While the tragic is generally identified with high seriousness, the postmodern is often associated with the playful or pastiche, placing it at the other end of the literary spectrum. The tragic is also arguably part of a foundationalist discourse, that is, one grounded in certain basic assumptions, most obviously that conflicts are intrinsic to life in the world, creating inevitable catastrophic collisions. Postmodern thinking is extremely various, but is generally held to be anti-foundationalist: that is, it is unconvinced of the existence of, or even the need for fundamental values or standards that stand apart from the exigencies and particularities of life or the world. Stanley Fish, for example, has argued that human beings are inevitably enmeshed in cultural practices that are rule-governed so that values, constraints and standards will emerge from the particularity of the situation one is in without the need for anything more fundamental. Fish has clearly been influenced by the philosopher Richard Rorty, one of the leading thinkers associated with the postmodern. For both Fish and Rorty, in place of confrontation between fixed positions there is pragmatism or some form of lateral thinking, so that by implication the necessity for a tragic outcome to any conflict is challenged, and it is pragmatism in this postmodern anti-foundationalist context that I shall contrast with the tragic in this chapter.

The postmodern, though associated with the arts and perhaps emerging first in the context of the arts, is not an artistic movement in the conventional sense. Like deconstruction, which has been seen as a parasite that coexists with its host even if antithetical to it, it is not a separate phenomenon that can be positioned conventionally after Modernism in the way that Modernism comes after Romanticism.