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1. From “Modernism and Postmodernism,” in M. H. Abrams’ A Glossary of Literary Terms:
The term modernism is widely used to identify new and distinctive features in the subjects, forms, concepts, and styles of literature and the other arts in the early decades of the present century, but especially after World War I (1914-1918). The specific features signified by “modernist” vary with the user, but many critics agree that it involves a deliberate and radical break with some of the traditional bases not only of Western art, but of Western culture in general. Important intellectual precursors of modernism, in this sense, are thinkers who had questioned the certainties that had supported traditional modes of social organization, religion, morality, and also traditional ways of conceiving the human self – thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud [. . .].
Literary historians locate the beginning of the modernist revolt as far back as the 1890s, but most agree that what is called high modernism, marked by an unexampled range and rapidity of change, came after the first World War. The year 1922 alone was signalized by the simultaneous appearance of such monuments of modernist innovation as James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, as well as many other experimental works of literature. The catastrophe of the war had shaken faith in the moral basis, coherence, and durability of Western civilization and raised doubts about the adequacy of traditional literary modes to represent the harsh and dissonant realities of the postwar world. T. S. Eliot wrote in a review of Joyce’s Ulysses in 1923 that the inherited mode of ordering a literary work, which assumed a relatively coherent and stable social order, could not accord with “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” Like Joyce and like Ezra Pound in his Cantos, Eliot experimented with new forms and a new style that would render contemporary disorder, often contrasting it to a lost order and integration that had been based on the religion and myths of the cultural past. In The Waste Land (1922), for example, Eliot replaced the standard syntactic flow of poetic language by fragmented utterances, and substituted for the traditional coherence of poetic structure a deliberate dislocation of parts, in which very diverse components are related by connections that are left to the reader to discover, or invent. Major works of modernist fiction, following Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and his even more radical Finnegans Wake(1939), subvert the basic conventions of earlier prose fiction by breaking up the narrative continuity, departing from the standard ways of representing characters, and violating the traditional syntax and coherence of narrative language by the use of stream of consciousness and other innovative modes of narration. Gertrude Stein – often linked with Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Woolf as a trail-blazing modernist–experimented with automatic writing (writing that has been freed from control by the conscious, purposive mind) and other modes that achieved their effects by violating the norms of standard English syntax and sentence structure. Among other European and American writers who are central representatives of modernism are the novelists Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, André Gide, Franz Kafka, Dorothy Richardson, and William Faulkner; the poets Stéphane Mallarmé, William Butler Yeats, Rainier Maria Rilke, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens; and the dramatists August Strindberg, Luigi Pirandello, Eugene O’Neill, and Bertolt Brecht. Their new forms of literary construction and rendering had obvious parallels in the violation of representational conventions in the artistic movements of expressionism and surrealism, in the modernist paintings and sculpture of Cubism, Futurism, and Abstract Expression, and in the violations of standard conventions of melody, harmony, and rhythm by the modernist musical composers Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and their radical followers.
A prominent feature of modernism is the phenomenon called the avant-garde (a military metaphor: “advance-guard”); that is, a small, self-conscious group of artists and authors who deliberately undertake in Ezra Pound’s phrase, to “make it new.” By violating the accepted conventions and proprieties, not only of art but of social discourse, they set out to create ever-new artistic forms and styles and to introduce hitherto neglected, and sometimes forbidden, subject matter. Frequently, avant-garde artists represent themselves as “alienated” from the established order, against which they assert their own autonomy; a prominent aim is to shock the sensibilities of the conventional reader and to challenge the norms and pieties of the dominant bourgeois culture. [. . . .]
The term postmodernism is often applied to the literature and art after World War II (1939-1945), when the effects on Western morale of the first war were greatly exacerbated by the experience of Nazi totalitarianism and mass extermination, the threat of total destruction by the atomic bomb, the progressive devastation of the natural environment, and the ominous fact of overpopulation. Postmodernism involves not only a continuation, sometimes carried to an extreme, of the countertraditional experiments of modernism, but also diverse attempts to break away from modernist forms which had, inevitably, become in their turn conventional, as well as to overthrow the elitism of modernist “high art” by recourse to the models of “mass culture” in film, television, newspaper cartoons, and popular music. Many of the works of postmodern literature – by Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Roland Barthes, and many others – so blend literary genres, cultural and stylistic levels, the serious and the playful, that they resist classification according to traditional literary rubrics. And these literary anomalies are paralleled in other arts by phenomena like pop art, op art, the musical compositions of John Cage, and the films of Jean-Luc Godard and other directors.
An undertaking in some postmodernist writings – prominently in Samuel Beckett and other authors of the literature of the absurd – is to subvert the foundations of our accepted modes of thought and experiences so as to reveal the meaninglessness of existence and the underlying “abyss,” or “void,” or “nothingness” on which any supposed security is conceived to be precariously suspended.
2. From “post-modernism” in J. A. Cuddon’s Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory:
A general (and sometimes controversial) term used to refer to changes, developments and tendencies which have taken place (and are taking place) in literature, art, music, architecture, philosophy, etc. since the 1940s or 1950s. Post-modernism is different from modernism, even a reaction against it. It is no easier to define than many other -isms. Like them, it is amorphous by nature.
To talk of post-modernism is to imply that modernism is over and done with. This is not so. There never is a neat demarcation line. Originally, avant-garde movements in literature and the arts in general were modernist; avant-garde influences continue. It might be said that there is a new avant-garde. Besides, post-modernism is still happening. When something else develops from it or instead of it, it will, perhaps, be easier to identify, describe and classify.
As far as literature is concerned it is possible to descry certain features in post-modernism. For instance, there is literature which tends to be non-traditional and against authority and signification. Here one may cite experimental techniques, in fiction as displayed in the nouveau roman and the anti-novel. In some cases these looked perilously close to mere gimmickery. There have also been experiments with what is called concrete poetry, though there is nothing particularly postmodernist about that (or even modernist, for that matter) [. . .]. In drama one might cite experiment with form, content and presentation in such developments as the Theatre of the Absurd, Total Theatre, the ‘happening’ and, latterly, the Théatre de Complicité.
Other discernible features of post-modernism are an eclectic approach, aleatory writing, parody and pastiche. Nor should we forget the importance of what is called magic realism in fiction, new modes in science fiction, the popularity of neo-Gothic and the horror story.
3. Adapted from Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge:
What, then, is the postmodern? It is undoubtedly part of the modern. All that has been received, if only yesterday, must be suspected. In an amazing acceleration, the generations precipitate themselves. A work can only be modern if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.
