When I first learned of the existence of this thing called postmodernism, I was amazed: how had something so vast as to be practically uncategorizeable - a something encompassing not just aesthetics but a sense of reality - have escaped my attention for so long (I was about twenty years old)? And then I realized the more amazing thing: this something had preceded me, according to the standard periodization, by almost twenty years!

What does this mean for one's position with regard to a cultural development - that is, whether one has seen it come into being, or, on the other hand, been born into it? In one case, the observer realizes the thing as it is happening around him. In the other, one looks around and realizes that one has been blind to one's own reality, not because it has crept up on you, but because you are saturated with it.

How many scholars of postmodernity are younger than it? What is the effect of this lag of the scholars behind the object of their scholarship? What will happen when those born after, say, 1980 will come to dominate academic discourse on the postmodern (if there is any such thing as academic discourse by then)?

Striking as it was for me to notice postmodernism, what I discovered was, in large measure, a corpse.