ENG426:Modernism and post modernism
the theory of modernism:
Modernism is a revolutionary movement that affected the creative world from the 1890s to 1900s, a period during which artists and writers sought to liberate themselves and their works from the conventions and tradition of the strict Victorian period. Modernism became popular after the World War I, a very traumatic event that physically devastated, psychologically disillusioned and affected the economy of the West in an entirely unprecedented way. As against the tradition of the Victorian era, modernism employed a different aesthetic tradition. For example modernist fiction lacks a coherent, linear or organic plot, and is oftentimes ―plotless‖. Where a coherent plot may be identified, it is usually cyclical, broken-down, and open-ended to give a picture of life that is never conclusive or ended, but one in which there are possibilities and the individual is always on a quest for meaning. Characters in modernist fiction are not presented as products of social or environmental events as we have them in Victorian literature. Rather, they are shown to be anti-social, ahistorical and introverted loners, who sometimes dwell in the gloom of their minds as mere observers and thinkers, perpetually sad and unable to associate with one another. In modernist literature, there are no heroes whose fall symbolically implies the fall of the community. There are usually only anti-heroes whose lives negate every fabric of the ideals and beliefs that their societies extol. The characters are alienated, isolated, detached from the external world. The omniscient third person narrator is rarely favoured, and where it is used at all, it is radically revised, sometimes confusing the reader, for example The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man where the stream-of-consciousness technique almost overshadows the author‘s attempt at using the omniscient third person
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narrator. The scepticism to what is the Truth or the Meaning of life in modern existence led writers to be less assertive in that quest for relative meaning; hence, there is no need for a know-it-all narrative voice. The modern novel preferred a multiple perspective that privileged the stream-of-consciousness technique and the internal monologue, as a way of understanding the psychic reality of humans. 3.2 Postmodernism Postmodernism is largely a reaction or response to the assumptions of modernism. Scholars do not always agree on its definition but ―it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyper reality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning‖ (Aylesworth, 2005). As a movement, it began in the arts and architecture and just like modernism, abandons the realist mode of the 19th century. Postmodernism as a concept improves on modernism and shares many characteristics with modernism including: absence of universal or absolute truth, anti-authority and anti-tradition, disregard for rationality, the belief that human life is complex and disjointed but could also be celebrated as it cannot be changed. For postmodernists, nothing is based on logical reasoning or an established widely accepted or acceptable universal truth as everyone has lost faith in truth, rationality or an ordered world where events are to happen normally but rather what is depicted is a world where things happen anyhow and anytime. There is no certainty, security or structure. This reality for them cannot be changed as everything is fragmented, de-centered and unstructured. For them this situation should not be approached mournfully or tragically as modernists do but should be played with. This is what brings about the artistic playfulness that postmodernists are known for. In this respect, Samuel Beckett is regarded as a transitional playwright, whose writing could be read as modern and postmodern, especially Waiting for Godot. The way he allows his characters to ―play‖ about everything is a significant feature. Like other postmodernists, he approaches life playfully deploying techniques irony, parody, and dark humour. In postmodernist literature there is little or no difference between fiction and nonfiction, postmodernists clamour for equality in gender, religion, class and race among others. Morality as well as truth is relative. A major feature of postmodern thought is that universality is unacceptable and that ―all groups have a right to speak for themselves, in their own voice, and have that voice accepted as authentic‖ and this cannot be ignored in understanding how human relations function (Harvey, 1989). Differences along gender, sexuality, religion, class and race lines are all important. Postcolonialism, poststructuralism, deconstruction and feminism are all offshoots of postmodernism. 3.3 Literary Postmodernism
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Postmodernist disillusionment and its celebration of the existential nature of life were noticed around 1960 to 1990 in literary representations. Its characteristics include de-centeredment, pastiche, allegory, ambiguity, irony, parody, dark humour, fragmentation, especially in dialogue, questionable narrators, meta-narratives, isolated characters, and the blurring of the divide between reality (life) and fiction. It is clear that modernism and postmodernism share a lot in common but they are different. Postmodernism did not just succeed modernism, it replenished it. It came at a time when people had lost faith in all forms of positive thinking (Matz, 2004). The skepticism that accompanied modernism had changed the way people think and approached life. Although the modernists attempted to show how the society and the individual grow farther from each other, their literature sensitized the people into a sad and isolated position. All faith in any idealism as a form of redemption or answer to the lingering questions of existence was lost. Literature turned the society‘s view in a way that what had been good about modernity suddenly felt good no longer and the inventions of modernity became the same tool that birthed the estrangement in the atmosphere Modernists were shocked and horrified by the ways machine replaced and displaced men in the modern world. They were not in support of the changes that technology, machines and industrialization brought to their world. However, instead of feeling alienated and helpless by these changes, postmodernists accept and embrace these technologies and machinmachines. They are interested in representing these technologies and machines and the social, political and economic consequences of these innovations. Instead of the alienated and isolated characters who find it difficult to communicate and enter into relationships in modernist texts, postmodernist characters are comfortable and at ease with their loneliness. They enjoy this alienation and do not feel strange about it. Postmodernist texts show a world that is fragmented, incoherent and uncertain. Neglected and marginalized members of the society are also given prominence in some postmodernist writing, for example the colonized and women. As against the stream of conscious/ess technique of the narration of the modernists where the workings of the mind of the characters are seen as more important than the external realities or communication, in the narratives of the postmodernists, characters are allowed to speak for themselves, there are at least two narrators whose stories or versions of a story are at times contradictory and it is not always easy to point out who the true narrator of the story is. In modernist literature, unrealistic issues and events live only within a character‘s mind as a form of sickness or hallucination for example in Virginia Woolf‘s Mrs Dalloway, Septimus Warren Smith lives in his unrealistic world and in his mind the human nature is upon him. Modernists will find an explanation for this unrealistic hallucination or sickness and Septimus‘s is the shell shock he suffered as a soldier in the First World War. But in a postmodern literature like Muriel Spark‘s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Miss Jean Brodie‘s obsession to bring up her chosen girls to become de crème la crème in her prime is exhibited outside her mind, she lives it and practices it and this obsession is left
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unresolved even though it is illogical and lacks any rational explanation. This kind of strange obsession or event can also be seen in Ian McEwan‘s Atonement where a young girl‘s over imaginative mind leads her to accuse her sister‘s friend of rape and this sets the course for the novel. While modernists clamour for a new and independent way of writing literature and representing reality, postmodernists revisit and reform the past and blend it with the new. The concept of pastiche is a postmodernist one and it connotes the mixing of texts, genres, style and works of art. Postmodernists posit that every text is a product of a wide range of experiences(texts) and that interpretation is problematic because all the underlying texts of a text have some impact on the new text that is produced. Self-Assessment Exercise Describe four features of postmodernist literature. 4.0 CONCLUSION The influence of postmodernism can be seen in different fields like architecture, literature, philosophy, social sciences, arts, and so on. As noted earlier postmodernism as a concept did not start in literature but its influences are present to a large extent in literary theories like deconstruction gender studies and criticism not to talk of creative writings.
Modernism is a revolutionary movement that affected the creative world from the 1890s to 1900s, a period during which artists and writers sought to liberate themselves and their works from the conventions and tradition of the strict Victorian period. Modernism became popular after the World War I, a very traumatic event that physically devastated, psychologically disillusioned and affected the economy of the West in an entirely unprecedented way. As against the tradition of the Victorian era, modernism employed a different aesthetic tradition. For example modernist fiction lacks a coherent, linear or organic plot, and is oftentimes ―plotless‖. Where a coherent plot may be identified, it is usually cyclical, broken-down, and open-ended to give a picture of life that is never conclusive or ended, but one in which there are possibilities and the individual is always on a quest for meaning. Characters in modernist fiction are not presented as products of social or environmental events as we have them in Victorian literature. Rather, they are shown to be anti-social, ahistorical and introverted loners, who sometimes dwell in the gloom of their minds as mere observers and thinkers, perpetually sad and unable to associate with one another. In modernist literature, there are no heroes whose fall symbolically implies the fall of the community. There are usually only anti-heroes whose lives negate every fabric of the ideals and beliefs that their societies extol. The characters are alienated, isolated, detached from the external world. The omniscient third person narrator is rarely favoured, and where it is used at all, it is radically revised, sometimes confusing the reader, for example The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man where the stream-of-consciousness technique almost overshadows the author‘s attempt at using the omniscient third person
28
narrator. The scepticism to what is the Truth or the Meaning of life in modern existence led writers to be less assertive in that quest for relative meaning; hence, there is no need for a know-it-all narrative voice. The modern novel preferred a multiple perspective that privileged the stream-of-consciousness technique and the internal monologue, as a way of understanding the psychic reality of humans. 3.2 Postmodernism Postmodernism is largely a reaction or response to the assumptions of modernism. Scholars do not always agree on its definition but ―it can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyper reality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning‖ (Aylesworth, 2005). As a movement, it began in the arts and architecture and just like modernism, abandons the realist mode of the 19th century. Postmodernism as a concept improves on modernism and shares many characteristics with modernism including: absence of universal or absolute truth, anti-authority and anti-tradition, disregard for rationality, the belief that human life is complex and disjointed but could also be celebrated as it cannot be changed. For postmodernists, nothing is based on logical reasoning or an established widely accepted or acceptable universal truth as everyone has lost faith in truth, rationality or an ordered world where events are to happen normally but rather what is depicted is a world where things happen anyhow and anytime. There is no certainty, security or structure. This reality for them cannot be changed as everything is fragmented, de-centered and unstructured. For them this situation should not be approached mournfully or tragically as modernists do but should be played with. This is what brings about the artistic playfulness that postmodernists are known for. In this respect, Samuel Beckett is regarded as a transitional playwright, whose writing could be read as modern and postmodern, especially Waiting for Godot. The way he allows his characters to ―play‖ about everything is a significant feature. Like other postmodernists, he approaches life playfully deploying techniques irony, parody, and dark humour. In postmodernist literature there is little or no difference between fiction and nonfiction, postmodernists clamour for equality in gender, religion, class and race among others. Morality as well as truth is relative. A major feature of postmodern thought is that universality is unacceptable and that ―all groups have a right to speak for themselves, in their own voice, and have that voice accepted as authentic‖ and this cannot be ignored in understanding how human relations function (Harvey, 1989). Differences along gender, sexuality, religion, class and race lines are all important. Postcolonialism, poststructuralism, deconstruction and feminism are all offshoots of postmodernism. 3.3 Literary Postmodernism
29
Postmodernist disillusionment and its celebration of the existential nature of life were noticed around 1960 to 1990 in literary representations. Its characteristics include de-centeredment, pastiche, allegory, ambiguity, irony, parody, dark humour, fragmentation, especially in dialogue, questionable narrators, meta-narratives, isolated characters, and the blurring of the divide between reality (life) and fiction. It is clear that modernism and postmodernism share a lot in common but they are different. Postmodernism did not just succeed modernism, it replenished it. It came at a time when people had lost faith in all forms of positive thinking (Matz, 2004). The skepticism that accompanied modernism had changed the way people think and approached life. Although the modernists attempted to show how the society and the individual grow farther from each other, their literature sensitized the people into a sad and isolated position. All faith in any idealism as a form of redemption or answer to the lingering questions of existence was lost. Literature turned the society‘s view in a way that what had been good about modernity suddenly felt good no longer and the inventions of modernity became the same tool that birthed the estrangement in the atmosphere Modernists were shocked and horrified by the ways machine replaced and displaced men in the modern world. They were not in support of the changes that technology, machines and industrialization brought to their world. However, instead of feeling alienated and helpless by these changes, postmodernists accept and embrace these technologies and machinmachines. They are interested in representing these technologies and machines and the social, political and economic consequences of these innovations. Instead of the alienated and isolated characters who find it difficult to communicate and enter into relationships in modernist texts, postmodernist characters are comfortable and at ease with their loneliness. They enjoy this alienation and do not feel strange about it. Postmodernist texts show a world that is fragmented, incoherent and uncertain. Neglected and marginalized members of the society are also given prominence in some postmodernist writing, for example the colonized and women. As against the stream of conscious/ess technique of the narration of the modernists where the workings of the mind of the characters are seen as more important than the external realities or communication, in the narratives of the postmodernists, characters are allowed to speak for themselves, there are at least two narrators whose stories or versions of a story are at times contradictory and it is not always easy to point out who the true narrator of the story is. In modernist literature, unrealistic issues and events live only within a character‘s mind as a form of sickness or hallucination for example in Virginia Woolf‘s Mrs Dalloway, Septimus Warren Smith lives in his unrealistic world and in his mind the human nature is upon him. Modernists will find an explanation for this unrealistic hallucination or sickness and Septimus‘s is the shell shock he suffered as a soldier in the First World War. But in a postmodern literature like Muriel Spark‘s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Miss Jean Brodie‘s obsession to bring up her chosen girls to become de crème la crème in her prime is exhibited outside her mind, she lives it and practices it and this obsession is left
30
unresolved even though it is illogical and lacks any rational explanation. This kind of strange obsession or event can also be seen in Ian McEwan‘s Atonement where a young girl‘s over imaginative mind leads her to accuse her sister‘s friend of rape and this sets the course for the novel. While modernists clamour for a new and independent way of writing literature and representing reality, postmodernists revisit and reform the past and blend it with the new. The concept of pastiche is a postmodernist one and it connotes the mixing of texts, genres, style and works of art. Postmodernists posit that every text is a product of a wide range of experiences(texts) and that interpretation is problematic because all the underlying texts of a text have some impact on the new text that is produced. Self-Assessment Exercise Describe four features of postmodernist literature. 4.0 CONCLUSION The influence of postmodernism can be seen in different fields like architecture, literature, philosophy, social sciences, arts, and so on. As noted earlier postmodernism as a concept did not start in literature but its influences are present to a large extent in literary theories like deconstruction gender studies and criticism not to talk of creative writings.
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