1 Postmodernity “I DON’T THINK WE’RE IN KANSAS ANYMORE,” commented Dorothy to Toto in The Wizard of Oz. Living in the early years of the twenty-first century, we might experience a similar sense of dislocation. As Dorothy realized something had changed, so critical writers of the past quarter-century remind us that the assumptions of much of the twentieth century—what is called “modernity”1—are not as they once were. The shift—called “postmodernity”—is away from previous philosophical underpinnings