Local Transcendence

Driven by global economic forces to innovate, today’s society paradoxically looks forward to the future while staring only at the nearest, most local present—the most recent financial quarter, the latest artistic movement, the instant message or blog post at the top of the screen.  Postmodernity is lived, it seems, at the end of history.             In the essays collected in Local Transcendence , Alan Liu takes the pulse of such postmo