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Lynskey, Dorian. 1999. Dixie Chicks. Q 154: 36.
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Society.

PREHISTORY OF POSTMODERN AND RELATED TERMS:

EVIDENCE FROM THE JSTOR ELECTRONIC JOURNAL
ARCHIVE AND OTHER SOURCES
fred r. shapiro, Yale University

The leading fad and buzzword of contemporary humanistic activity is

postmodern. Inevitably, this word and related terms have become the subject
of their own literature attempting to trace their earliest uses and improve
upon their treatment by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED2 1989). Koehler
(1977), Bertens (1986), Welsch (1987), and Rose (1991) are the leading
contributions to the hunt for early evidence.
I present below the oldest citations I have been able to nd for
postmodern, postmodernism, postmodernist as a noun and postmodernist as an
adjective. My ndings represent dramatic antedatings of the rst uses in the
OED2, and also of the discoveries of previous investigators. The Toynbee,

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Hudnut, Fitts, Fiedler, Ransom, Smith, and Jarrell citations have already
been unearthed by the abovementioned scholars. I have veried and, as
needed, corrected these citations. The others are my own discoveries.
I do not maintain that all of these usages correspond to current
meanings of the terms. Indeed, many of them are quite different in
signication from todays usage. For example, the 1929 use of post-modern
by Lucien V. Alexis occurs in a four-page popular science pamphlet of
which only a single copy appears to exist in any library, that residing at the
New Orleans Public Library. The pamphlet is described as Monograph No.
1 in a Post-Modern Scientic Thought Series, and an advertisement in
the back for another pamphlet states that the second one is published by
Post-Modern Scientic Thought. What precisely Alexis meant by postmodern is now impossible to fathom.
The 1914, 1926, and 1939 quotations that are the earliest evidence for
postmodernism and postmodernist (both as noun and adjective) are drawn
from religious writings. Here the modernism that is being reacted against is a
progressive, predominantly Catholic theological movement of the early
twentieth century.
The earliest discovered usage of postmodern or any of its forms in
reference to the cultural or artistic realms with which the terms are now
associated is by William S. Rusk in a 1936 journal article. The Rusk usage
and the 1945 Feibleman usage were yielded by a search conducted in the
JSTOR electronic journal archive. JSTOR provides electronic access to
backles of leading scholarly journals in many elds. High-resolution
images of each page are linked to a text le that is completely searchable.
JSTOR has substantial chronological depth and has enormous potential
for uncovering early occurrences of terms from scholarship, science, economics, politics, philosophy, and education. Previous researches in which I
have been able to retrieve occurrences of hundreds of important terms
antedating the earliest evidence otherwise available are described in Shapiro
(1998, 1999a, 1999b, 2000, 2001).
postmodern adj [OED2 1949] 1929 Lucien V Alexis The Thermoelectric Formula: X Minus Y Equals Z (title page) Monograph No. 1 Post-Modern Scientic
Thought Series / (advt) The New Physics: Fundamentals in Physics and in
Chemistry by Lucien V. Alexis . . . Published by Post-Modern Scientic Thought
2427 Palmyra St. Galvez 3281 New Orleans, La. 1936 William S Rusk Journal
of Higher Education 7: 379 The small volumes of the Renaissance Society of
Chicago carry appreciation of modern European art into the post-modern
forms of surrealisme and die neue Sachlichkeit and include a rediscovery (sic!) of
Seurat. 1939 Arnold J Toynbee A Study of History 5: 43 Our own Post-

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333

Modern Age has been inaugurated by the general war of 191418. 1945
James Feibleman Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 5: 315 On the vexed
question of universals . . . we nd quite naturally that James assumed the
modern view, or, may we say, the then post-modern view. May Joseph Hudnut
Architectural Record 70 (head) The post-modern house / 75 I shall not imagine
for my future house a romantic owner. . . . No, he shall be a modern owner, a
post-modern owner, if such a thing is conceivable.
postmodernism n [OED2 1979] 1914 J M Thompson Hibbert Journal 12:
733 (head) Post-modernism / 737 Why Post-Modernism? Not simply because it is something which comes after Modernism, but rather as implying
that it has some likeness . . . to the school of art which is called Post-Impressionism. / 740 Post-Modernism has no scruples about applying to the New
Testament the same theory of inspiration, and the same principles of interpretation, as to the Old. 1926 Bernard I Bell Postmodernism and Other Essays
54 Modernism has ceased to be modern. We are ready for some sort of
Postmodernism. / 55 Postmodernism will frankly admit the possibility of
miracles, although not in the sense which denes miracles as an arbitrary
violation of natural law. / 59 Postmodernism will readily and gladly acknowledge, what Christianity has always recognized, that for purposes of worship the
Incarnation must needs be extended and continued sacramentally. 1942
Dudley Fitts Anthology of Contemporary Latin-American Poetry 601 It is no exaggeration to say that his [Enrique Gonzalez Martinezs] sonnet on the Swan . . .
is the manifesto of post-Modernism. 1969 Dec Leslie Fiedler Playboy 151
Almost all todays readers and writers are aware that we are living through the
death throes of literary modernism and the birth pangs of postmodernism.
postmodernist n [OED2 1966] 1914 J M Thompson Hibbert Journal 12: 737
The Post-Modernist is trying to nd a scheme of forms which shall express the
real and directly felt values of spiritual things, not perverted and obscured by
their conventional embodiments. 1926 Bernard I Bell Postmodernism and
Other Essays 57 To the Postmodernist the Incarnation will ever continue to be
a miracle, the central miracle of all. / 63 The Postmodernist looks with more
approval upon Roman Catholicism than he does upon current Protestantism.
1939 Bernard I Bell Religion for Living: A Book for Postmodernists 1941 John
Crowe Ransom Kenyon Review 3: 378 In the prose conclusion, as in the poetic
sequel, Jarrell forbids us to say yet that he is a post-modernist.
postmodernist adj [OED2 1965] 1926 Bernard I Bell Postmodernism and Other
Essays 65 An infallible pope or an infallible heirarchy [sic] seems to his
Postmodernist mind to contradict the technic of Jesus quite as much as an
infallible book or an appeal to his own supposedly infallible brain. 1945
Bernard Smith Place, Taste and Tradition: A Study of Australian Art since 1788 245
The other division of contemporary realism in Australia is centred in
Melbourne, and consists of Noel Counihan, Vladimir Bergner and Victor
OConnor. . . . It is evident, then, that they have matured in a post-Modernist

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world. 1947 Jan 18 Randall Jarrell Nation 76 Lowells poetry . . . is essentially a post- or anti-modernist poetry, and as such is certain to be inuential.
1957 William J Monahan (title of M.A. thesis, Emory Univ) The Post-Modernist Short Story in Venezuela

NOTE
I gratefully acknowledge that the research reported in this paper was supported in
part by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. I would like to express
thanks to Harriet Zuckerman, William G. Bowen, and Alvin B. Kernan of the
Mellon Foundation and Kevin Guthrie of JSTOR for their instrumental roles in
facilitating this grant.

REFERENCES
Bertens, Hans. 1986. The Postmodern Weltanschauung and Its Relation to Modernism: An Introductory Survey. In Approaching Postmodernism, ed. Douwe
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Koehler, Michael. 1977. Postmodernismus: Ein begriffsgeschichtlicher berblick. Amerikastudien 22: 818.
OED2. The Oxford English Dictionary. 1989. 2d ed. 20 vols. Oxford: Clarendon.
Rose, Margaret A. 1991. The Post-Modern and the Post-Industrial. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Shapiro, Fred R. 1998. A Study in Computer-Assisted Lexicology: Evidence on the
Emergence of hopefully as a Sentence Adverb from the JSTOR Journal Archive
and Other Electronic Resources. American Speech 73: 27996.
. 1999a. Antedating the OED from the JSTOR Electronic Journal Archive.
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. 1999b. Earlier Computer-Assisted Evidence on the Emergence of hopefully
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Welsch, Wolfgang. 1987. Unsere postmoderne Moderne. Weinheim: VCH.