Page 1 : MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM

Page 2 : Modernism, ▪The term modernism is Widely the new and, distinctive features in the subjects, concepts, and, styles of literature and the other arts in the early, decades ot the twentieth century especially after, World War I (1914-18).

Page 3 : ▪ The specific features signified by modernism (or by the, , adjective modernist) vary with the user, but many critics, agree that it involves a deliberate and radical break with, some of the traditional bases not only of Western art but, , of Western culture in general important intellectual, precursors of modernism .

Page 4 : ▪ in this sense, are thinkers who had questioned the certainties, that had supported traditional modes of social organization,, religion, and morality, and also traditional ways of conceiving the, , human self ----thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx,, Sigmund Freud, and James G. Frazer, whose twelve-volume The, Golden Bough (1890-1915) stressed the correspondence between, central christian tenets and pagan, often barbaric, myths and, rituals.

Page 5 : ▪ Some literary historians locate the beginning of the modernist, revolt as far back as the 1890s, but most agree that what is called, high modernism, marked by an unexampled scope and rapidity of, change, came after the first world War. The year 1922 alone was, , signalized by the appearance of such monuments of modernist, innovation as James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s the Waste Land,, and Virginia Woolfs Jacob’s Room, as well as many other, experimental works of literature .

Page 6 : ▪ The catastrophe of the war had shaken faith in the moral basis,, coherence, and durability of Western civilization and raised doubts, , about the adequacy of traditional literary modes to represent the harsh, and dissonant realities of the postwar world., , ▪ TS. Eliot wrote in a review of Joyce’s Ulysses in 1923 that the inherited, mode of ordering a literary work, which assumed a relatively coheret, , and stable social order, could not accord with “the immense panorama, of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”

Page 7 : ▪ Like Joyce and like Ezra Pound in his Cantos, Eliot experimented with, new forms and a new style that would render contemporary disorder,, , often contrasting it to a lost order and integration that, he claimed , had, been based on the religion and myths of the cultural past. In The Waste, Land (1922), for example, Eliot replaced the standard syntactic flow of, , poetic language by fragmented utterances, and substituted for the, traditional type of coherent poetic structure a deliberate dislocation of, , parts, inwhich very diverse components are related by connections that, are left to thereader to discover, or invent.

Page 8 : ▪ Major works of modernist fiction, following Joyce ’s Ulysses and, his even more radical Finnegans Wake (1939). Subvert the basic, conventions of earlier prose fiction by breaking up the narrative, , continuity , departng from the standard ways of representing, characters, and violating the traditional syntax and coherence of, narative language by the use of stream of consciousness and, other innovative modes of narration.

Page 9 : ▪ Gertrude Stein often linked with Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Woolf as a, , trail-blazing modernist experimented with automatic writing, (writing that has been freed from con-trol by the conscious,, purposive mind) and other modes of language that achieved their, effects by violating the norms of standard English syntax and, sentence structure.

Page 10 : ▪ Among other European and American writers who are central, , representatives of modernism are the novelists Marcel Proust,, Thomas Mann.André Gide, Franz Kafka, Dorothy Richardson, and, William Faulkner: thepoets Stéphane Mallamé, William Butler, Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, MarianneMoore, William Carlos, Wiliams, and Wallace Stevens; and the dramatists August, , Strindberg, Luigi Pirandello, Eugene ONeill, and Bertolt Brecht.

Page 11 : ▪ Their new forms of literary construction and rendering had, , obvious parallels in the break away from representational, conventions in the artistic movements of expressionism and, surrealism, in the modernist paintings and sculpture ofCubism,, Futurism, and Abstract Expressionism, and in the violations of, standard conventions of melody, harmony, and rhythm by the, , modernist musical composers Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and their, radical followers

Page 12 : ▪ A prominent feature of modernism is the phenomenon called the, avant-garde (a French military metaphor: advance-guard ); that is,, , a small, self-conscious group of artists and authors who, deliberately undertake, in EzraPound 's phrase, to make it new. By, Violating the accepted conventions and proprieties not only of art, but ot social discourSe, they set out to create ever-new artistic, forms and styles and to introduce hitherto neglected, and, , sometimes forbidden , subject matter.

Page 13 : ▪ Frequently , avant-garde artists represent themselves as alienated, , from the established order, against which they assert their own, autonomy: a prominent aim is to shock the sensibilities of the, conventional reader and to challenge the norms and pieties of the, dominant bourgeois culture.

Page 14 : Postmodernism, ▪ The term postmodernism is often applied to the literature and art, after World War II (1939-45), when the effects on Western, morale of the FirstWorld War were greatly exacerbated by the, experience of Nazi totaitarianism and mass extermination, the, , threat of total destruction by the atomic bomb, the progressive, devastation of the natural environment , and the ominous fact of, overpopulation.

Page 15 : ▪ Postmodernism involves not only a Continuation, sometimes, , carried to an extreme, of the countertraditional experiments ot, modemism but also diverse attempts to break away from, modernist forms which had, inevitably, become in their turn, conventional, as well as to overthrow the elitism of modernist, “high art” by recourse for models to the “mass culture” of, , film,television, newspaper cartoons, and popular music.

Page 16 : ▪ Many of the works of post-modem literature by Jorge Luis Borges,, Sanmuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov,Thomas Pynchon, Roland, Barthes, and many others so blend literary genres cultural and, stylistic levels, the serious and the playful, that they resist, , clasification according to traditional literary rubrics.

Page 17 : ▪ And these iterary anomalies are paralleled in other arts by, , phenomena like pop art, op art, thne musical composi-tions of, John Cage, and the films of Jean-Luc Godard and other directors.An, undertaking in some postmodernist writing prominently in, , Samuel Beckett and other authors of the literature of the absurd 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 any, supposed security is conceived to be precariousy suspended.

Page 18 : ▪ Postmodernism in literature and the arts has parallels with the, move-ment known as poststructuralism in linguistic and literary, theory; poStstructur-alists undertake to subvert the foundations, ot language in order to demonstrate that its seeming, , meaningfulness dissipates, for a rigorous inquirer, into a play of, conflicting indeterminacies, or else undertake to show that all, forms of cultural discourse are manifestations of the reigning, ideology, or of the relations and constructions of power, in, contemporary society.