 Early modernity: Renaissance to Industrial

Revolution
 Modernity: Industrial Revolution (18th
Century Enlightenment)

Modernism: (1910-1930)
 Post- Modernity: Period of mass media
(From 1960s to Present)
Postmodernism (1980s-
 For many historians and literary theorists,
the Enlightenment (or the Age of Reason in
the 18th century) is synonymous with
modernity (Bressler:96).

 At the center of this view of the world lie

two prominent features: a belief that reason
is humankind's best guide to life and that
science, above all other human endeavors,
could lead humanity to a new promised
land (Bressler:96).
 Eg: Philosophically, modernity rests on the
foundations laid by Rene Descartes (1596-
1650), a French philosopher, scientist, and
mathematician. "I think, therefore I am" thus
becomes the only solid foundation upon
which knowledge and a theory of
knowledge can be built (Bressler:96).

 Thanks to Bacon, the scientific method has

become part of everyone's elementary and
high school education. It is through
experimentation, conducting experiments,
making inductive generalizations, and
verifying the results that one can discover
truths about the physical world (Bressler:96-
97).
 Thanks to Newton, the physical world is no
longer a mystery but a mechanism that operates
according to a system of laws that can be
understood by any thinking, rational human
being who is willing to apply the principles of
the scientific method to the physical universe
(Bressler:97).

 Anything the enlightened mind set as its

goal, these scholars believed, was attainable.
Through reason and science, all poverty,
ignorance, and injustice would finally be
banished (Bressler:97).
For several centuries, modernity's chief tenets
—that reality can be known and investigated
and that humanity possesses an essential
nature characterized by rational thought—
became the central ideas upon which many
philosophers, scientists, educators, and
writers constructed their worldviews
(Bressler:98).
Briefly put, modernity's core characteristics are
as follows:
 The concept of the self is a conscious,
rational, knowable entity.
 Reality can be studied, analyzed, and known.
 Objective, rational truth can be discovered
through science.
 The methodology of science can and does
lead to ascertaining truth.
 The yardstick for measuring truth is reason.
 Truth is demonstrable.
 Progress and optimism are the natural results
of valuing science and rationality
 Language is referential, representing the
perceivable world (Bressler:98).
 Newtonian Order

 God, Reason and Progress

 There was a center to the universe.
 Progress is based upon knowledge,
and man is capable of discerning
objective absolute truths in science
and the arts.

TRADITIONAL WESTERN “MODERN” THINKING

 What Is Language?

as
 People are the same everywhere
 There are universal laws and truths
 Knowledge is independent of
culture, gender, etc.
 Language is a man-made tool that
refers to real things / truths
 Purpose of Literature

 Good literature is of timeless

significance.
 The text will reveal constants,
universal truths, about human
nature, because human nature
itself is constant and unchanging.

TRADITIONAL WESTERN “MODERN” THINKING

Rooted in the philosophy and ideals of the
Enlightenment, modernity, with its
accompanying philosophical, political,
scientific, and ethical ideas, provides
much of the basis for intellectual thought
from the 1700s to the midpoint of the
twentieth century. World War I, however,
marks a dramatic shift, especially in the
arts. Growing out of the devastation of the
war, the arts began to reflect society's
concerns, emphasizing decay, loss, and
disillusionment (Bressler:101).
 The term modernism is given to this aesthetic
movement dated from 1914 to 1945 that
questioned the ideals of British Victorianism and
reflected both the material and the
psychological devastation of two world wars
(Bressler:101).

Writers such as W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Virginia

Woolf, Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, George Bernard
Shaw, and many others began to question
some of modernity's core beliefs such as the
objective status of reality and the fixed nature of
aesthetic forms (Bressler:101-102).
 Using unconventional stylistic techniques
such as stream of consciousness and
multiple-narrated stories, artists and
writers emphasized the subjective,
highlighting how "seeing" or "reading"
actually occurs rather than investigating
the actual object being seen or read.
Characterized by a transnational focus,
literary artists blurred the established
distinctions among the various genres,
rejecting previously established aesthetic
theories,
choosing to highlight unconscious or
subconscious elements in their works by
using the psychoanalytic theories of
Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.
Decentering the individual and
introducing ambiguity and
fragmentation, modernism began to see
life as a collage rather than a map
(Bressler:102).
 Some of the important characteristics o f the
literary modernism practised by these writers
include the following:

1) A new emphasis on impressionism and

subjectivity, that is, on 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 o f view and clear-cut moral positions.
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 o f disparate materials.

5) A tendency towards ‘reflexivity’, so that

poems, plays, and novels raise issues
concerning their own nature, status, and
role.
 The overall result of these shifts is to
produce a literature which seems
dedicated to experimentation and
innovation (Barry:82).
 Death of the Old Order

 Early 1900s:
◦ World War I
◦ Worldwide poverty & exploitation
 Intellectual upheaval:
◦ Freud: psychoanalysis
◦ Marx: class struggle
◦ Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Nietzsche
◦ Picasso, Stravinsky, Kafka, Proust, Brecht, Joyce,
Eliot

PRECURSORS OF POSTMODERNISM
 The Bending of Time & Space

 Einstein: relativity, quantum mechanics

 Refutation of Newtonian science
 Time is relative
 Matter and energy are one
 Light as both particle and wave
E=mc
 Universe is strange
2

PRECURSORS OF POSTMODERNISM
 Breaking the Rules

 Cubism
 Surrealism
 Dadaism
 Expressionism

PRECURSORS OF POSTMODERNISM
 A World with No Center

“Things fall apart,

The centre cannot hold,
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the
world.”

--Yeats, “The Second

Coming”

PRECURSORS OF POSTMODERNISM
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
 Breaking the Rules

 Emphasis of subjectivity
 Movement away from “objective”
third-party narration
 Tendency stream of consciousness
 Obsession with the psychology of
self
 Rejection of traditional aesthetic
theories
 Experimentation with language
 Literary Examples: (Imagist Poem)
“In a Station of the Metro”
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough. (Ezra Pound)

(stream of consciousness)
The sun became extraordinarily hot because the motor
car had stopped outside Mulberry’s shop window; old
ladies on the tops of omnibuses spread their black
parasols; here a green, here a red parasol opened with
a little pop. Mrs Dalloway, coming to the window with
her arms full of sweet peas, looked at the motor car.
Septimus looked. Boys on bicyles sprang off. Traffic
accumulated. (V.Woolf, Mrs.Dalloway:11)
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 1960s (a decade which has
interesting points of similarity with the
1920s, when modernism was at its
height). However, modernism never
regained the pre-eminence it had enjoyed
in the earlier period (Barry,82-83).
 Timeline

1914 1939 1945 1960 2000 now

 Modern Period Postmodern

period

You are here

TRADITIONAL WESTERN “MODERN” THINKING

 Postmodernist thinkers reject
modernity's representation of discourse
(the map) and replace it with a collage.
Unlike the fixed, objective nature of a
map, a collage's meaning is always
changing. Whereas the viewer of a map
relies on and obtains meaning and
direction from the map itself, the viewer
of a collage actually participates in the
production of meaning.
Unlike a map, which allows one
interpretation of reality, a collage
permits many possible meanings: the
viewer (or "reader") can simply
juxtapose a variety of combinations of
images, constantly changing the
meaning of the collage. Each viewer,
then, creates his or her own
subjective picture of reality (Bressler:99).
 Beginning in the 1960s and continuing
to the present, the voices of the French
philosopher Jacques Derrida, the French
cultural historian Michel Foucault, the
aesthetician Jean-Francois Lyotard, and
the ardent American pragmatist Richard
Rorty, professor of humanities at the
University of Virginia, declare univocally
the death of objective truth.
These leading articulators of
postmodernism assert that modernity
failed because it searched for an
external point of reference—God, reason,
science, among others—on which to
build a philosophy. For these
postmodern thinkers, there is no such
point of reference because there is no
ultimate truth or inherently unifying
element in the universe and thus no
ultimate reality (Bressler:100).
 Overall, postmodernism's core characteristics
can be stated as follows:
 A skepticism or rejection of grand
metanarratives to explain reality
 The concept of the self as ever-changing
 No objective reality, but many subjective

interpretations
 Truth as subjective and perspectival,

dependent on cultural, social, and personal

influences
 No "one correct" concept of ultimate reality
 No metatheory to explain texts or reality
 No "one correct" interpretation of a text
When such principles are applied to literary
interpretation, the postmodernist realizes that
no such thing as the meaning—or, especially,
the correct meaning—of an aesthetic text
exists. Like looking at a collage, meaning
develops as the reader interacts with the
text, for meaning does not reside within the
text itself. And because each reader's view of
truth is perspectival, the interpretation of a
text that emerges when a reader interacts with
a text will necessarily be different from every
other reader's interpretation. For each text,
then, there exists an almost infinite number of
interpretations or at least as many
interpretations as there are readers (Bressler:101).
 What postmodernist literary critics do
1) They discover postmodernist themes,
tendencies, and attitudes within literary works
of the twentieth century and explore their
implications.

2) They foreground fiction which might be said to

exemplify the notion of the ‘disappearance of
the real’, in which shifting postmodern identities
are seen, for example, in the mixing of literary
genres (the thriller, the detective story, the myth
saga, and the realist psychological novel, etc.)
(eclectic).

3. They foreground what might be called

‘intertextual elements’ in literature, such as
parody, pastiche, and allusion, in all of which
there is a major degree o f reference between
one text and another, rather than between the
text and a safely external reality.
4) They foreground irony, in the sense
described by Umberto Eco, that whereas the
modernist tries to destroy the past, the
postmodernist realises that the past must be
revisited, but ‘with irony’
(Modernism/Postmodernism, ed. Peter
Brooker,p. 227.)

5)They foreground the element of ‘narcissism’ in

narrative technique, that is, where novels
focus on and debate their own ends and
processes, and thereby ‘de-naturalise’ their
content. [metafiction: fiction about fiction]

6) They challenge the distinction between high

and low culture,‘ and highlight texts which
work as hybrid blends o f the two (Barry:91).
 An eclectic approach (fragmented forms-
collage, montage, bricolage)

 Aleatory writing (Dadaists’s poems(1917)

made from sentences plucked randomly from
newspapers).

 Parody and pastiche (abandonment of the

divine pretensions of authorship implicit in
the omniscient narratorial stance)
 The nature of the distinction between
modernism and postmodernism is
summarised in the excellent joint entry
on the two terms in Jeremy Hawthorn’s
Concise Glossary of Contemporary
Literary Theory. 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.
 For the postmodernist, by contrast,
fragmentation is an exhilarating,
liberating phenomenon, symptomatic of
our escape from the claustrophic
embrace of fixed systems of belief. In a
word, the modernist laments
fragmentation while the postmodernist
celebrates it (Barry:83-84).
 Allusion:
I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain… (1-4)

Chaucer’s The General Prologue of Canterbury Tales:

When April with his showers sweet with fruit
The drought of March has pierced unto the root
And bathed each vein with liquor that has power) (1-3)
 Collage, montage, pastische:
And I will show you something different from
either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu,
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
They called me the hyacinth girl.” (28-36)
 Pastische:
• “My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with
me.
Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
I never know what you are thinking. Think.” (111-
114) (Prose+Love poem)

I think we are in rats’ alley

Where the dead men lost their bones.
“What is that noise?”
The wind under the door.
“What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”

Nothing again nothing. (115-120) (Prose+Riddle)

 Julian Barnes: A History of the World in1/2 10 Chapters
There were times when Noah and his sons got quite
hysterical. That doesn’t tally with your account of
things? You’ve always been led to believe that Noah
was sage, righteous and God-fearing, and I’ve
already described him as a hysterical rogue with a
drink problem? The two views aren’t entirely
incompatible. Put it this way: Noah was pretty bad,
but you should have seen the others . It came as little
surprise to us that God decided to wipe the slate
clean; the only puzzle was that he chose to preserve
anything at all of this species whose creation did not
reflect particularly well on its creator.
 Pastische: (Flaubert’s Parrot) (Prose+ biography)
If not, then perhaps he in his turn had
borrowed a parrot from a museum and used it
as a model. I warned him of the dangerous
tendency in this species to posthumous
parthenogenesis. I hoped to get my replies quite
soon.
Chronology I
1821-Birth of Gustave Flaubert, second son o f
Achille- Cleophas Flaubert, head surgeon at the
Hotel-Dieu, Rouen, and of Anne-Justine-Caroline
Flaubert, nee Fleuriot. The family belongs to
the successful professional middle class, and
owns several properties in the vicinity o f
Rouen. A stable, enlightened, encouraging and
normally ambitious background (16-17).
 Parody, plurality of reality:

II
1817-Death o f Caroline Flaubert (aged twenty
months),the second child of Achille-Cleophas
Flaubert and Anne-Justine-Caroline Flaubert.
1821-Birth of Gustave Flaubert, their fifth child.
(22)
III
1842-Me and my books, in the same
apartment: like a gherkin in its vinegar.
1846-When I was still quite young I had a
complete presentiment of life.
 It was like the nauseating smell of cooking
escaping from a ventilator: you don’t have
to have eaten it to know that it would
make you throw up
(Flaubert’s Parrot: 28).

Metafiction: [METAFICTION is fiction about fiction:novels

and stories that call attention to their fictional status and
their own compositional procedures (D.Lodge, Art of
Fiction:206]
I do not know. This story I am telling is all
imagination. These characters I create never
existed outside my own mind.
 If I have pretended until now to know my
characters’ minds and innermost thoughts, it
is because I am writing in (just as I have
assumed some of the vocabulary and ‘voice’
of) a convention universally accepted at the
time of my story: that the novelist stands
next to God. He may not know all, yet he tries
to pretend that he does. But I live in the age
of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes; if
this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the
modern sense of the word. (John Fowles, The
French Lieutenant’s Woman:97).

The End !
Barry, P. (2002). Beginning Theory: An
Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Bressler, C. E. (2007). Literary Criticism: An
Introduction to Theory and Practice. New
Jersey:Pearson Prentice Hall.
Lodge, D. (1993). The Art of Fiction: Illustrated
from Classic and Modern Texts. New York:
Viking.