"My ideal postmodernist author neither merely repudiated nor merely imitates either his twentieth-century Modernist parents or his nineteenth-century premodernist grandparents. He has the first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back. Without lapsing into moral or artistic simplism, shoddy craftsmanship, Madison Avenue venality, or either false nor real naiveté, he nevertheless aspires to a fiction more democratic in its appeal than such late-modernist marvels (by my definition and my judgement) as Beckett's Stories and Texts for Nothing or Nabokov's Pale Fire. He may not hope to reach and move the devotees of James Michener and Irving Wallace - not to mention the lobotomized mass-media illiterates. But he should hope to reach and delight, at least part of the time, beyond the circle of what Mann used to call the Early Christians: professional devotees of high art"

Source: John Barth, "The Literature of Replenishment, Postmodernist Fiction", The Atlantic, January 1980, pp. 65-71. quoted in Charles Jencks. 1986. What is Post-Modernism? Third Edition 1989. pp. 9. Academy Editions London/ St. Martin's Press New York.

"The word and concept [of Post-Modernism] have changed over fifty years and have only reached such clarification in the last ten. (...) 'What is Post-Modernism?' It is a question, as well as the answer I will give, and one must see that its continual growth and movement mean that no definitive answer is possible - at least until it stops moving"

Source: Charles Jencks. 1986. What is Post-Modernism? Third Edition 1989. Page 7. Academy Editions London/ St. Martin's Press New York.

"Post-Modernism is fundamentally the eclectic mixture of any tradition with that of the immediate past: it is both the continuation of Modernism and its transcendence. Its best works are characteristically doubly-coded and ironic, making a feature of the wide choice, conflict and discontinuity of traditions, because this heteregeneity most clearly captures our pluralism. Its hybrid style is opposed to the minimalism of Late-Modern ideology and all revivals which are based on an exclusive dogma or taste"

Source: Charles Jencks. 1986. What is Post-Modernism? Third Edition 1989. Page 7. Academy Editions London/ St. Martin's Press New York.

"The Post-Modern Age is a time of incessant choosing. It's an era when no orthodoxy can be adopted without self-consiousness and irony, because all traditions seem to have some validity."

Source: Charles Jencks. 1986. What is Post-Modernism? Third Edition 1989. Page 7. Academy Editions London/ St. Martin's Press New York.

"Post-Modernism is fundamentally the eclectic mixture of any tradition with that of the immediate past: it is both the continuation of Modernism and its transcendence"

Source: Charles Jencks. 1986. What is Post-Modernism? Third Edition 1989. Page 7. Academy Editions London/ St. Martin's Press New York.

"The modern age, which sounds as if it would last forever, is fast becoming a thing of the past. Industrialisation is quickly giving way to Post-Industrialisation, factory labour to home and office work and, in the arts, the tradition of the New is leading to the combination of many traditions. (...) The Post-Modern Age is a time of incessant choosing. It's an era when no orthodoxy can be adopted without self-consiousness and irony, because all traditions seem to have some validity. This is partly a consequence of what is called the information explosion, the advent of organised knowledge, world communication and cybernetics. It is not only the rich who become collectors, eclectic travellers in time with a superabundance of choice, but almost every urban dweller. Pluralism, the 'ism' of our time, is both the great problem and the great oportunity: where Everyman becomes a Cosmopolite and Everywoman a Liberated individual, confusion and anxiety become ruling states of mind and ersatz a common form of mass-culture. This is the price we pay for a Post-Modern Age, as heavy in its way as the monotony, dogmatism and poverty of the modern epoch. But, in spite of many attempts in Iran and elsewhere, it is impossible to return to a previous culture and industrial form, impose a fundamentalist religion or even a Modernist orthodoxy. Once a world communication system and form of cybernetic production have emerged they create their own necessities and they are, barring a nuclear war, irreversible."

Source: Charles Jencks. 1986. What is Post-Modernism? Third Edition 1989. Page 7. Academy Editions London/ St. Martin's Press New York.