This book examines the implications of postmodern culture for adult education through a review of modernist culture and education and a comparative account of modernist and postmodernist culture that is configured as a set of six tensions in three domains: belief (situatedness and ambiguity); individual identity (determination and control); and sociality (homogeneity and temporality). The tensions are used to explore the nature of educational practice and engagement in postmodernity from different perspectives: through dialogues with students regarding practice; through case studies of practice; as descriptive tendencies of engagement; and as nodal forms of pragmatic activity. Part One, Modernity and Modernist Adult Education, includes: The Modernist Inheritance 1: Thinking and Being in a Straightjacket; and The Modernist Inheritance 2: Denying Adult Education). Part Two, Postmodernity, discusses: Postmodernity 1: Seeing, Believing, and Being in a Fractured World; Postmodernity 2: Conversation and Hope in a Cultural Implosion; and Formal Tensions, Contingent Realities: Reconfiguring the Problematic. Part Three, Adult Education in Postmodernity, includes: Eternal Ambivalence: Learning in Postmodern Adult Education; Horsehair in the Undies: Adult Educator as a Boundary Rider; Odors in the Ether: Tendencies in Postmodern Adult Education; Fashioning Educative Difference: Nodal Forms of Engagement; Fanning the Flames: Research in Postmodern Adult Education; and The Situationally Sensitive Wayfarer: Being an Adult Educator in the Age of the Chameleon. The book contains 577 references and an index. (MN)