Special issue: after postmodernism, nach der Postmoderne

The articles in the thematic section of this issue of Germanistik in Ireland are responses to the deliberately provocative title of After Postmodernism, specifically to the question: If we are finally „over? postmodernism, as has been suggested for some time now, then what becomes of the values, trends and attitudes associated with that allegedly by-gone „epoch?? If postmodernism is associated with hybridity, lack of political commitment, extremism, relativism, an anything-goes mentality, the ironic turn, the cultural turn, game-playing, globalization, the practices of late Capitalism, then what next? Does post-postmodernism entail a complete or partial departure from this, and, if so, in what form: reversal, negation, inversion, restoration? Additionally, in relation to the periodization difficulties associated with postmodernism, if it cannot be conceived as an epoch in the first place, how then do we move forward from it, if at all? With the first decade of the twenty-first century behind us – a period marked at one end by the 9/11 attacks, and at the other by financial meltdown – what possibilities (aesthetic, ethical, philosophical) does the category post-postmodern offer?