Understanding Modernism, A Summary Modernism: What It Is Unlike "the Enlightenment" or "Romanticism" this term is used a couple different ways. a) In its broadest, most general usage it may refer to the world given to us by the Enlightenment and Romanticism. This what you refer to when you think of your own and your "modern" American/Western culture's basic assumptions: secular, democratic republics, civil liberties and equality, a belief that nature is beautiful etc. b) As an artistic or literary movement it may refer to Modern Art such as Van Gogh or to Modern Literature's emphasis on realism, the individual, and the inner life of the psyche or mind. c) It’s also useful to think of Modernism as a “condition” rather than an intellectual movement. The Modern Condition "The Modern Condition" can be understood as having its philosophical roots in the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and its historical roots in the Industrial Revolution, Colonialism and the major wars and genocide of the late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. As you know, the Enlightenment argued that Rationality and Freedom would save man from himself, and Romanticism argued that Love and Emotion would correct the sterility and “heartlessness” of the Enlightenment, but Modernism is in many ways a critique of the empty or impossible promises of both previous movements: both the Enlightenment and Romanticism offered some excellent ideas, but how many people really took them to heart and/or act upon them? In other words, did they really improve our lot as human beings or did they simply present another set of equally brutal problems? Thus, Enlightenment works such as Tartuffe and Candide conclude with well balanced, moderate, rational solutions to social problems; in Romantic works such as Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein realizes, albeit too late, that his lack of love has created a monster and destroyed his own family, and the reader is left clearly understanding the nature of the problem and its solution. But the works of T.S. Eliot and Joseph Conrad mainly expose the problem and despair over ever finding another solution: they expose the hypocritical “whited sepulchers” of the Enlightenment and mourn the failure of love, and yet they remain too jaded to offer up another easy solution. In many ways, the Modern Condition is this willingness to realize and honestly admit to the failure of previous solutions. Guernica (Pablo Picasso 1937) Why This Despair? Darwin and The Origin Of The Species Charles' Darwin's The Origin of the Species (1859) revolutionized modern culture in a couple of ways: First, like Kepler, Galileo and Newton, Darwin again proved that science could explain the natural world or universe in ways that religion once had, and when it did it did not confirm but rather disprove the prior religious explanations. As with Galileo but even more so, Darwin's theory was (and still is) seen as an attack on organized religion itself. This drove (and continues to drive) an even larger wedge between those who turned to science and those who turned to religion as a means of understanding existence, and unlike what Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and Jefferson expected, the religious backlash was vehement and continuing. But more importantly, Darwin's theory not only removed an all knowing "creator" from the picture; it replaced it with chance and random circumstance. Where religion had given us a universe with meaning and order, Darwin gave us one of blind luck and empty blackness: not only were we not at the center of the universe, science suggested, but the universe was endlessly vast and we just another insignificant organism, made in the image of bacteria rather than God. This scared, and continues to scare, the shit out of us. Colonialism: Unwillingness of "Enlightened" Western "Civilization" to truly treat all peoples as "equal". See Conrad and Achebe Notes War: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” – Yeats The Enlightenment offered the promise of freedom and prosperity: through rationality man would build new, democratic, egalitarian, just, utopias that would harness emerging scientific technologies and deliver man from slavery. Instead, the 19th and 20th Centuries proved vastly more bloody and brutal than any other in written history. By many estimates, at least 170,000,000 civilians were killed by their own governments during the 20th Century. (http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM) The American Civil War cost the States 618,000 lives. Even loving, Christian, Enlightened Americans proved themselves willing to slaughter one another for the right to enslave others. World War I caused 9.7 million military and 6.6 million civilian deaths. Modern technology proved itself adaptable to "modern warfare", which proved itself vastly more destructive than "primitive" technologies and methods. World War II caused 62 million casualties, 37 million of which were civilian. The United States alone killed 500,000 Japanese civilians by firebombing 67 Japanese cities; the first, Tokyo, is estimated to have killed up to 100,000 in one night. ...Enlightenment technology had given us the means of killing each other like never before without, seemingly, giving us the means of not killing each other as we always had. Such power clearly reached its peak with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Holocaust is perhaps the clearest representation or symbol of the failure of Enlightenment and Romantic principles. Under Hitler and the Nazis, the three most "civilized" elements of Western Civilization -- modern "Enlightenment" technology and rationalism, Romanticism, and both Protestant and Catholic Christianity -- teamed up to carry out the most "barbaric" systematic extermination of people, ever. Under both Mao and Stalin, the relatively “modern”, “rationally” based, utopian Communist states led to the two greatest recorded acts of genocide, ever. (We'll study how Marxism is an outgrowth of both Enlightenment rationality and Rousseau's Romantic philosophy.) Rational, scientific man, it turned out, had perhaps simply learned how to kill more efficiently. Neither the spread of or end of Christianity seemed to alter mankind's thirst for evil -- in the United States (Civil War) and Western Europe (WWI and WWII) Christians slaughtered each other in larger numbers than ever before, in numbers mimicked in Post-religious-Communist China and Russia. Freedom, The Primacy of the Individual, and Alienation The Enlightenment call for greater civic freedoms and the Romantic call for increased individual freedoms further led to a culture of alienation: freed from the social constrictions of the church, Modern man found himself freed from both community and recourse to faith. In other words, in times of need, the Modern man found himself alone. Freed from the constrictions of formal religion, Modern man was freed from the comforts of ritual and forced to figure out life’s existential questions alone. Freed from the village and farm, Modern man was freed from the security of family, common culture and community. The alienation from the natural world bemoaned by the Romantics only deepened as societies increasingly urbanized. Industrialization further alienated Modern man from the product of his own hands. And so we find Conrad's Enlightened Kurtz not simply armed with reason but armed and dangerous, far from cultural constraints, reaching deep inside only himself for morality, only to find…nothing. Or more aptly: Nothingness. In Things Fall Apart, Achebe shows us that "enlightening" and "civilizing" foreign cultures really means destroying those cultures so that we may exploit them, and freedom from "barbaric" or "savage", "uncivilized" customs and beliefs leaves men like Okonkwo defeated and left with no defense but violence and brutality. We find the epic heroes of the classical age replaced with T.S. Eliot's scarecrow "hollow men". We find Tolstoy's Anna Karenina freed from the constraints of traditional marriage, a truly modern, sexually liberated woman, yet she is also utterly alienated from her children, her church, her community. Are Marx And Freud "Modern"? If we look at "Modernism" this way, as a condition rather than a philosophical movement, it may be helpful to think of Freudian and Marxist philosophy as in many ways vestiges of the Enlightenment, as both still hold out hope that scientific rationality can end human suffering. However, both Marx and Freud (and Nietzsche) contribute greatly to the growing sense that knowledge is existential and "contaminated" by our subjectivity, emotions and human relationships. This will become the central theme of "Postmodernism" but these seeds were clearly planted and influential in the Modern era. See Modern Literature http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/engl_258/Lecture%20Notes/understanding_modernism.htm Postmodernism Dr. Mary Klages, Associate Professor, English Department, University of Colorado, Boulder http: www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klagespomo.html 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. Perhaps the easiest way to start thinking about postmodernism is by thinking about modernism, the movement from which postmodernism seems to grow or emerge. Modernism has two facets, or two modes of definition, both of which are relevant to understanding postmodernism. 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: 1. 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. 2. 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 multiplynarrated stories are an example of this aspect of modernism. 3. 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). 4. an emphasis on fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives, and random-seeming collages of different materials. 5. 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. 6. 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. 7. 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. Postmodernism, like modernism, follows most of these same ideas, rejecting boundaries between high and low forms of art, rejecting rigid genre distinctions, emphasizing pastiche, parody, bricolage, irony, and playfulness. Postmodern art (and thought) favors reflexivity and selfconsciousness, fragmentation and discontinuity (especially in narrative structures), ambiguity, simultaneity, and an emphasis on the destructured, decentered, dehumanized subject. But--while postmodernism seems very much like modernism in these ways, it differs from modernism in its attitude toward a lot of these trends. Modernism, for example, tends to present a fragmented view of human subjectivity and history (think of The Wasteland, for instance, or of Woolf's To the Lighthouse), but presents that fragmentation as something tragic, something to be lamented and mourned as a loss. Many modernist works try to uphold the idea that works of art can provide the unity, coherence, and meaning which has been lost in most of modern life; art will do what other human institutions fail to do. Postmodernism, in contrast, doesn't lament the idea of fragmentation,provisionality, or incoherence, but rather celebrates that. The world is meaningless? Let's not pretend that art can make meaning then, let's just play with nonsense. Another way of looking at the relation between modernism and postmodernism helps to clarify some of these distinctions. According to Frederic Jameson, modernism and postmodernism are cultural formations which accompany particular stages of capitalism. Jameson outlines three primary phases of capitalism which dictate particular cultural practices (including what kind of art and literature is produced). The first is market capitalism, which occurred in the eighteenth through the late nineteenth centuries in Western Europe, England, and the United States (and all their spheres of influence). This first phase is associated with particular technological developments, namely, the steam-driven motor, and with a particular kind of aesthetics, namely, realism. The second phase occurred from the late nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century (about WWII); this phase, monopoly capitalism, is associated with electric and internal combustion motors, and with modernism. The third, the phase we're in now, is multinational or consumer capitalism (with the emphasis placed on marketing, selling, and consuming commodities, not on producing them), associated with nuclear and electronic technologies, and correlated with postmodernism. Like Jameson's characterization of postmodernism in terms of modes of production and technologies, the second facet, or definition, of postmodernism comes more from history and sociology than from literature or art history. This approach defines postmodernism as the name of an entire social formation, or set of social/historical attitudes; more precisely,this approach contrasts "postmodernity" with "modernity," rather than "postmodernism" with "modernism." What's the difference? "Modernism" generally refers to the broad aesthetic movements of the twentieth century; "modernity" refers to a set of philosophical, political, and ethical ideas which provide the basis for the aesthetic aspect of modernism. "Modernity" is older than "modernism;" the label "modern," first articulated in nineteenth-century sociology, was meant to distinguish the present era from the previous one, which was labeled "antiquity." Scholars are always debating when exactly the "modern" period began, and how to distinguish between what is modern and what is not modern; it seems like the modern period starts earlier and earlier every time historians look at it. But generally, the "modern" era is associated with the European Enlightenment, which begins roughly in the middle of the eighteenth century. (Other historians trace elements of enlightenment thought back to the Renaissance or earlier, and one could argue that Enlightenment thinking begins with the eighteenth century. I usually date "modern" from 1750, if only because I got my Ph.D. from a program at Stanford called "Modern Thought and Literature," and that program focused on works written after 1750). The basic ideas of the Enlightenment are roughly the same as the basic ideas of humanism. Jane Flax's article gives a good summary of these ideas or premises (on p. 41). I'll add a few things to her list. 1. There is a stable, coherent, knowable self. This self is conscious, rational, autonomous, and universal--no physical conditions or differences substantially affect how this self operates. 2. This self knows itself and the world through reason, or rationality, posited as the highest form of mental functioning, and the only objective form. 3. The mode of knowing produced by the objective rational self is "science," which can provide universal truths about the world, regardless of the individual status of the knower. 4. The knowledge produced by science is "truth," and is eternal. 5. The knowledge/truth produced by science (by the rational objective knowing self) will always lead toward progress and perfection. All human institutions and practices can be analyzed by science (reason/objectivity) and improved. 6. Reason is the ultimate judge of what is true, and therefore of what is right, and what is good (what is legal and what is ethical). Freedom consists of obedience to the laws that conform to the knowledge discovered by reason. 7. In a world governed by reason, the true will always be the same as the good and the right (and the beautiful); there can be no conflict between what is true and what is right (etc.). 8. Science thus stands as the paradigm for any and all socially useful forms of knowledge. Science is neutral and objective; scientists, those who produce scientific knowledge through their unbiased rational capacities, must be free to follow the laws of reason, and not be motivated by other concerns (such as money or power). 9. Language, or the mode of expression used in producing and disseminating knowledge, must be rational also. To be rational, language must be transparent; it must function only to represent the real/perceivable world which the rational mind observes. There must be a firm and objective connection between the objects of perception and the words used to name them (between signifier and signified). These are some of the fundamental premises of humanism, or of modernism. They serve--as you can probably tell--to justify and explain virtually all of our social structures and institutions, including democracy, law, science, ethics, and aesthetics. Modernity is fundamentally about order: about rationality and rationalization, creating order out of chaos. The assumption is that creating more rationality is conducive to creating more order, and that the more ordered a society is, the better it will function (the more rationally it will function). Because modernity is about the pursuit of ever-increasing levels of order, modern societies constantly are on guard against anything and everything labeled as "disorder," which might disrupt order. Thus modern societies rely on continually establishing a binary opposition between "order" and "disorder," so that they can assert the superiority of "order." But to do this, they have to have things that represent "disorder"--modern societies thus continually have to create/construct "disorder." In western culture, this disorder becomes "the other"--defined in relation to other binary oppositions. Thus anything non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual, nonhygienic, non-rational, (etc.) becomes part of "disorder," and has to be eliminated from the ordered, rational modern society. The ways that modern societies go about creating categories labeled as "order" or "disorder" have to do with the effort to achieve stability. Francois Lyotard (the theorist whose works Sarup describes in his article on postmodernism) equates that stability with the idea of "totality," or a totalized system (think here of Derrida's idea of "totality" as the wholeness or completeness of a system). Totality, and stability, and order, Lyotard argues, are maintained in modern societies through the means of "grand narratives" or "master narratives," which are stories a culture tells itself about its practices and beliefs. A "grand narrative" in American culture might be the story that democracy is the most enlightened (rational) form of government, and that democracy can and will lead to universal human happiness. Every belief system or ideology has its grand narratives, according to Lyotard; for Marxism, for instance, the "grand narrative" is the idea that capitalism will collapse in on itself and a utopian socialist world will evolve. You might think of grand narratives as a kind of meta-theory, or meta-ideology, that is, an ideology that explains an ideology (as with Marxism); a story that is told to explain the belief systems that exist. Lyotard argues that all aspects of modern societies, including science as the primary form of knowledge, depend on these grand narratives. Postmodernism then is the critique of grand narratives, the awareness that such narratives serve to mask the contradictions and instabilities that are inherent in any social organization or practice. In other words, every attempt to create "order" always demands the creation of an equal amount of "disorder," but a "grand narrative" masks the constructedness of these categories by explaining that "disorder" REALLY IS chaotic and bad, and that "order" REALLY IS rational and good. Postmodernism, in rejecting grand narratives, favors "mini-narratives," stories that explain small practices, local events, rather than large-scale universal or global concepts. Postmodern "mini-narratives" are always situational, provisional, contingent, and temporary, making no claim to universality, truth, reason, or stability. Another aspect of Enlightenment thought--the final of my 9 points--is the idea that language is transparent, that words serve only as representations of thoughts or things, and don't have any function beyond that. Modern societies depend on the idea that signifiers always point to signifieds, and that reality resides in signifieds. In postmodernism, however, there are only signifiers. The idea of any stable or permanent reality disappears, and with it the idea of signifieds that signifiers point to. Rather, for postmodern societies, there are only surfaces, without depth; only signifiers, with no signifieds. Another way of saying this, according to Jean Baudrillard, is that in postmodern society there are no originals, only copies--or what he calls "simulacra." You might think, for example, about painting or sculpture, where there is an original work (by Van Gogh, for instance), and there might also be thousands of copies, but the original is the one with the highest value (particularly monetary value). Contrast that with cds or music recordings, where there is no "original," as in painting--no recording that is hung on a wall, or kept in a vault; rather, there are only copies, by the millions, that are all the same, and all sold for (approximately) the same amount of money. Another version of Baudrillard's "simulacrum" would be the concept of virtual reality, a reality created by simulation, for which there is no original. This is particularly evident in computer games/simulations--think of Sim City, Sim Ant, etc. Finally, postmodernism is concerned with questions of the organization of knowledge. In modern societies, knowledge was equated with science, and was contrasted to narrative; science was good knowledge, and narrative was bad, primitive, irrational (and thus associated with women, children, primitives, and insane people). Knowledge, however, was good for its own sake; one gained knowledge, via education, in order to be knowledgeable in general, to become an educated person. This is the ideal of the liberal arts education. In a postmodern society, however, knowledge becomes functional--you learn things, not to know them, but to use that knowledge. As Sarup points out (p. 138), educational policy today puts emphasis on skills and training, rather than on a vague humanist ideal of education in general. This is particularly acute for English majors. "What will you DO with your degree?" Not only is knowledge in postmodern societies characterized by its utility, but knowledge is also distributed, stored, and arranged differently in postmodern societies than in modern ones. Specifically, the advent of electronic computer technologies has revolutionized the modes of knowledge production, distribution, and consumption in our society (indeed, some might argue that postmodernism is best described by, and correlated with, the emergence of computer technology, starting in the 1960s, as the dominant force in all aspects of social life). In postmodern societies, anything which is not able to be translated into a form recognizable and storable by a computer--i.e. anything that's not digitizable--will cease to be knowledge. In this paradigm, the opposite of "knowledge" is not "ignorance," as it is the modern/humanist paradigm, but rather "noise." Anything that doesn't qualify as a kind of knowledge is "noise," is something that is not recognizable as anything within this system. Lyotard says (and this is what Sarup spends a lot of time explaining) that the important question for postmodern societies is who decides what knowledge is (and what "noise" is), and who knows what needs to be decided. Such decisions about knowledge don't involve the old modern/humanist qualifications: for example, to assess knowledge as truth (its technical quality), or as goodness or justice (its ethical quality) or as beauty (its aesthetic quality). Rather, Lyotard argues, knowledge follows the paradigm of a language game, as laid out by Wittgenstein. I won't go into the details of Wittgenstein's ideas of language games; Sarup gives a pretty good explanation of this concept in his article, for those who are interested. There are lots of questions to be asked about postmodernism, and one of the most important is about the politics involved--or, more simply, is this movement toward fragmentation, provisionality, performance, and instability something good or something bad?...... .....This association between the rejection of postmodernism and conservatism or fundamentalism may explain in part why the postmodern avowal of fragmentation and multiplicity tends to attract liberals and radicals. This is why, in part, feminist theorists have found postmodernism so attractive, as Sarup, Flax, and Butler all point out. On another level, however, postmodernism seems to offer some alternatives to joining the global culture of consumption, where commodities and forms of knowledge are offered by forces far beyond any individual's control. These alternatives focus on thinking of any and all action (or social struggle) as necessarily local, limited, and partial--but nonetheless effective. By discarding "grand narratives" (like the liberation of the entire working class) and focusing on specific local goals (such as improved day care centers for working mothers in your own community), postmodernist politics offers a way to theorize local situations as fluid and unpredictable, though influenced by global trends. Hence the motto for postmodern politics might well be "think globally, act locally"--and don't worry about any grand scheme or master plan. -----------------------------------------------------------------------All materials on this site are written by, and remain the propery of, Dr. Mary Klages, Associate Professor, English Department, University of Colorado, Boulder. You are welcome to quote from this essay, or to link this page to your own site, with proper attribution. For more information, see Citing Electronic Sources. -----------------------------------------------------------------------The Flax article referred to is Jane Flax, "Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory," in Linda J. Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism, Routledge, 1990. -----------------------------------------------------------------------The Sarup article referred to is Chapter 6, "Lyotard and Postmodernism," in Madan Sarup's An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism, University of Georgia Press, 1993. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Reading Guide on Klages' Essay Klages’s Essay Reading Guide We will be using this essay to understand both the modern aspects of the poetry you have read in this module and to understand the modern aspect and the postmodern aspects of the two plays you will read in the next module. Klages’s essay is difficult. You might want read it all the way through once, reading through the difficult parts and even the words you aren’t familiar with. On the second read through you can stop to make notes in the margins and circle new vocabulary as you work to parse out the meaning. What follows is a brief guide to the essay. Though Klages’s essay is called “Postmodernism” she also spends a great deal of time explaining both modernism and modernity. Modernity predates modernism and modernism predates postmodernism. Modernity includes all the ideas that influenced the artistic movement called modernism. Historians argue as to when modernity starts, but Klages says modernity starts in about 1750. Modernity focuses on ideas about a variety of subjects including economics (the free market versus the invention communism in the mid to late 1800s), politics (the new American democracy in the late 1700s, freedom for slaves, women’s equality), philosophy (including Frederick Nietzsche, among others), science (Darwin and the theory of evolution, Pasteur and germ theory, among others), new war theory and practices, and psychology (including Freud). On page three of Klages’s essay, she offers an extensive list of the basic idea of the Enlightenment period which had a profound effect on modernity. Modernism refers to the aesthetic movement, or artistic movement, that followed in the wake of the revolutionary ideas of modernity. Modernism is not the same as contemporary when discussing art and literature. It is a specific period that has specific attributes. Klages dates high modernism from 1910 – 1930, though many earlier works such as The Awakening contain characteristics of modernism. Klages says Modernism ends at about 1980 which is when she says postmodernism begins. However those dates are also somewhat plastic. There are stories written in the 1970s that have characteristics of postmodernism. On page one and two of her essay Klages lists seven elements of modernism. The following is an explanation of each of her seven characteristics of modernism. 1. Impressionism and subjectivity means that the writer is trying to tell the reader what a situation feels like from a particular perspective. Objectivity is trying to get to the facts, without any personal feelings involved. Modernist writers realized that our perspective (which includes our history, where we come from, our culture, who raised us, and our beliefs) shapes the way we see reality. So writers tried to capture that subjective reality rather than an objective just-the-facts reality. 2. The way writers accomplished number 1 was often by creating a first person narrator, as in “Prufrock” or by showing us what the world feels like from one character’s viewpoint as in “The Weary Blues.” Modernist writers were less likely than their predecessors to use an Omniscient or all-knowing, God-like narrator, than a narrator who could only tell us about the world from his particular experience. 3. Genre means the type of literature discussed. Poetry, for example, is one genre, as is the short story. We can see several examples of blurring of distinctions between genres in the poems on the syllabus. “Home Burial” for example, tells a story through poetic lines. 4. Fragmentation is very much a part of modern (and postmodern) literature. “Prufrock” works like a collage of many images that all come together to make a cogent, meaningful poem. 5. When Klages talks about reflexivity or self-consciousness in the work she means that modernist writers often called attention to the work of writing. Cullen does this in his poem in the last two lines. So does Stevens, whose poem is in many ways about how we see (and thus write about) the world. 6. A rejection of elaborate aesthetics happens in Stevens work. Gone are the formal ideas about poetry. Instead he allows himself to create new ways of lineating a poem. Cullen, on the other hand, actually uses the fairly elaborate aesthetics of the form Sonnet, but for modern purposes. 7. Finally Klages discusses the rejection of the distinction between “high” and “low” art. A good example of that happens in Hughes’s poem, where he celebrates the blues, what had been considered “low” art or popular art, and says that the blues are just as valuable as an opera for making poetry. Postmodernism refers to work written since 1980. We will not read any postmodern work until the third module. Thus you do not need to concentrate on that aspect of her essay until we get there. At that time, I will include a discussion of postmodernism A M E R I C A N L I T E R A R Y P E R I O D S www.teachnlearn.org Periods COLONIAL 1620-1750 Genre & Style Characteristics Sermons, diaries, personal narratives Focuses on daily life, moral attitudes, and political unrest Sermons written in plain style rather than ornate Religious poetry REVOLUTIONARY 1750-1800 Political pamphlets Travel writing Persuasive writing ROMANTICISM 1800-1860 Character sketches Slave narratives Poetry Short stories Literature is instructive, reinforces authority of the Bible and church Literature instills pride, spurs patriotism, and common agreement Historical Context Predestination: fate determined by God All are sinful and must be saved by Christ “Puritan" began as an insult by traditional Anglicans to those who criticized or wished to "purify" the Church of England. Examples Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation Bradstreet’s “Upon the Burning of Our House” Edward's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" Though not written during Puritan times, The Crucible & The Scarlet Letter depict life during the time when Puritan theocracy prevailed (1692, Salem Witch Trials). Encourages support for the Revolutionary War Writings of Jefferson, Paine, Henry Celebrates the individual, nature, imagination & emotions Expansion of magazines, newspapers, and book publishing Irving's “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” Value intuition over reasoning Industrial revolution leads questioning the "old ways" (English ways) of doing things Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac and "The Autobiography" National mission and the American character Flee corruption of civilization and limits of rational thought toward the integrity of nature and freedom of the imagination Instill proper gender behavior for men & women Re-imagine the American past Slavery debates Civil War (18611865) is pivotal Melville’s Moby Dick and Billy Budd Whitman’s Leaves of Grass Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” (Some say these founders of American poetry also belong to Realism and Modernism.) TRANSCENDENTAL ISM Poetry Transcendental: Essays True reality is spiritual 1830-1880 Short Stories (Some consider the anti-transcendentalists to be the "dark" romantics or gothic) Novels Intuition leads us to the indwelling God Self-reliance & individualism Gothic: Sin, pain, evil Contains elements of gloom, mystery, the grotesque REALISM 1850-1900 Novels and short stories Naturalism: An outgrowth of Realism People are hapless victims of immutable natural laws No supernatural intervention MODERNISM Novels 1900-1950 Plays Poetry (resurgence after deaths of W & D) Experimental as writers seek a unique style Use of interior monologue & stream of consciousness Realism: Examines realities of life, human frailty, local color Depiction of ordinary people in everyday life Today in literature we still read of people seeking beauty in life and in nature, the belief in true love and contentment We still see stories of the persecuted young girl forced apart from her true love Civil War (18611865) brings demand for a "truer" type of literature that does not idealize people or places Dialogue includes regional voices Soon that optimism and a belief in the importance of the individual is overwhelmed by Themes of alienation and disillusionment Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and “Rappaccini’s Daughter” Poe's “The Raven,” "The Fall of the House of Usher,” and "The Tell-Tale Heart" Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage & “The Open Boat” The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (some say st 1 modern novel) Regional works like Chopin’s The Awakening, Wharton’s Ethan Frome, and Cather’s My Antonia (some say modern) Does not tell reader how to interpret story America as the land of Eden Thoreau's Walden We still see portrayals of antagonists whose evil characteristics appeal to one’s sense of awe Objective narrator The pursuit of the American Dream Emerson’s Nature and “SelfReliance” WWI and WWII Writers reflect the ideas of Darwin (survival of fittest) and Karl Marx (how money & class structure control a nation) Overwhelming technological changes of the th 20 Century Harlem Renaissance Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath Eliot’s The Wasteland Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms Williams’ The Glass Menagerie Miller's The Death of a Salesman (some say Postmodern) HARLEM RENAISSANCE 1920s (Part of Modernism) Allusions to African-American spirituals Uses structure of blues songs in poetry (repetition) Gave birth to "gospel music" Blues and jazz transmitted across American via radio and phonographs Superficial stereotypes revealed to be complex characters POSTMODERNISM 1950 to present (Many critics merge this with Contemporary) Narratives: both fiction and nonfiction Concern with individual in isolation Metafiction Social issues as writers align with feminist & ethnic groups Magic realism Mixing of fantasy with nonfiction; blurs lines of reality for reader No heroes CONTEMPORARY 1970s-Present (Continuation of Postmodernism) Usually humorless Narratives: both fiction and nonfiction Concern with connections between people Anti-heroes Emotionprovoking AfricanAmericans have more access to media and publishing outlets after they move north Post-World War II prosperity Media culture interprets values Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun Wright's Native Son Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God Hughes’ “Theme for English B,” “What Did I Do…?” Ellison’s Invisible Man Feminist & Social Issue poets: Plath, Rich, Sexton, Levertov, Angelou Capote's In Cold Blood Stories of Bradbury & Vonnegut Erodes distinctions between classes of people Insists that values are not permanent but only "local" or "historical" Autobiographical essays Mass AfricanAmerican migration to Northern urban centers Salinger's Catcher in the Rye Beat poets: Kerouac, Burroughs & Ginsberg Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Beginning a new century Poetry of Dove, Cisneros, Soto & Alexie Media culture interprets values Walker's The Color Purple, Haley's Roots & Morrison’s Beloved Nonfiction by Didion, White, Dillard & Krakauer O'Brien’s The Things They Carried Humorous irony Megastars: King, Crichton, Grisham, Clancy From: https://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/postmodernism/modules/introduction.html Modernity and Modernism: "Modernity" is as slippery a term as "postmodernity"; indeed, some scholars date the "modern subject" as emerging as early as the Renaissance (thanks to the sorts of changes in thinking that I discuss above under "Renaissance"). Usually, though, when someone refers to the "modern period," they mean the period from about 1898 to the second world war. This is a time of wild experimentation in literature, music, art, and even politics. There is still a belief among many thinkers in concepts such as truth and progress; however, the means taken to achieve utopic goals are often extreme. This is the period that saw such revolutionary political movements as fascism, nazism, communism, anarchism, and so on. Indeed, "isms" abound as various groups establish bold manifestos outlining their visions for an improved future. Manifestos about artistic form are just as widespread and, like the political manifestos, often radically different one from the next (eg. surrealism, dadaism, cubism, futurism, expressionism, existentialism, primitivism, minimalism, etc.). In general, this radicalism is driven by a sense that Enlightenment values may be suspect. Modernists therefore participate in a general questioning of all the values held dear by the Victorian period (narrative, referentiality, religion, progress, bourgeois domesticity, capitalism, utilitarianism, decorum, empire, industry, etc.). Many modernists also tend to take the Romantic exploration of the irrational, the primitive, and the unconscious to darker extremes, as in, for example, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899), James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, or Antonin Artaud's surrealism. In general, there is a fear that things have gone off track (a feeling exacerbated by World War I) and that we need to follow radically new paths if we are to extricate ourselves. Some of the features of modernist aesthetic work include: 1) self-reflexivity (as in Picasso's Woman in the Studio on the left). 2) an exploration of psychological and subjective states, combined sometimes with a rejection of realism or objective representation (as in expressionism or stream-of-consciousness writing). 3) alternative ways of thinking about representation (eg. cubism, which attempts to see the same event or object from multiple perspectives at the same time). 4) radical experimentation in form, including a breakdown in generic distinction (eg. between poetry and prose, with the French prose poem and the poetic prose of Gertrude Stein or Virginia Wolf as prominent examples). 5) fragmentation in form and representation (eg. T. S. Eliot's "Wasteland"). 6) extreme ambiguity and simultaneity in structure (eg. William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, which offers the same events from radically different focalized perspectives). 7) some experimentation in the breakdown between high and low forms (eg. Eliot's and Joyce's inclusion of folk and pop-cultural material in their work), though rarely in a way that is easily understandable by the general masses. 8) the use of parody and irony in artistic creation (eg. James Joyce's Ulysses or the creations of the surrealists and dadaists), though again in a way that tends to be difficult for the mass consumer to understand. Postmodernity and Postmodernism: One of the problems in dealing with postmodernism is in distinguishing it from modernism. In many ways, postmodern artists and theorists continue the sorts of experimentation that we can also find in modernist works, including the use of self-consciousness, parody, irony, fragmentation, generic mixing, ambiguity, simultaneity, and the breakdown between high and low forms of expression. In this way, postmodern artistic forms can be seen as an extension of modernist experimentation; however, others prefer to represent the move into postmodernism as a more radical break, one that is a result of new ways of representing the world including television, film (especially after the introduction of color and sound), and the computer. Many date postmodernity from the sixties when we witnessed the rise of postmodern architecture; however, some critics prefer to see WWII as the radical break from modernity, since the horrors of nazism (and of other modernist revolutions like communism and Maoism) were made evident at this time. The very term "postmodern" was, in fact, coined in the forties by the historian, Arnold Toynbee. Some of the things that distinguish postmodern aesthetic work from modernist work are as follows: 1) extreme self-reflexivity. Postmodernists tend to take this even further than the modernists but in a way that tends often to be more playful, even irreverant (as in Lichtenstein's "Masterpiece" on the left). This same self-reflexivity can be found everywhere in pop culture, for example the way the Scream series of movies has characters debating the generic rules behind the horror film. In modernism, self-reflexivity tended to be used by "high" artists in difficult works (eg. Picasso's painting above); in postmodernism, self-reflexive strategies can be found in both high art and everything from Seinfeld to MTV. In postmodern architecture, this effect is achieved by keeping visible internal structures and engineering elements (pipes, support beams, building materials, etc.). Consider, for example, Frank Gehry's postmodern Nationale-Nederlanden Building, which plays with structural forms but in a decidedly humorous way (which has led to the nickname for the building, Fred and Ginger, since the two structures—clearly male and female—appear to be dancing around the corner). 2) irony and parody. Connected to the former point, is the tendency of postmodern artists, theorists, and culture to be playful or parodic. (Warhol and Lichtenstein are, again, good examples.) Pop culture and media advertising abound with examples; indeed, shows or films will often step outside of mimetic representation altogether in order to parody themselves in midstride. See especially the Hutcheon module on parody, which discusses this element in particular. 3) a breakdown between high and low cultural forms. Whereas some modernists experimented with this same breakdown, even the modernists that played with pop forms (eg. Joyce and Eliot) tended to be extremely difficult to follow in their experimentations. Postmodernists by contrast often employ pop and mass-produced objects in more immediately understandable ways, even if their goals are still often complex (eg. Andy Warhol's commentary on mass production and on the commercial aspects of "high" art through the exact reproduction of a set of Cambell's Soup boxes—on the left). We should, however, keep in mind that Warhol is here clearly following in the modernist tradition of "ready-mades," initiated by Marcel Duchamp, who used everyday objects in his art exhibits (including, for example, a urinal for his work, Fountain) . (Click here for selected works by Duchamp.) 4) retro. Postmodernists and postmodern culture tend to be especially fascinated with styles and fashions from the past, which they will often use completely out of their original context. Postmodern architects for example will juxtapose baroque, medieval, and modern elements in the same room or building. In pop culture, think of the endlessly recycled tv shows of the past that are then given new life on the big screen (Scooby-Doo, Charlie's Angels, and so on). Jameson and Baudrillard tend to read this tendency as a symptom of our loss of connection with historical temporality. 5) a questioning of grand narratives. Lyotard sees the breakdown of the narratives that formerly legitimized the status quo as an important aspect of the postmodern condition. Of course, modernists also questioned such traditional concepts as law, religion, subjectivity, and nationhood; what appears to distinguish postmodernity is that such questioning is no longer particularly associated with an avant-garde intelligentsia. Postmodern artists will employ pop and mass culture in their critiques and pop culture itself tends to play with traditional concepts of temporality, religion, and subjectivity. Think of the popularlity of queer issues in various media forms or the tendency of Madonna videos to question traditional Christianity ("Like a Prayer"), gender divisions ("What It Feels like for a Girl"), capitalism ("Material Girl"), and so on. Whether such pop deconstructions have any teeth is one of the debates raging among postmodern theorists. 6) visuality and the simulacrum vs. temporality. Given the predominance of visual media (tv, film, media advertising, the computer), both postmodern art and postmodern culture gravitate towards visual (often even two-dimensional) forms, as in the "cartoons" of Roy Lichtenstein (example on the right). A good example of this, and of the breakdown between "high" and "low" forms, is Art Spiegelman's Maus, a Pulitzer-prize-winning rendition of Vladek Spiegelman's experiences in the Holocaust, which Art (his son) chooses to present through the medium of comics or what is now commonly referred to as the "graphic novel." Another symptom of this tendency is a general breakdown in narrative linearity and temporality. Many point to the style of MTV videos as a good example. As a result, Baudrillard and others have argued (for example, through the notion of the simulacrum) that we have lost all connection to reality or history. This theory may help to explain why we are so fascinated with reality television. Pop culture also keeps coming back to the idea that the line separating reality and representation has broken down (Wag the Dog, Dark City, the Matrix, the Truman Show, etc.). 7) late capitalism. There is also a general sense that the world has been so taken over by the values of capitalist acqusition that alternatives no longer exist. One symptom of this fear is the predominance of paranoia narratives in pop culture (Bladerunner, X-Files, the Matrix, Minority Report). This fear is, of course, aided by advancements in technology, especially surveillance technology, which creates the sense that we are always being watched. 8) disorientation. MTV culture is, again, sometimes cited as an example as is postmodern architecture, which attempts to disorient the subject entering its space. Another example may be the popularity of films that seek to disorient the viewer completely through the revelation of a truth that changes everything that came before (the Sixth Sense, the Others, Unbreakable, the Matrix). 9) secondary orality. Whereas literacy rates had been rising steadily from the introduction of print through the modern period, postmodern society has seen a drastic reversal in this trend as more and more people are now functionally illiterate, relying instead on an influx of oral media sources: tv, film, radio, etc.. The culture still very much relies on print to create these media outlets (hence the term secondary orality); however, it is increasingly only a professional, welleducated class that has access to full print- and computer-literacy. An ever larger percentage of the population merely ingests orally the media that is being produced. 
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