In social theory, the distinction between the modern and postmodern was normalized as a legitimate form of conceptualization, although differences remained over its usefulness in general. This chapter sorts out appropriate uses of the discourse of the postmodern, and the usefulness of the postmodern turn in contemporary theory, as well as some abuses of the discourse. It suggests that distinctions between the modern and the postmodern in a wide range of issues can highlight novelties in the contemporary moment and discontinuities with the past, but that the distinction in question between the modem and the postmodern must be clearly explicated. The chapter argues that postmodern discourses help provide theoretical mappings and social narratives of the major novelties and developments in contemporary society, culture, and theory and can articulate continuities and discontinuities with the past in the present moment.

All of the evidence seems to suggest that Leonard Cohen’s fan base had more women than men. Perhaps Leonard’s focus on desire, on wanting rather than having, enhanced his appeal to women. Women featured prominently in Cohen’s life and music – as objects of desire, as muses, as torturers, as partners, bandmates, audiences, and as fans. Cohen’s representations of women’s desire make his songs so appealing to female listeners. Arnet’s title comes from something Cohen said in 1968: “I wish the women would hurry up and take over … I really am for the matriarchy.” His songs express this point by giving us female characters who have agency. Numerous great women artists, from Judy Collins to Nina Simone to Tori Amos, have recorded Cohen’s songs and in various ways made them their own.

Part of a series of four dialogues with contemporary art and writing practitioners whose work represents a critical intervention in thinking about gesture, politics, and embodiment – across art, writing, and theory – and the various entanglements found therein. This dialogue on gesture takes the form of an experimental epistolary exchange between the artist Jade Montserrat and artist-theorist Erin Manning.

Chapter 2 rehearses Rochester's upbringing because it is here that we find the basic orientation of his life. Rochester's orientation, like so many artists and writers, was pious. It arose from his early childhood training and subsequent education, in a conglomerate of values that included love and honour for parents, governors, and princes, a belief in their authority, an equally deep belief in the truth of the Christian religion, of the honour claimed and due the aristocracy, and of the graceful performance of all the duties of peace and war that makes such honour, rooted in social origin, also a matter of merit. The emotional links – emotional because formed in childhood – with this aristocratic and heroic world are everywhere present in Rochester's work and life, even when, perhaps most of all when, he or his personae are violating them. A disillusioned Rochester came to doubt this basic orientation, opening himself up to new ways of accounting for his own motivations and of others’, and beginning a search for new duties, new authorities. It is this attempt to banish the past and to replace its claims of authority with new ones that Rochester’s poetry, though in no systematic way, records. The chapter goes on to show that ‘A Ramble’ was the first poem to record this process in all its complexity.

This chapter discusses different versions of the representation of Saint Jerome that Dürer completed during his lifetime as part of a constant search for the best possible representation of Saint Jerome. In order to do justice to his various roles as hermit, author, scholar, and man of the church Dürer was inspired by those who had previously experimented with the subject in Italy and in Northern Europe as they motivated him to find new solutions. The culmination in the 1514 engraving of Saint Jerome in his Study is of a wise and spiritual intellectual paired with a world full of material objects which encourage the viewer to connect with Jerome's life as well as everyday aspects of quotidian life in Nuremberg.

In this chapter, Thomas Paul Burgess relates how he met Tom Coulter – ‘TC’ – who was, by some distance, the best street fighter in Loyalist North Belfast. TC was the leader of the ‘Debs’, short for Debonairs. TC was the author’s best mate, even though he was a year older and a few classes academically higher than him at Belfast Boys Model School in the north of the city. TC boasted family links with the working-class Shankill Road. At that time, the Shankill was increasingly suffering from the violence of street riots, bombs and a brutal redevelopment scheme that ripped the heart out of the community. So his mother sought to secure a better future by applying to the recently established Northern Ireland Housing Executive to be rehoused elsewhere.

The postmodernity debate may have been a fleeting affair but in its time it was indispensable. Like many other good intentions, it went astray. The freedom to choose identity, like all freedoms, has its positive and negative aspects. What is celebrated in most postmodernist literature is the positive aspect: freedom to choose at will the difference of one's liking and to make it stick "modern suggests a mode of fantasy in which security and enjoyment are derived by attempting to control order and regulate the self others and sociopolitical world." The second "postmodern suggests a mode of fantasy in which reflective space is more central to identity and politics.

Nineteen-year-old Sasha comes to Moscow to pursue his dream of becoming an actor. He gains entry into a prestigious theatrical university, where he meets Pavel, another student who is about to graduate. They are attracted to each other and soon become sexually involved. Pavel takes Sasha on walks around Moscow, showing him the places where people like them meet. Their acquaintance takes place against the backdrop of night disappearances and brutal mass arrests of Soviet people.

Leonard Cohen came of age in the 1950s, prior to the youth rebellions of the 1960s. Nevertheless, his emergence as a songwriter and recording artist in the later 1960s occurred in the midst of the counterculture of the period. If Cohen always dressed like a visitor to that scene from an earlier time, he often behaved in a way that was very much in keeping with the youth culture of the time. His relationships and representations of them are an expression of what was called the “sexual revolution.” His use of drugs, while not a major subject of his songs, was consistent with the habits of the rock stars of that moment. His search for spiritual and personal fulfillment over and above traditional markers of success illustrates another dimension of the counterculture. This chapter explores Cohen’s complicated relationship to this cultural phenomenon, which involves mutual influence and a certain distance.