The Message and the Medium: The Roots/Routes of Jerome Bruner's Postmodernism

Abstract

Jerome Bruner has been one of the most prominent American psychologists and educators since World War II with particular interest in and influence on social education. He has repeatedly invented new fields of study and reinvented himself in the process. A pioneer in public opinion research during the 1940s, Bruner founded the New Look school of perception in the early 1950s, the Cognitive Revolution during the late 1950s, and a post-Piagetian school of child development in the 1970s. Bruner was a positivist during the 1940s, then a structuralist through the 1960s, and a post-structuralist during the 1970s. A Cold War liberal in politics through the 1950s, he has since moved steadily to the Left. During the 1980s, Bruner emerged as a postmodernist and founded the field of cultural psychology. This article is an intellectual biography of Bruner, focusing on the influence of his early years in public opinion research and the significance of his conversion to postmodernism.