A few questions about Modernism

[Desolation]

Let me start by saying that I am not asking for others to do my homework for me (I know that people coming on and asking for help on assignments annoys many board members), I have actually yet to take a literature class. I'm just curious about this genre, and wikipedia has not been much help.

- I suppose that my first question is, what exactly is Modernism? What are its goals, what makes a novel a Modernist novel? Is it related to the content of the book in question, or is it simply the time period that the book was written in?
- From what I vaguely understand, a large part of Modernism is about deconstruction of traditional narratives, so, by that definition, would Surrealist and Existentialist writers such as Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, Henry Miller, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, and Albert Camus, be considered Modernist authors?
- What is Postmodernism? How can something be "Post Modern"?

Thanks for the help.

[Il Dante]

OK: postmodernism, not modernism, is all about deconstructing so-called "meta-narratives." Postmodernism, philosophically, is basically an idea that says people "construct" language and "construct" culture, which includes religion, gender, ideas about race, rituals, philosophy, literature, etc.--all in order to get and maintain power over other groups. Thus it argues that all of human language and culture is "culturally constructed" for Machiavellian purposes. It also posits that because we are prisoners of our culture, we cannot truly know the truth, but can only know contingent truth within our cultural "meta-narrative." This, of course, begs the question: if we are all bound by our culture, is postmodernism bound by its culture (namely, Western culture)? From what sublime peak does the postmodernist survey our condition? This is just a polite way of stating the obvious, that postmodernism is self-contradictory.

Postmodern literature takes the above ideas and runs with them, creating works of literature that are darkly ironic and self-referential, often using pastiche or whatever.

Modernism is rather different from that.

[Sebas. Melmoth]

Cultural Modernism (in the arts) began around the turn of the 20th Century (ca.1900 +/- 10 years) and was reflective of a couple of primary issues:
(1) a reaction against Victorian hypocrisy in social mores such as the repressive concept of 'respectability' which caused many people a great deal of unhappiness (and was also something of an adjunct to capitalism); and, (2) the effects of the rapid transformation of information techne in the form of science and industry, especially with the so-called 'Second Industrial Revolution' of steel, chemicals, and electricity (ca.1895).

So Modernism in the arts sought to recognize these changes in the forms of Realism (Verismo), Impressionism, Naturalism, and then Postimpressionism in the form of stream-of-consciousness, raw sexuality, etc. (cf. Joyce, Woolf, Proust, Lawrence)

Modernism sought an appeal to the psyche, to natural urges, to gritty depiction of industrial society with speedy motion, etc.

And then, with the wholesale bloodshed of the First World War, Modernism reflected digust with the old Victorian mentality which had caused the War, and with the meaningless of life in Dada.

Then Modernism turned to Surrealism in search of a deeper meaning of life in unexplained mystery and chance encounter.

[Il Dante]

So there you have it: modernism and post-modernism.

Just to recapitulate, modernism originally had much to do with Freud and his cynical theories which explained all human behavior in terms of the ID (related to sexual urges) and the ego (the cowboy trying to ride the bucking bronco and often failing). Thus Freud explored the dark realms that had been heretofore avoided by Victorians. Modernists, likewise, followed Freud in journeying into darker territory, to places that might have been considered "crude" or immoral before. Then WWI struck, and thus caused modernism to evolve to be even more cynical, dark, and pessimistic. This pessimism is eloquently expressed in T.S. Elliot's "The Hollow Men" and "The Wasteland." Modernism had much to do, as the above poster said, with angst, depression, a feeling of despair, the loss of religion as consolation (with the notable exception of Elliot), a feeling that humanity was terrible and getting worse, that things were hopeless. Then came surrealism and absurdism. Absurdism holds that life is absurd, as best exemplified by Becket's famous play, "Waiting for Godot."

After all of that fun stuff came post-modernism, which was less overtly cynical, but more deeply cynical. PoMo, as they call it, undermined the belief in truth and undermined the idea that we can really know anything at all. Thus postmodern literature often comments on the percieved absurdity of language, of art, and of trying to know the truth. So PoMo art can be very ironic.

It's also important to note that this idea that the Victorians were "sexually repressed" was invented by the Edwardians (the generation of English people from 1901 to 1914), who despised their Victorian forebears just as many generations tend to despise the generation before them. Edwardian artists such as D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, et al were highly successful at portraying the Victorians as stuffy, constipated, Puritanical moralizers. But it is important to remember that this picture of the Victorians is, although widely accepted, not necessarily altogether accurate. In fact, historians of Victorian England generally reject this notion.

[Sebas. Melmoth]

Victorianism had its own critics--even at its high-water mark: Tennyson, Carlyle, Mill, Arnold, and Pater come to mind.

Then late-Victorianism's critics included Wilde, Hardy, and Beerbohm.

The Georgians' Bloomsbury Group gave us Stratchey's Eminent Victorians.

http://www.amazon.com/Eminent-Victorians-Oxford-Worlds-Classics/dp/0192801589/ref=sr_1_2_oe_3?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=books&qid=1272999160&sr=1-2

See too:
http://www.amazon.com/Carrington-Emma-Thompson/dp/B00005R5GC/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1272999308&sr=1-2

Oh, yes--there's a good film on Eliot as well:
http://www.amazon.com/Tom-Viv-Willem-Dafoe/dp/B00008978I/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1272999526&sr=1-1

And by the same director, a superb film on Wilde:
http://www.amazon.com/Wilde-Special-Stephen-Fry/dp/B00005V5NU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1272999575&sr=1-1

[Sebas. Melmoth]

BTW, some perspicacious critics have asserted that Postmodernism ran from c.1945-2000, and that we are now in a Post-postmodern era.

I can agree with that critique in even more specifically terming our current era as Neo-primitivistic.

[Desolation]

So, if one were to write a novel now with the traits of a Modernist or Post-modernist work, it would be called Post-post-modernism?

Thanks for all of the information, by the way. It was really helpful. After reading all that, I added a stack of Modernist works to my Amazon wishlist. I'm definitely interested in reading more into the genre.

[ThousandthIsle]

Wow, what a wealth of knowledge in these forums. I join the OP in saying thanks for sharing all of this information! And Sebas. Melmoth, I have added Tom & Viv to my Netflix queue - thanks for recommending!

[mal4mac]

Cultural Modernism (in the arts) began around the turn of the 20th Century (ca.1900 +/- 10 years) and was reflective of a couple of primary issues:
(1) a reaction against Victorian hypocrisy in social mores such as the repressive concept of 'respectability' which caused many people a great deal of unhappiness ....


Does 'respectability' have to be repressive? Does it have to lead to unhappiness? Take Nicholas Nickleby, for instance. He's acts in a respectable way, but seems markedly happy (even in straightened circumsntances.) On the other hand, Byron seems remarkably unhappy. Modernists were famous for being unhappy. Read a biography of Joyce, Eliot or Woolf! The Victorians - Dickens, Thackery, and Austen seemed a much happier bunch.