The third part of the book is devoted to literary movements, with special emphasis on conceptualism and metarealism in poetry and the rearguard in prose, and includes a republication of original postmodernist literary manifestos of the 1980s.
The fourth part examines postmodernist concepts in visual art, in the theory of play/game and in the project of lyrical museum, with its specific relationship between words and things and the words and images.
The fifth part is devoted to those intellectual movements and theoretical reflections that accompanied and partly predetermined literary and artistic postmodernism, and includes a republication of original philosophical manifestos of the 1980s.
The sixth part outlines the boundaries of postmodernism and the ways of its self-transgression, highlighting the «post-postmodern» spaces for new sentimentality, counter-irony, trans-utopism, the removal of the «quotation mode» and imagining the future after the death of the «future».
Finally, the seventh part examines new cultural movements that arose on the basis of postmodernism and in contradiction with it, such as proto (vs post) and proteism, transculturalism (vs multiculturalism) and a new blend of technology and vitalism that characterizes the mentality of the first decades of the 21st century.
The Conclusion defines the role of postmodernism in the techno-informational evolution of humanity and analyzes the place of postmodernism as a specific cultural formation within the larger historical epoch of postmodernity which is now at its early stage.
The Appendix contains the author’s conversation with Andrey Bitov, one of the founders of Russian literary postmodernism.
A number of new concepts and terms are defined in the concise Glossary at the end of the book. A more detailed explanation of these and many other concepts denoting new directions in postmodern culture and theory can be found in M. Epstein’s book Proektivnyi slovar’ gumanitarnykh nauk (The Projective Dictionary of the Humanities; Moscow: NLO, 2017).