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As Prapassaree Kramer describes Caryl Churchill’s work in “Top Girls: Postmodern Imperfect,” Top Girls also employs many of the traditional features of postmodernism, especially in the first act:
Churchill’s commitment to various postmodern features is part and parcel of a larger concern on her part: That is, the explicitly socialist-feminist works of her immediate peers ignore some of the larger issues faced by women in the Thatcher era. However, even while Churchill retains a tendency to reject epistemological trends generally, her desire to pursue claims against both feminism and the patriarchy ultimately necessitates her turn toward realism in the second two acts of the work.
Perhaps while similarly motivated as her peers, this final turn toward realism might best be regarded as regressive rather moving beyond the postmodern given how slight is its self-consciousness about the tension between political progressivism and postmodernity.
James Fisher is understandably reluctant to peg Tony Kushner as postmodern, at least in part because Kushner has described himself as a “premodern modernist…not quite ready for postmodernism” (255 in