MODERNISM & POSTMODERNISM

Modernist Period (1900s-1940s)

• was marked by sudden and unexpected breaks with traditional ways of viewing and interacting with the world

• experimentation and individualism became virtues (past would disagree to this)

• because modernism was perceived as a counter-culture, always having the potential to criticize the regime itself by offering alternative realities other than they promote.

History of Modernism

• is a literary genre which sprung up around 1914, from the beginning of World War I.

• was born from the notion of putting an end to realistic novels, which modernist authors believed had become stale and had lost all artistic merit.

• modernist impulse is fueled in various literatures by industrialization and urbanization and by the search for an authentic response to a much-changed world.

• the enormity of the war had undermined humankind's faith in the foundations of Western society and culture.

• came from the Latin word, "modernus" meaning "just now" or "the new and now"

Modernist Literature

• reflected a sense of disillusionment, displacement, and fragmentation

• a primary theme of T.S. Eliot's long poem "The Waste Land" (1922), a pivotal Modernist work, is the search for redemption and renewal in a sterile and spiritually empty landscape.

• according to T.S. Eliot, the real world is too fragmented, irrational, and chaotic to be mirrored by realism.

• therefore, realism is different from modernism because it is said to be elite and a difficult writing that distinguishes itself from the vulgar masses.

Modernism in Literature

• the publication of the Irish writer James Joyce's Ulysses in 1922 was a landmark event in the development of Modernist literature. D

• dense, lengthy, and controversial, the novel details the events of one day in the life of three Dubliners through a technique known as stream of consciousness

• it also commonly ignores orderly sentence structure and incorporates fragments of thought to capture the flow of characters' mental processes

• stream of consciousness: a narrative style that tries to capture a character’s thought process in a realistic way

Post Modernist Period (1945 - onwards)

• we are currently living in this historical period

• the postmodern world began developing in the ruins of the modern

• was a reaction to modernism and was influenced by the disenchantment that followed World War II.

  • modernism: attempts to find depth and interior meaning beneath the surface of objects and events,

  • postmodernism: prefers to dwell on the exterior image and avoids drawing conclusions or suggesting underlying meanings associated with the interior of objects and events.

History of Postmodernism

• in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, modernist literature was the central literary movement. 

• after World War II, a new school of literary theory, deemed postmodernism, began to rise.

• is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality.

• “reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality”

Postmodernism in Literature

• a literary movement that presented certain characteristics от post-World War II literature.

• it avoids absolute meaning and instead emphasizes fragmentation, intertextuality.

• Postmodern writers often celebrate change over craft because it employs metafiction and unreliable narrators to undermine the author's "univocation"