The Encyclopedia of Postmodernism provides comprehensive and authoritative coverage of academic disciplines, critical terms and central figures relating to the vast field of postmodern studies. With three cross-referenced sections, the volume is easily accessible to readers with specialized research agendas and general interests in contemporary cultural, historical, literary and philosophical issues.
Since its inception in the 1960s, postmodernism has emerged as a significant cultural, political and intellectual force that many scholars would argue defines our era. Postmodernism, in its various configurations, has consistently challenged concepts of selfhood, knowledge formation, aesthetics, ethics, history and politics. This Encyclopedia offers a wide-range of perspectives on postmodernism that illustrates the plurality of this critical concept that is so much part of our current intellectual debates. In this regard, the volume does not adhere to a single definition of postmodernism as much as it documents the use of the term across a variety of academic and cultural pursuits.
The Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, it must be noted, resists simply presenting postmodernism as a new style among many styles occuring in the post-disciplinary academy. Documenting the use of the term acknowledges that postmodernism has a much deeper and long-lasting effect on academic and cultural life. In general, the volume rests on the understanding that postmodernism is not so much a style as it is an on-going process, a process of both disintegration and reformation.

In the last three decades, Postmodernism has emerged as a significant cultural, political and intellectual force that has left unyielding critiques of architecture, selfhood, knowledge formation, ethics, history, economics and politics in its wake. While there are countless texts today that chronicle the advent and current status of postmodernism, most of the primary and historically significant accounts of postmodernism took place in scholarly journals long before the publication of these books. Until now, these pertinent and historically necessary texts remain uncollected. This title aims to provides scholars with an interdisciplinary collection of essays that map out the ways in which postmodernism is conceptualized and demonstrate how it has caused a wide range of traditions and disciplines to redefine their objects of study and modes of inquiry.

This text argues for the possibility of theological thinking in a postmodern secular milieu. Moving beyond the now familiar reiteration of postmodernity's losses - the death of God, the displacement of the self, the end of history, the closure of the book - Winquist equates a desire to think theologically with a desire, amidst postmodernity's disappointments, for a thinking that does not disappoint. To desire theology in this sense is to desire to know an "other" in and of language that can be valued in the forming of personal and communal identity. In this book, "desiring theology" carries another sense as well, for Winquist argues that, in the wake of psychoanalysis, theology must elaborate the meaning and importance of desire in its own discourse. Winquist's work is tactical as well as theoretical, showing what kind of work theology can do in a postmodern age. He suggests that theology is closely akin to what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari refer to as a minor intensive use of a major language. The minor intensive theological use of language, Winquist argues, pressures the ordinary weave of discourse and opens it to desire. Thus theology becomes a work against "the disappointment of thinking". Engaged with the work of Nietzsche, Derrida, Tillich, Robert P. Scharlemann and Mark C. Taylor, among others, this book aims to provide a contribution to contemporary theology.