Modernism and Postmodernism - Research Paper Example

? Modernism and Postmodernism This paper tries to compare and contrast two major phenomena of world literature: modernism and postmodernism. The modernist movement of the beginning of the 20th century and postmodernism of the 21st became the turning points of literature process. A variety of artistic and social forms of modernism, a different nature of these forms at different stages of historical development of the 20th century, as well as a wide range of ideological aspirations underlying the aesthetic experimentation, made ??it difficult to search for common definitions of modernism. The researchers of modernism have always noted a special interest of its members in creating new forms, defiantly opposed to the harmonic forms of classical art, as well as emphasis on the subjectivity of the modernist worldview. The first modernists are the people of the late 19th century raised by the general crisis of European culture. Many of them rejected the methods of social and political radicalism in the change of lifestyle, but they were all ardent supporters of the spiritual revolution, which, in their view, was inevitably born by the crisis of the old world. Spiritual revolution, as a new quality of consciousness and a new concept of life, demanded a new ideological platform. This platform was formulated on the basis of Henri Bergson’s intuitionism, Nietzscheanism, Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, Sigmund Freud’s and Carl Jung’s psychoanalysis, Soren Kierkegaard’s and Martin Heidegger’s existentialism. The works of these authors not only cemented the ideological platform of modernist art searches in the period, but allowed this artistic school to act retrospectively, capturing the events of preceding culture, and prospectively, leaving the field for experiments in the future (postmodernism). Modernism, fighting for liberation and renewal of forms in art, could not exist without common ties with the history of culture, recognizing in this way the principles of historicism in its own trend: “the creation of a usable past was a key means of both coming to terms with and keeping at bay the pressures and the alleged chaos of the modern world at the turn of the twentieth century” (Ardis 47). In modernist literature the reader is constantly confronted with the further development of the qualities generated not by modernism, but by the Romantic era of the French Revolution and radical sentimentalism of Johann Herder and Gotthold Lessing. This, for example, is the emphasis on the place of the individual consciousness in life in the cosmos. However, the romantic individualism of the 18th century and modernist individualism are fundamentally different phenomena. In romanticism the individual was either the owner of all spiritual riches of the universe, or this individual grieved about the unavailability of absolute values ??and universal ideals not denying the possibility of their existence. Modernists, on the contrary, recognized the insolubility of these issues, came to a denial of the spiritual and moral “absolutes.” At the same time, they tried to revive the myth-creating method, which, in their opinion, was able to restore the integrity of the organic and human life in a single cosmological system by the means of art. The poetry of modernism had a deep sympathy to the ideas of a new, mystical ideas and myth. In the effort to speak the language of new images the symbolists did not reject the traditions of classical poetry, but on the contrary, tried to build a new language based on ancient archaic images. Modernist poets paid a lot of attention to classical mythology (Paul Valery, Thomas Eliot), national folkloric characters (William Yates), ancient esoteric teachings and their modern modifications, like theosophy or anthroposophy (Yates, for example, created his own mystical system). The foundation of the modernist prose was laid by the Austrian writer Franz Kafka. According to him, the whole world order is most tragic and hostile to man, who is powerless and doomed to suffer. Plots of Kafka’s works resemble terrible dreams. With a remarkable precision they portray a world where people and other creatures are subject to the sacred and vague laws, inaccessible to full understanding; they are inside a never ending life-threatening game. These views are largely common for the existentialists, with the only difference that in the novels and stories of the representatives of the modernist school there is an attempt to create the concept of the person who prescribes the standards of conduct himself, and does so because of his spiritual motivation, and because of the moral fall from the usual society and forced loneliness inside the hostility of existence. One of the most important elements of modernist literature was the narrative mode of “the stream of consciousness”. The idea of ??the stream of consciousness in the first decades of the 20th century united the whole school of literature: Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, etc. After the appearance of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922), the stream of consciousness was considered by many modernists as the only method. Elements of the stream of consciousness as the means of psychological analysis were very common in the 20th century among writers of different schools and countries. These appeared to be the main directions of searches of modernist literature of the 20th century. In the 60’s and 70’s the Western aesthetics took a new turn. This shift in cultural studies is called “postmodernism.” This term began to be widely used since 1979 with publication of the book by French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Among the literary scientists it was first used by the American researcher Ihab Hassan in 1971. He also gave it its modern meaning. The term “postmodernism” cannot be understood as a name of some style. It involves quoting the known samples, but may do so by cataloging, but also in a manner of a deliberately delusional collage. According to Hassan, modernism is the brainchild of the era of Humanism and Enlightenment, but postmodernism is built on the remnants of lost ideals, and that is why it is anti-intellectual. Lyotard believed that postmodernism “recollects” its cultural history, like a patient during the psychoanalytic session. Postmodernism is not engaged in retrospect, but it draws from the cultural memory the fragments of dreams, including the old styles, and builds on their basis diverse eclectic formations. Eclecticism in modern culture grew during the whole world history of the 20th century. At the beginning of the century culture ceased to be a comfortable space. At one point of focus all the spiritual principles were gathered: Eastern and Western, African, Asian and European cultures collided with each other and reinforced the process of assimilation of the artistic phenomena that have recently been characterized by purity (the general meaning of art, the goal of an artist, artistic materials, etc.). Displacement of various spiritual layers is constantly growing and putting man on the brink of chaos, the beginning of existence. Man begins to feel that only he is responsible for his existence. This possibly determines the main value of life. In the middle of the century humanity began to move back. A number of processes characterized this movement (orthodox Christianity, aestheticism, etc.). And as a consequence culture is running away from dialogue towards imitation. The reflection of these phenomena found its complete expression in postmodernist literature. Imitation does not deprive the contemporary literature of dialogic character, but it shows the dialogue in an inverted form. This displacement is particularly important when it is associated with a change in the value orientations of society; in this case – with the rejection of humanistic principles, and their replacement with game ones. In contrast to modernism, postmodernism is often perceived as a stream, writing which seems too difficult and intelligent for intellectuals, but accessible to the illiterate, retarded and schizophrenics. Therefore, according to postmodernists, their art must be seen as pure experimentation, freed from pseudo-aesthetic ties with any social structures. Postmodernism came to Western culture in the wake of the student revolutions of 1968 “our most explosive decade” (Hoffmann 33), and became a reaction to the art that by the end of the 20th century had tasted all the delights of a consumer society. It tried to bring to the unprincipled society the new super idea: today a true artist in the world is surrounded by enemies. Postmodern saturates society with revolutionary potential, creating a new art-revolutionary situation, inventing a new civilization. Thus, postmodernism quite fits in the left-wing radical concept of aesthetic rebellion. It is in tune with the new ideas of sexuality and a new sensuality. In all its varied manifestations modernism cannot claim a wide popularity. Its aesthetics by its nature could not be publicly available. Modernism struggled only for the right to work and social significance of such work. However, the fruitfulness of modernism is seen not only in the fact that it was creating something new, but in the fact that it created basis for future art. Literature of postmodernism operates in its artistic practice a number of techniques: the intentional complexity of narrative manner, fragmentation, parody, author’s mask, intertextuality, allusions, etc. An important feature of American postmodernism, for example, is its relationship with the school of black humor, which includes a parody of in respect of modernism. The characters of black humorists and writers of postmodern orientation are mainly passive, obedient, concerned only with their own existence, while the heroes of modernism rejected bourgeois values. Thus, postmodernism was the first and last literature school of the 20th century, which openly admitted that the text does not reflect reality, but creates a new reality, or rather a lot of realities that are often not mutually dependent. Because the reality is no more, postmodernism thus destroyed the most important opposition to classical modernism – the opposition between text and reality, making it unnecessary to search for the boundaries between them: the reality was not discovered, there is only a text. References Ardis, A. Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 1880-1922. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Hassan, I. “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism”, The Postmodern Turn, 1987. Available at http://www.mariabuszek.com/kcai/PoMoSeminar/Readings/HssnPoMo.pdf Hoffmann, G. Modernism to Postmodernism: Concepts and Strategies of Postmodern American Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. Lyotard, J.F. The Postmodern Condition. Manchester University Press, 1984. Available at http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/lyotard.htm Poplawski, P. Encyclopedia of Literary Modernism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003. Read More