00146--Post Modernism

            A knowledge of modernism is necessary to understand post modernism.  'Modernism' is the name given to the movement which dominated the arts and culture of the first half of the twentieth century.  Modernism is the name given to movement which dominated the arts and culture of the first half of the twentieth century.  Modernism was that earthquake in the arts which brought down much of the structure of pre-twentieth century practice in music, painting, literature, and architecture.  One of the major epicenters of this earthquake seems to have been Vienna, during the period of 1890-1910, but the effects were felt in France, Germany, Italy and eventually even in Britain, in art movements like Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.  Its after-shocks are still being felt today, and many of the structures it toppled have never been rebuilt.  Without an understanding of modernism, then, it is impossible to understand twentieth-century culture.

            The period of high modernism was the twenty years from 1910 to 1920 and some of the literary 'high priests' of the movement (writing in English) were T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, Wallace Stephane Mallarme, Andre Gide, Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke.  Some of the important characteristics of the literary modernism practised by these writers include the following:

1)        A new emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity, that is, on how we see rather than what we see (a preoccupation evident in the use of the stream-of-consciousness technique).

2)        A movement (in novels) away from the apparent objectivity provided by such features as: Omniscient external narration, fixed narrative points of view and clear-cut moral position.

3)        A blurring of the distinctions between genres, so that novels tend to become more lyrical and poetic, for instance, and poems more documentary and prose like.

4)        A new liking for fragmented forms, discontinuous narrative, and random-seeming collages of disparate materials.

            The overall result of these shifts is to produce a literature which seems dedicated to experimentation and innovation.  After its high point, modernism seemed to retreat considerably in the 1930s, partly no doubt, because of the tensions generated in a decade of political and economic crisis, but a resurgence took place in the 1960.  However, modernism never regained the pre-eminence it has enjoyed in the earlier period.