (1984) suggested that the idea of “the world” (in the sense of everything that exists) is sublime in the Kantian sense. He argued that the point of modern art and literature is “to make visible that there is something which can be conceived...