Perspectives: Postmodernism Key Words 2

• The Enlightenment Project
• The attempt to define and explain the human predicament through science as well as to achieve mastery over it through the use of a social technology.
• Modernity
•  A topic in the humanities and social sciences, is both a historical period, as well as the ensemble of particular socio-cultural norms, attitudes and practices that arose in the wake of the Renaissance—in the "Age of Reason" of 17th-century thought and the 18th-century "Enlightenment".
• Structuralism
• A method of interpretation and analysis of aspects of human cognition, behaviour, culture, and experience, which focuses on relationships of contrast between elements in a conceptual system. It is the methodology that implies elements of human culture must be understood by way of their relationship to a broader, overarching system or structure. It works to uncover the structures that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel. 
• Ahistorial
• Lacking historical perspective or context.
• Irreducible
• Not able to be reduced or simplified.
• Objective
• Someone who is not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts. It is a philosophical concept of being true independently from individual subjectivity caused by perception, emotions, or imagination. A proposition is considered to have objective truth when its truth conditions are met without bias caused by a sentient subject.
• Universal
• Relating to or done by all people or things in the world or in a particular group; applicable to all cases.
• Definitive
•  Done or reached decisively and with authority.
• Poststructuralism
• An extension and critique of structuralism, especially as used in critical textual analysis. The term is defined by its relationship to the system before it- structuralism.  Common themes include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of structuralism and an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute those structures.
• Reflexivity
• An act of self-reference where examination or action "bends back on", refers to, and affects the entity instigating the action or examination. It  refers to circular relationships between cause and effect, especially as embedded in human belief structures.
• The Unreliable Narrator
• A narrator whose credibility has been seriously compromised. It is a cognitive theory of unreliability that rests on the readers values and her sense that a discrepancy exists between the narrator's statements and perceptions and other information given by the text.