Book Introduction-Postmodernism: Summary of Knowledge Report Postmodernism is one of the thoughts of contemporary literature. It rose in the United States and France in the 1960s, and soon spread to Germany and Japan, and also reacted in the former Soviet Union and other countries. Generally speaking, it is different from1modernism which has prevailed for nearly a century since the second half of the 9th century. Some people think it is a refutation of modernism, others think it is the further development of modernism, and it is the product of various crises of capitalist system in the era of information society and new technological revolution. Postmodernism involves the understanding and evaluation of the cultural and literary tendencies of the United States, the West and the former Soviet Union since the Second World War. It's about the global cultural situation, so people are concerned and we should know something about it. Jean-Francois Lyotard is an important representative of contemporary French post-structuralism philosophy. He is a philosophy professor at the University of Paris VIII and the University of California. The main theoretical works are Economics of Libido (1974), Postmodern Situation: A Report on Knowledge (1979), Justice (1984) and Pluralistic Discourse (1986). In the post-modern situation, Lyotard focuses on the evolution of the knowledge state of the contemporary western post-industrial society, trying to explain the social variation and cultural symptoms of contemporary capitalism with the concepts and methods of pragmatics. Different from other postmodern theories, Lyotard didn't explain the "cultural contradiction" and belief crisis in post-industrial society from the perspective of social system theory like daniel bell, nor did he put forward the "legalization crisis of late capitalism" like Habermas and try to rebuild the theory of rational communication, nor did he alienate Flederick Jameson's overall thinking of superimposing postmodern cultural production on capitalist economic logic. Focusing on the differences between language information and its application rules, he profoundly demonstrated the exhaustion and withering of meta-discourse, which is the network and cognitive basis of western civilization, and the resulting "narrative crisis" and illegal localization of knowledge. This post-structuralist concept, which emphasizes the incommensurability of knowledge and develops differently in different languages, has many conflicts and disputes with the interpretation of postmodernism by western Marxism and neoconservatism. After all, as an important difference, it admits new discourse content for this debate. At the same time, Lyotard's post-modern philosophical discourse has a great influence on western literature and its critical theory. Today, the debate about "crisis of artistic representation" inspired by him is still going on in a noisy atmosphere.