Become a Postmodern Critic

Bakhtinian Fountains: Adam’s Rib(it) as Signifier vs. Eve(ry)one’s Narrative

“[Your nemesis] privileges the classist project,” or “[Your friend] subverts phallocentric discourse.”
Here are some other hints. Be sure to pluralize as much as possible as in “decentering hegemonic strategies,” or “deterritorializing disjunctive processualities.” Use parentheses freely to deconstruct words and create arcane puns which show that you are not really heavily invested in what you are writing. For instance, in an essay about gender, you might well write about “displacing her(men)eutic constructs.” It is important to change parts of speech to allow your subject its full complexity. It is good postmodernist usage, for instance, to add -(at)ize to form verbs, and -ization to form nouns: “to problematize textual historitizations.” Add de-, non-, or un- to negate, as in “devalorization,” “nonlogocentric,” or “unmarginalizing.” Finally, you should nearly always use a colon in your title and, if possible, a nonfinite -ing participle, which helps you deconstruct your own title, as in “Interrogating Bod(ies): Gendering Colonialist Narratives,” or “Defamiliarzing the Centers: Fetishizing Monological Discourses.”

Begin your work. Now you’re a postmodernist critic!