Jeremy Hawthorn's concise Glossary of contemporary literary theory defines the two terms. Both, he says, give great prominence to fragmentation as a feature of twentieth century art and culture, but they do so in very different moods.
" The modernist features it in such a way as to register a deep nostalgia for an earlier age when faith was full and authority intact. In the wasteland the persona says, as if despairingly of the poem, "There fragments I have shored against my ruins". In instances like this there is a tone of lament, pessimism, and despair about the world which finds its appropriate representation in these 'fractured' art forms.
" For the postmodernist, by contrast, fragmentation is an exhilarating, liberating phenomenon, symptomatic of our escape from the claustrophobic embrace of fixed systems of belief. In a word, the modernist laments fragmentation while the postmodernist celebrates it.
" An important aspect of modernism was a fierce asceticism which found the over elaborate art forms of the nineteenth century deeply offensive and repulsive. This asceticism has one of its most characteristic and striking manifestations in the pronouncements of modernist architects.
" By contrast, postmodernism rejects the distinction between 'high' and popular' art which was important in modernism, and believes in excess, in gaudiness and in 'bad taste' mixtures of qualities. It disdains (the modernist asceticism as elitist.
