THE POSTMODERN INDIVIDUAL. BRITISH AND AMERICAN ILLUSTRATIONS

The present book tries to identify and ‘picture’ today’s individual acting against the background of such order, generated by a set of postmodern theories that advocate the idea that the individual subject is ‘dead’, that the monadic individual does not exist anymore and that personal identity is a ‘thing of the past’. In “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” (1998), Frederic Jameson identifies two positions on this matt er: on the one hand, there is the individual subject and the individualism of the bourgeois hegemonic class that has disappeared in corporate capitalism being replaced by “the so-called organization man”; on the other hand, there is the poststructuralist position that claims that the bourgeois individual is a myth, a “cultural mystifi cation which sought to persuade people that they ‘had’ individual subjects and possessed some unique personal identity”.