the.com/postmodernism

means A late-20th-century movement in art, architecture, and thought that rejected grand universal truths and stable meanings in favor of irony, fragmentation, pastiche, and the idea that reality is shaped by language and perspective.

from Built plainly from 'post-' (after) plus 'modernism,' it first surfaced in early-to-mid-20th-century debates about architecture and the arts, marking a break from modernism's faith in progress, pure form, and singular truth. The term gained its real philosophical weight from French theorists later in the century, who used it to describe a broader suspicion toward 'master narratives' — the big, totalizing stories (religious, scientific, political) that claim to explain everything. So the word itself is simple — just 'after modernism' — but what came after turned out to be anything but simple.