This critique of the postmodern turn discusses the distinctive aspects of postmodern scholarship: the pervasiveness of the literary and the flight from grand theory to local knowledge. Defining features of postmodern thought are also discussed here such as storytelling and localism.

But he also identifies the danger in abandoning synthetic knowledge to particular truths, cautioning that "we would be foolish to pretend that little narratives are true alternatives to grand ones, rather than chips off a larger block whose shape we can no longer see because we are not looking."

Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Academic Postmodern?
1: The Return of the Storyteller and the Circulation of "Literature"
2: Anecdotes and Conversations: The Method of Postmodernity
3: Speaking Personally: The Culture of Autobiography in the Postmodern
4: Feminisms and Feminizations in the Postmodern
5: Localism, Local Knowledge, and Literary Criticism
6: Romanticism and Localism
7: The Urge for Solutions and the Relief of Fiction
Bibliography
Index