"Nothing is worse," Nietzsche once said, "than the smell of an ill-constituted soul." For this professor of Classics and son of a Protestant minister, things were not hidden, there were no secrets: the world revealed itself. From this base of materialism and realism, Nietzsche assaulted Christianity,

Bombast, Clever, Discourse as event, Dramatic, Epic, Euphoric, Flux, Joyful, Melancholy, Overflowing, Philosophy, Poststructuralism, Profane, Surface, Witty

It is the rare novelist who can elicit a contract for his death, but Salman Rushdie managed to do precisely that with a Postmodern, playful rumination on religion and politics that made Islamic literalists gnash their teeth and ready their Kalashnikovs. Born on the eve of India's declaration of indep

Dense, Epic, Excessive, Expansive, Magical realism, Playful, Political, Post-colonial literature, Postmodern fiction, Profane, Round, Sprawling, Wise assy

Spalding Gray splashed into the national consciousness with the epic monologue-cum-performance piece "Swimming to Cambodia" (1985), a distinctive solo show that has been on the road in some incarnation for well-nigh 20 years. He cut his teeth on Postmodern performance theory with SoHo's experimental

Agitated, Epic, Neurotic, Solo performance