Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "
Not quite. "Poststructuralism" is an ex-post label and many of the thinkers that are most often identified with the emergence of "postmodern" ideas actually rejected it. (Some of them even rejected the whole notion of "postmodernism" as an unhelpful simplification of their actual ideas.) "Continental philosophy" really means the 'old-fashioned' sort of philosophy that Analytic philosophers distanced themselves from; you can certainly view postmodernism as encompassed within continental philosophy, but the notions are quite distinct. Similarly, "critical theory" exists in both 'modernist'/'high modern' and 'postmodern' variants, and one cannot understand the 'postmodern' kind without knowing the 'modern' critical theory it's actually referring to, and quite often criticizing in turn.
All of which is to say that, really, it's complicated, and that while describing postmodernism as a "different set of concerns, goals and approaches" may hit significantly closer to the mark than merely caricaturing it as an antithesis to rationality, neither really captures the worthwhile ideas that 'postmodern' thinkers were actually developing, at least when they were at their best. (--See, the big problem with 'continental philosophy' as a whole is that you often get a few exceedingly worthwhile ideas mixed in with heaps of nonsense and confused thinking, and it can be really hard to tell which is which. Postmodernism is no exception here!)