modernistic elitism in literature and postmodernism

[MudFoot]

First of all I want to say hello to all members on this forum... I wasn't active in terms of posting - but I'm here for a long time, and I'm trying to read carefully...

Also, english language is not my natural way of expressing my self... so I will ask for patience if you find my structure of thoughts a bit broken.

The thing I'm asking here TOO, can be something of a common place... Something that I have slipped through and overlooked while reading literary theories...
But I find it intriguing for my self... Really...

Reading things about postmodernism always drop you a line of how it surpasses modernism in bringing literature back to the people, overthrowing the modernist elitism and fact that literature was loosing it's social importance. I find those thoughts all over the place, and the worst case for me, it's only that snippet which is so repeatable that it just annoys me... Because I don't understand it...

What would be "modernist high art", in this case literature, and how it is separated from the people?

Is it purity in the style or in the means of expression that was hardly understandable for the "people", striving for experiment and innovation that made it hardly reachable, so literature was reserved only for those who are deeply within what literature is?

How postmodernism surpasses that? And how it brings back literature to the people?

Is it the postmodern hybridization? The fact that they refer to popular culture and that they talk about common things/feelings/motives giving them a "equal value"?

I'm not sure that I understand, because the way I see things this whole postmodernism thing isn't really that understandable for people who don't read that much, yet I read all over the place how switch from "modernism" to "postmodernism" was about making literature reachable in it's meanings and forms to people who don't read that much...

I actually come to conclusion that literature and people being part of that wanted to see books being part of the society in more relevant ways then they were with subconscious streams of thought, dadaism and stuff like that...

I just wonder is my intuition making any sense, and how have I slept on that distinction between "high art in modernism" and popularization of literature that happens with postmodernism.

I hope you have enough patience to bother about this for few minutes and if you know where to look for explanations, please let me know...

[ennison]

Elitist writers tend to look down on the "masses". They do not care much if they are understood. Indeed the true elitist thinks it beneath his or her dignity to do anything as mundane as try to communicate.
Various literary terms like "modernism" or "postmodernism" just bounce off the average reader. Most of us know a good difficult writer from a charlatan and there's a lot of 'em about. There is of course the reverse elitism of the clown who hates anything that challenges his intellectual processes as it makes him sweat embarrassingly. Therefore he dismisses everything that is not just above the gutter as too "posh", too "liberal", too "pink", too ...whatever. What HE really means is "Too hard for me"

[Desolation]

I don't know, I think that even though Modernism might be difficult for "the masses"(and I would place myself in that category, not strictly being a student of literature) to grasp, it's more of a rebellion against literary snobs than it is an effort to alienate people. I like to think of James Joyce, Knut Hamsun, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Nabokov, et al, as the punk rockers of their day. They've got their middle fingers up to literary conventions and they're very loud about their disdain. I'd find it hard to argue that Finnegans Wake is any more appealing for literary elitists than it is for "the masses."

[River Boy]

Elitist writers tend to look down on the "masses". They do not care much if they are understood. Indeed the true elitist thinks it beneath his or her dignity to do anything as mundane as try to communicate.
Various literary terms like "modernism" or "postmodernism" just bounce off the average reader. Most of us know a good difficult writer from a charlatan and there's a lot of 'em about. There is of course the reverse elitism of the clown who hates anything that challenges his intellectual processes as it makes him sweat embarrassingly. Therefore he dismisses everything that is not just above the gutter as too "posh", too "liberal", too "pink", too ...whatever. What HE really means is "Too hard for me"

I'd be more inclined to blame the critics than the writers themselves. I suspect writers produce the kind of material that inspires them, unless they're trying to be someone else, but critics tend to try and decide which writers should be held up as important.

Some like Germaine Greer, who in some ways I like but I can't help feel she believes her tastes to be better to others, looks to champion literature she's comfortable with and doesn't have to share with the masses, allowing her to present herself as being having a superior relationship with literature. Her efforts to discredit The Lord of the Rings as having any literary methods at all are legenday amongst the Tolkien community, over which she seems particularly desperate to relate having predicted the books success would be a complete fad for the 60s generation.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Hi, I only have a little time but I'll quickly answer a few points for you if it is any help.

Reading things about postmodernism always drop you a line of how it surpasses modernism in bringing literature back to the people, overthrowing the modernist elitism and fact that literature was loosing it's social importance. I find those thoughts all over the place, and the worst case for me, it's only that snippet which is so repeatable that it just annoys me... Because I don't understand it...

What would be "modernist high art", in this case literature, and how it is separated from the people?

Well we are talking about a sort of movement in the arts and literature from about 1910-1930, important figures in literature typically being the likes of Joyce, Woolf, Pound, Stein, Eliot. Often the elitist label gets attached to modernism but I think this is somewhat unfair and at times inaccurate, but nevertheless in literature modernism featured degrees of experimentation (such as stream of consciousness with the emphasis on how not what we see) which may appear from the outside to have the effect of separating the work from the "common" reader. So in novels typically the plot is cast aside in favour of more abstract ways of working. So I suppose that for such reasons it is seen as been separated from the people in that sense and sometimes suffers from the "elitist" tag.

Is it purity in the style or in the means of expression that was hardly understandable for the "people", striving for experiment and innovation that made it hardly reachable, so literature was reserved only for those who are deeply within what literature is?

I think I have partly answered that one or you had yourself really. I certainly don't think that such experimentation was purposely done in order to "go above the heads of the common people" as has been said in the past and I don't think it takes much reading into to grasp what some modernists were trying to achieve, but I suppose people will always attack something that at first appears different.

Reading things about postmodernism always drop you a line of how it surpasses modernism in bringing literature back to the people

How postmodernism surpasses that? And how it brings back literature to the people?

I agree with what you said further on in your post about postmodernism being just as removed from "the common reader" than modernism is. The idea is that postmodernism supposedly breaks the divisions between "high" and "low" art and therefore some could argue the postmodernsim "brings literature back to the people" but like I say, I'm not really championing that idea much.

Is it the postmodern hybridization? The fact that they refer to popular culture and that they talk about common things/feelings/motives giving them a "equal value"?

Postmodernsim in a purist sense sees no difference between "high" and "low" literature. It is in itself a playful blend of all styles, so that you will often find references to Shakespeare and the Bible together with references to popular culture within the same page or paragraph, so yes it gives everything equal value in that sense.

I'm not sure that I understand, because the way I see things this whole postmodernism thing isn't really that understandable for people who don't read that much, yet I read all over the place how switch from "modernism" to "postmodernism" was about making literature reachable in it's meanings and forms to people who don't read that much...

Yes I agree with you here in the sense that I don't really buy that as well. I think it is important to point out that "movements" such as modernism and postmodernism (if they are to be seen as movements and not merely styles) don't necessarily come about in a conscious sort of manner. I don't think that a postmodernist writer (if there is really such thing) got up one morning and purposely decided to "bring literature back to the people" or such things, merely that someone could say that postmodernism breaks the divisions between the notions of what is "high" and "low" and in that sense could appear to be "anti-elitist" but it's not really accurate or fair in my opinion to make such judgments.

Hope that helps in some way.

[mal4mac]

What would be "modernist high art", in this case literature, and how it is separated from the people?

Is it purity in the style or in the means of expression that was hardly understandable for the "people", striving for experiment and innovation that made it hardly reachable, so literature was reserved only for those who are deeply within what literature is?

Try reading John Carey "The Intellectuals and the Masses" for a vitriolic attack on the modernists. He suggests that upper class writers/readers had their elitism challenged by the rise of working class literacy. These elitists were unhappy that they could no longer consider themselves part of the chosen few because everybody could read Dickens. So they created literature like 'Ulysses' and 'The Waste Land' that 'the people' could not, or would not, want to read.

This move dehumanized 'the people', who the modernists called 'the mass'. Both terms are dehumanizing, designed to eliminate the human status of the majority of people.

Nietzsche started it all with his contempt for newspapers. Hardy, Eliot, produced common suggestions that the mass of people have no souls. (No arguments for this, of course, they just bluntly stated it to support their own elitist agenda.) Lawrence said he would gas societies outcasts. Waugh welcomed the nuclear threat, as a nuclear holocaust would destroy the mass.

Yeats attacked benefactors like Lord Nuffield for bringing education to the mass (I took a Nuffield Foundation science A level, the best course I ever took, so I think Yeats is talking through his daft meta-mythical hat...)

Lawrence called for the closing of all the schools (nothing like a working class elitist for turning on his own!)

Eliot called for the closing of the universities while teaching classes to working people at London University!

Anyway, Carey has many more examples...

How postmodernism surpasses that? And how it brings back literature to the people?

What is Postmodernism? So many writers have been put under the banner of post-modernism that I can't see how you can discuss it - better to look at individual authors and see how they have brought literature back to the masses. Can Carey be called post-modernist? As he comes after the modernists, in both senses , I can't see why not. So read Carey and see how literature can be brought back to everybody, where it should be.

Many writers often called postmodern are just as unreadable to most people (Foucault, Derrida). Even Harold Bloom classes them as unreadable, and he classified Joyce and Proust as readable!

This whole postmodernism thing isn't understandable to me, and I read quite a lot. Many working class readers attacked by "modernists" read a lot, it's just they don't read things like Ulysses. So even if a working class reader has read all of Dickens, George Eliot, Austen, and Twain the modernist snobs can still dismiss them as inferior. The elitists force themselves to read (or pretend to themselves that they have read) Ulysses and then they can feel superior.

I can't see that anything under the banner of "postmodernism" is at all about 'making literature reachable in it's meanings and forms to people who don't read that much'. John Carey doesn't take this paternalistic approach, he just recommends some good reading (e.g., Arnold Bennett and H.G. Wells - when he slips into non-elitist mode.)

There is of course the reverse elitism of the clown who hates anything that challenges his intellectual processes as it makes him sweat embarrassingly. Therefore he dismisses everything that is not just above the gutter as too "posh", too "liberal", too "pink", too ...whatever. What HE really means is "Too hard for me"

Isn't it elitist to call such a person a 'clown'? What next? Send him to the gas chamber as D.H. Lawrence proposed?

I can imagine someone reading, say, 1984 with great appreciation and then dismissing Ulysses as a load of gibberish. So is 1984 'just above the gutter'?

How do you know that Ulysses is 'too hard' for 'the clown'. Perhaps he just finds it too obscure for him. If he made the effort, perhaps by reading the doorstop commentaries, he could understand it *better* than any pre-doorstop modernist. But he wants to read a novel, not doorstops. That seems sensible rather than clownish!

I can see some working class people calling Ulysses 'too posh' for them, while at the same time thinking they are inferior, say, to the elitist teacher who suggested that they read it. This would be sad. And wrong.

Half of me wants to dismiss Ulysses as a load of gibberish, my better read half produces some gentle arguments for regarding it in other ways. Fortunately, the better read half doesn't dismiss the other half as a clown or gutter-snipe - both halves value tranquillity of mind.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Here is an article by Woolf regarding modernism which you find interesting:
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~class/wo...in/modern.html

It is an article by which she attempts to outline what modernism is, or should be.

[mal4mac]

I don't know, I think that even though Modernism might be difficult for "the masses"(and I would place myself in that category, not strictly being a student of literature) to grasp, it's more of a rebellion against literary snobs than it is an effort to alienate people.

Modernism is difficult for everyone, it's just that the elitists are willing to suffer its strange ways to retain their elitism.

I like to think of James Joyce..., et al, as the punk rockers of their day. They've got their middle fingers up to literary conventions and they're very loud about their disdain. I'd find it hard to argue that Finnegans Wake is any more appealing for literary elitists than it is for "the masses."

Leopold Bloom in Ulysses is an ordinary guy who is not dismissed by Joyce, which makes Joyce a rare exception amongst modernists. But Ulysses' obscurity excludes people like Bloom from its readership. Sympathetic imagining creates the illusion of the reader's solidarity with Bloom, in conjunction with preserving the reader's superiority - Bloom is expelled from the intelligentsia, who are incited to contemplate him, judge him, and end up realising their superiority to him.

Joyce was fully supported by grants from well off elitists and given support by Yeats, Eliot, Pound - members of the elite literary establishment. Joyce never had a mass readership or support from the popular book press - not at all like punk rock.

Some of Joyce's antics sound a bit like those of punk rockers. But getting blind drunk most nights & scrounging money off everyone is common in many walks of life.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Modernism is difficult for everyone, it's just that the elitists are willing to suffer its strange ways to retain their elitism.

See, I just don't agree with this at all Mac. I don't agree with attacking modernism on grounds of elitism at all, as in my first post. Read Woolf's article above. I don't believe that the object of modernism is to create an elite which separates those from common readers. Modernism was a huge movement in the whole of the arts across Europe, it is not about one person (Joyce?) or whoever trying to position themselves above everyone else. I think this a wholly unfair angle in which to take.

[sixsmith]

I generally agree with much of what both Neely and Mal have said. Certainly modernism , as I understand it, is a more cohesive and self-aware 'movement' than 'postmodernism' which tends to elude anything approaching a stable definition. The diverse character of novelists that share the nomenclature bears this out. That said, there are undoubtedly novelists (i.e Barth, Coover, Gaddis) who consciously inhabit a postmodern paradigm. In any case, the notion that postmodernism (such as it is) has returned literature to the people is, I think, largely erroneous. One need only look at the recent and virulent critical backlash against authors like Pynchon and DeLillo (the latter in particular) to realise that postmodernism is largely viewed as a self-serving genre or movement or what have you.

[MudFoot]

Great inputs people... Thank you a lot...

Neely and mal4mac, I really appreciate what you wrote. I'm taking a serious reads of what you posted. I believe we have similar stance on this topic. This really provides me with thoughts that I needed to understand some things being written about "postmodernism".

Mal4mac, thank your for Carey hint, I'm going to read that.

[LitNetIsGreat]

No worries, glad to help out.

[Alexander III]

I it is unfair to label modernism as elitist, the modernist movement did not pause to think about social implications, as a movement their aim was to change art to create a new form or something new to express the human mind.

In the movement as mentioned above there were writers with elitist tendencies and there were those who didn't even give consideration to the matter and there were those who tried to make their art more available to the people.

Postmodernism is a tricky affair, mostly because it cannot be defined as it is our contemporary. I personally don't like the movement however as they seem to bring revolution in art for revolutions sake. In modernism the revolution was required to reflect a new modern society. Postmodernism is elitist in the sense that it is complicating something which needs not be complicated, further separating itself from the masses. However as a literary movement it is a weak one as it has no proper foundation, I think of it as more of a placeholder until new born movement can come to its own and sweep the artistic world.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Yes, I agree.

I'm also not a fan of the postmodern position either and I like your point about it seems to be a revolution (a rather mild and silly one to me) for the sake of revolution. I certainly agree with your point, as the opening poster thought, about postmodernism being yet another separating factor from the masses and nothing at all to do with "bringing literature to the people" that to me is just nonsense.

There are some that say we are now in a post-postmodern era, but I'd rather hit them over the head with a rolled up newspaper than to think about the consequences of what that (if anything) involves.

If you are interested in modernism Mudfoot, Virgina Woolf is a good place to be, not an easy read for sure and hated by many, but undoubtedly there is genius there if you have the patience for it.

[mal4mac]

I it is unfair to label modernism as elitist, the modernist movement did not pause to think about social implications, as a movement their aim was to change art to create a new form or something new to express the human mind.

Carey makes a very good case for modernism being elitist. You can, perhaps, find exceptions, maybe some had a pure motivation to change art. Perhaps Joyce is one of those, but he was nurtured by fascists like Pound. Pound used 'sewage' as a metaphor for 'democratic voters' in the cantos - you can't get more nastily elitist than that.

Have you an example of a modernist who tried to make their art more available to the people? Joyce's efforts were very half-hearted given the difficulty He encouraged Gilbert to write his guidebook. But only a little. (Ellmann's biography of Joyce is good on detailing the problems that even the intelligentsia had with Ulysses... and as for Finnegan's Wake....)