Modernism, Postmodernism, and Contemporary Literature



The term modernism is widely used to identify new and distinctive features in the subjects, forms, concepts, and styles of literature and the other arts in the early decades of the twentieth century, but especially after World War I (1914-1918). The specific features of modernism 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, 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 of the human self—thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) will to power, superman; Karl Marx, Marxism, base, superstructure, class relations, commodification, alienated labor; Sigmund Freud dream, id, ego, superego, psychoanalysis, complexes, death drive; and James G. Frazier whose The Golden Bough stressed the correspondence between central Christian tenets and pagan, often barbaric myths and rituals.

Some literary historians locate the beginning of the modernist revolt as far back as the 1890s, but most agree that "high modernism," marked by an unexampled range and rapidity of change, came after the first World War. The year 1922 alone was signalized by the simultaneous appearance of such monuments of modernist innovation as James Joyce's Ulysses, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room, as well as many other experimental works of literature. The catastrophe of the war had shaken faith in the continuity of Western civilization and raised doubts about the adequacy of traditional literary modes to represent the harsh and dissonant realities of the postwar world. T.S. Eliot wrote in a review of Joyce's Ulysses in 1923 that the inherited mode of ordering a literary work, which assumed a relatively coherent and stable social order, could not accord with "the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." Like Joyce and 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 had been debased on the religion and myths of the cultural past, in which very diverse components are related by connections that are left to the reader to discover, or invent. Major work of modernist fiction, following Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and his even more radical Finnegans Wake (1939), subvert the basic conventions of earlier prose fiction by breaking up the narrative continuity, departing from the standard ways of representing characters, and sometimes violating the traditional syntax and coherence of narrative language by the use of stream of consciousness and other innovative modes of literature.

The term postmodernism is sometimes applied to the literature and art after World War II (1939-1945), when the effects on Western morale of the first World War were greatly exacerbated by the experience of Nazi totalitarianism and mass extermination, the massive bombing of London and firebombing of Dresden, the threat of total destruction by the atomic bomb as evidenced by the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the progressive devastation of the natural environment, and the ominous fact of overpopulation. Postmodernism involves not only a continuation, sometimes carried to an extreme, of the countertraditional experiments of modernism, 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 of the models of "mass" or "popular" culture in film, television, newspaper cartoons, and mainstream music. Many of the works of postmodern literature—by Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Pynchon, Roland Barthes, and many others—so blend literary genres, cultural and stylistic levels, the serious and the playful, that they resist classification according to traditional literary rubrics.

An undertaking in some postmodernist writings is to subvert the foundations of our accepted modes of thought and experience so as to the reveal the "meaningless" of existence and the underlying "abyss," or "void," or "nothingness" on which any supposed security is conceived to be precariously suspended. Postmodernism in literature and the arts has parallels with the movement known as poststructuralism in linguistic and literary theory; poststructuralists undertake to subvert the foundations of language in order to show that its seeming meaningfulness dissipates, for a rigorous inquirer, into a play of conflicting indeterminancies, or else to show that all forms of cultural discourse are manifestations of the ideology, or of the relations and constructions of power, in contemporary society.

Timeline


1960—Woolworth lunch counter sit-ins mark the organized beginning of the Civil Rights movements, though some might say it began with Rosa Parks refusing to sit in the back of a bus in 1955.

1963—President John F. Kennedy assassinated.

1965—Race riots in Los Angeles. Malolm X assassinated.

1965-73—Vietnam War.

1966—National Organization for Women (NOW) founded.

1968—King assassinated. Senator Robert F. Kennedy assassinated.

1969—U.S. astronauts land on the moon. Stonewall riots in New York City initiate gay liberation movement.

1970—National Guard kills four students during antiwar demonstrations at Ken State University, Ohio.

1972—Watergate scandal.

1973—Roe v. Wade legalizes abortion. (AIM) American Indian Movement members occupy Wounded Knee in South Dakota.

1974—President Richard Nixon resigns.

1976—U.S. bicentennial.

1982—Antinuclear protests. AIDS officially identified in the United States.

1989—Soviet Union collapses. Oil tanker Exxon Valdez runs aground in Alaska.

1991—United States enters Persian Gulf War. World Wide Web introduced.

1995—Federal building in Oklahoma City bombed in terrorist attack.

1997—Pathfinder robot explores Mars.

2001—Execution of Timothy McVeigh convicted in Oklahoma City bombing. September 11 attacks on Pentagon and World Trade Center.

2003. United States invades Iraq. Saddam Hussein captured.

2004 Twin robotic explorers Spirit and Opportunity explore Mars.

Characteristics of contemporary literature


• hero victorious only in defeat

• no possibility for a great action that will affect everyone

• powerlessness

• focus on family unit, often dysfunctional or nontraditional

• "in medias res," (in the middle of things) narrative shifts backwards and forwards in time

• lack of resolution

• unclear intentions on the part of characters

• gray areas of morality

• multiculturalism; focus on writing other than white male Brits, Europeans, and Americans

• subversion of traditional gender roles

• anti-hero

• focus on the personal

• looser, freer, more organic kinds of aesthetic structures

• instead of plotting an inner trajectory toward finality in meaning, form, and emotion, work often ends raggedly, in irresolution, or distractions

• longer stories, instead of unfolding sequentially toward a destination, are often organized serially, in modular units that have a tentative relation to one another. The reader is left to make connections and decide on an order

• The text confronts the reader with a variety of moral and social dilemmas, but offers no overt suggestions as to what the "right" choice may be

• stories may be in diary or notebook form, sometimes dated to indicate their immersion in history

• the artist or main character may not be sagacious, priestly individual whose role it is to purify, protect, and renovate language or humanity; he or she is an average person, no one special

• increasing focus on machines and digital technology. An increased questioning of and blurring between the natural and the constructed, the pastoral and the mechanical