This text is incredibly helpful for anyone trying to understand post-modernism, however there is one catch: you must know the language and you need at least a passing familiarity with history and philosophy.This is not a pick-up and go for post-modernism, but an in-depth study of the essence of the postmodern mood and questions as posed by several revolutionary thinkers such as Foucalt, Derrida, and Lyotard. With excerpts and full essays by these thinkers and more of their peers, you will grapple with many of the questions they posed. Each comes with an introduction by the author and editor.In fact, the introduction to this collection is wonderfully insightful on its own, if a bit reductive.If you do not have a good handle on terms such as "encode, decode, modern, narrative" or similar literary and philosophical concepts, I recommend you hold off on reading this work, or at the very least search for material on the internet to explain these concepts before proceeding.Some of the collected essays are quite challenging, particularly Derrida's. Read near the computer so that you can query every unexplained concept you come across (and there will be many as Derrida rarely bothered to stop and explain himself).I wholeheartedly recommend this text and am incredibly pleased with the things I have taken from it. My only reason for not giving it five stars is the considerable difficulty novices to literary theory would encounter in struggling through the text which makes it hardly introductory, even with the masterful preface and commentary by Drolet.