Monday, November 15, 2010

Modernism:

As a term, modernism is most often used to identify the most distinctive forms, styles, concepts, and sensibilities in literature and art from roughly WWI to the post-WWII years. Since it is a broad intellectual movement, modernism varies widely in specific features, but most critics agree that it involves a deliberate and radical break with the traditional bases of both Western culture and Western art. Modernists were writers and artists who questioned the certainties and standard truths that had previously provided support systems for all social organization, religion, morality, and the conception of the human self. Modernists were influenced by late 19th century thinkers, such as Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Darwin. They were especially influenced by the savagery and slaughter of WWI.

The modernist revolt against traditional literary and artistic forms and subjects manifested itself strongly after the catastrophe of WWI, which shook human faith in the continuity and foundations of Western culture. The inherited mode of ordering a literary or artistic work—and for that matter of ordering the world—assumed a relatively stable and coherent worldview. But there was a general shattering of traditional beliefs and foundational truths after WWI, and there was a general emergence of a belief in the futility and meaningless of life, that the world was characterized by disorder rather than order, by anarchy rather than stability. Experimenting with new forms and styles, modernists explored the dislocation and fragmentation of parts rather than the traditional artistic concept of unity. Modernist writers subverted the conventions of earlier prose fiction by breaking up narrative continuity, departing from standard ways of representing characters, and violating the traditional syntax and coherence of narrative language. Such techniques have obvious parallels in the violation of representational conventions in the modernist paintings of Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism as well as in the violations of standard conventions of melody, harmony, and rhythm by the modernist composers (Stravinsky, Copeland).

A prominent feature of modernism is the attempt to be “avant-garde,” a military term for “advance-guard.” Quite self-consciously, authors and artists attempted to, in Pound’s famous phrase, “make it new.” By violating accepted conventions and decorums, they undertook to create new artistic forms and styles and to introduce neglected, often forbidden subjects. Frequently avant-garde artists represent themselves as alienated from the established order, against which they assert their own autonomy. Their aim is often to shock the sensibilities of their audiences and to challenge the norms and pieties of bourgeois culture.

Literary Characteristics: free verse, stream-of-consciousness, objective correlative, imagism, multiple points-of-view, broken or fragmentary narratives, iceberg narratives, alienated characters, defiance of traditional values.

Joyce, Faulkner, Pound, Eliot, Conrad, Proust, Woolf, Pirandello, Brecht

Post-Modernism:

The often disputed term postmodernism is applied to the literature and art produced after World War II, when the disastrous effects on Western morale of the first war were greatly exacerbated by the experience of Nazi Totalitarianism and European Fascism, the mass exterminations and horror of WWII, the threat of total destruction by the atom bomb, the devastation of the natural environment, the space age, and the ominous threats of overpopulation and starvation. The term generally applies to a cultural condition prevailing in advanced, industrialized capitalist western societies since the 1960s, characterized by a superabundance of disconnected images and styles, most noticeably in television, advertising, commercial design, and pop video. In this sense, postmodernism is said to be a culture or aesthetic sense of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, and promiscuous and random superficiality, in which the traditional values of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and structure are evacuated or dissolved in a colorful chaos of signals. Postmodernism involves not only a continuation, carried to an extreme, of the counter-traditional experiments of modernism, but also diverse attempts to break away from modernist forms that had become conventional and familiar by the latter half of the twentieth century. A familiar undertaking in postmodernist writings is to subvert the foundations of our accepted modes of thought and experience so as to reveal the meaninglessness of existence and the underlying abyss or void (or nothingness) on which our supposed security is precariously suspended. In recent developments in linguistic and literary theory, there is an effort to subvert the foundations of language itself, so as to demonstrate that its seeming meaningfulness dissipates into a play of indeterminacies. In the most basic (and crude) terms, a postmodern writer or artist does not attempt to wrest meaning from the world through the traditional methods of myth, symbol, and artistic complexity but instead embraces the meaningless confusion and absurdity of contemporary existence with either indifference or flippant enthusiasm. Often postmodern writers write about writing itself (metafiction, or fiction about fiction), in which a narrator reflects critically on the lack of coherence in his or her own writing. Postmodernism as a term is generally not applied to poetry or drama but more often to fiction and art. Some writers often discussed as postmodern are Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Italo Calvino, Gunter Grass, Angela Carter, Vladimir Nabokov, William S. Burroughs, and William Golding.

1 comment:

  1. http://sheffeyintro2lit.blogspot.com/

    I have realized my blog isn't linked to the right hand column of your blog, I don't know how everyone else was able. Hopefully my blog hasn't gone unnoticed all year!

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