After studying this chapter, students should understand and be able to discuss the following:
The causes and characteristics of the two postwar economic and political systems of the superpowers and their allies
The major economic and political trends among the nations of western Europe
Domestic developments within the Soviet Union from 1970 to the present
Domestic developments within the United States from 1970 to the present
The causes and results of the emergence of the third world states
The causes of the changes in international relations since 1970
The emergence of the United States as a single superpower in 1990
The major global problems confronting the world in 1994
The major intellectual and cultural movements and their leaders since 1970
The renewal of feminism, its chief advocates and their messages
The discoveries and inventions in science and technology and their impact on Western culture from 1970 to the present, culminating in the Information Age and the Internet
The postmodern novel and novelists
The major developments, trends, and sculptors of late modernism
The general characteristics of postmodernism and its most important features
The postmodernist painters, sculptors, installation artists, video artists, and architects and representative works
The key developments, important innovations, and leading composers in late modernist and postmodern music
The world in the first decade of the 21st century, reflecting its heritage from earlier civilizations: making militant nationalism once again a force for disruptive change around the world, specifically in the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia; moving away from an international scene dominated by the superpowers to one governed by a multipolar arrangement; the conflict of the United States with fundamentalist Islamic terrorism; continuing classical influences in postmodernist arts and architecture; updating nineteenth-century expressionism and realism as trends in postmodernism; reviving and drastically refurbishing Hellenistic attitudes in postmodernist literature and philosophy and in the multiethnic, multiracial, multicultural states that seem to be emerging, particularly in the United States and Great Britain; returning to the roots of Western civilization in Mesopotamia and Egypt in the works of Anselm Kiefer, perhaps the most influential artist working today; restoring harmonious sounds and simple techniques to the music of postmodernism; and making American mass culture the world's common denominator
