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Postmodernism
| Postmodernism
is a complicated term, or set of ideas, one that has only emerged as an area of
academic study since the mid-1980s. Postmodernism is hard
to define, because it is a concept that appears in a wide
variety of disciplines or areas of study, including art, architecture, music,
film, literature, sociology, communications, fashion, and
technology. It's hard to locate it temporally or historically, because it's not
clear exactly when postmodernism begins. The first facet or definition of
modernism comes from the aesthetic movement broadly labeled "modernism." This
movement is roughly coterminous with twentieth century Western ideas about art
(though traces of it in emergent forms can be found in the nineteenth century as
well). Modernism, as you probably know, is the movement in visual arts, music,
literature, and drama which rejected the old Victorian standards of how art
should be made, consumed, and what it should mean. In the period of "high
modernism," from around 1910 to 1930, the major figures of modernism literature
helped radically to redefine what poetry and fiction could be and do: figures
like Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Proust, Mallarme, Kafka, and Rilke are
considered the founders of twentieth-century modernism. |
| From a literary perspective, the main
characteristics of modernism include: |
- An emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity in writing
(and in visual arts as well); an emphasis on HOW seeing (or reading or
perception itself) takes place, rather than on WHAT is perceived. An example
of this would be stream-of-consciousness writing.
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- A movement away from the apparent objectivity provided by
omniscient third-person narrators, fixed narrative points of view, and
clear-cut moral positions. Faulkner's multiply-narrated stories are an
example of this aspect of modernism.
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- A blurring of distinctions between genres, so that poetry
seems more documentary (as in T.S. Eliot or ee cummings) and prose seems
more poetic (as in Woolf or Joyce).
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- An emphasis on fragmented forms, discontinuous
narratives, and random-seeming collages of different materials.
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- A tendency toward reflexivity, or self-consciousness,
about the production of the work of art, so that each piece calls attention
to its own status as a production, as something constructed and consumed in
particular ways.
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- A rejection of elaborate formal aesthetics in favor of
minimalist designs (as in the poetry of William Carlos Williams) and a
rejection, in large part, of formal aesthetic theories, in favor of
spontaneity and discovery in creation.
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- A rejection of the distinction between "high" and "low"
or popular culture, both in choice of materials used to produce art and in
methods of displaying, distributing, and consuming art.
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The article was take from Reference: Klages, Mary. "Postmodernism." 21 Apr.
2003. 31 Mar. 2005 <http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/pomo.html>.
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