Postmodernism PPT
Industrial revolution (mid 1800s) -> Romantics and Victorian era, transcendentalism
American civil war (1860s) -> Realism/Naturalism, Existentialism
Modern period (1900-1960s) -> Modernism (WW1, The Great Depression, WW2)
Contemporary period (1950-60s to present) -> Postmodern
Why it arose
- Industrialisation transformed the West
- The decimation of WW1, which wiped out a generation
- Darwin, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud and Einstein changed people's understanding of history, economics, philosophy, science, psychology, physics, and even religion
- Move away from European influence into the "American century".
Industrialisation
- Inventions which changed our perception of space and time:
- Railways
- Photography
- Telegraph
- Complicated our ability to forge a coherent perspective on reality
- Reality obfuscated, experience mediated by machines, images, artificiality.
- For example, electricity? How does it work? Very few people know. Almost magical!!
Urbanisation
Population growth in 1800 to 1900. Specifically for cities, because cities are seen as the centre of modernity, industry, wealth etc.
- London: 960k to 6.5m
- NY: 60k to 3.4m
- Paris: 547k to 4m
- Boston: 28k to 561m
Squalor and poverty made visible
Anonymity and impersonality of modern life; fragmentation and social alienation
Birth of the metropolis: vast, capitalist epicentres in which people are strangers to one another.
Mass media, democratisation of information
With a consumerist mindset attached?
Proliferation of competing voices and perspectives: newspapers, tabloids, phonograph records
- Commercially driven, consumer-oriented texts that bear no connection to tradition (e.g. folklore) disregarding the established power and status of 'high art'.
Mass production of "inferior products", i.e. the information is of lesser quality.
Secularisation
Decline of religion
- Crisis of belief: lack of sense of purpose of metaphysical meaning, leading to a sense of futility and spiritual alienation, particularly after WW1
- People questioning how God could let WW1, and its horrors, happen.
Freud and the mind
Personal identity comprises a three-way struggle between subconscious desire, social, and personal values/beliefs.
- Identity no longer fixed but fluid, destabilized.
- 'The self' is difficult to know and understand
- Humans as inherently complex and, to some extent, chaotic
Essentially people were thinking more about what it meant to be human.
Asking what is the most tenable moral standpoint? Do we look out for others or for ourselves?
What it's about
Ezra Pound1's maxim of "make it new" has come to represent the movements goals, and is probably 'nicer' that William Carlos Williams' assertion that "Nothing is good save the new". Ultimately, they wanted to:
- break with the past
- reject literary traditions
- reject aesthetic values of their predecessors
- reject diction that seemed ill-fitting in an era of technological breakthroughs and global violence
- break with Romantic notion of the sublime2
- become self-consciously sceptical of language and its claims on coherence
Traits
- Stylistic experimentation and disrupted syntax
- Stream of Consciousness
- Theme of alienation: characters or speakers feel disconnected from people and/or society/the world
- Focus on images
- Use of collage and disjunction3
- Free verse
- An unsentimental impersonality
- References to both high and low culture.
Common threads
Regardless, modernism is relatively united in acknowledging that:
- Modernity comes with a crisis of identity; everything is in flux, so who are we and where do we stand in this world? At times this is alienating, at other times exciting.
- Crisis of representation: a new understanding that art (or anything) cannot actually 'represent' the world accurately and objectively. It can represent what the individual sees/thinks, which is entirely subjective.
- The modern world is messy and filled with unknowns. Whilst not necessarily a bad thing, it cannot be romanticized or dressed up to look pretty! (At least not in the conventional sense...)
- Art has to do something different if it is going to represent the modern experience properly.
Key poets
On literature set-text list
- T.S. Eliot ("The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock")
- e.e. cummings ("next to of course god america i")
- Robert Frost ("Out, Out-")
Not on the list
- William Carlos Williams
- Marianne Moore
- Ezra Pound
- Mina Loy
- HD
- And others...
Modernists
The following poets are modernist-adjacent, and on the literature set-text list. They are "arguably modernist".
- Phillip Larkin
- Kenneth Slessor
- Rosemary Dobson
- Pablo Neruda
- Judith Wright
- Zbiegniew Herbert
- Elizabeth Bishop
- David Campbell
- Dorothy Hewett
- Stevie Smith
- W.B. Yeats
- Francis Webb
Related Modernism movements
- Imagism
- Symbolism
- Futurism
- Cubism
- Surrealism
- Avant-Garde
- Dadaism
- Expressionism
- The Harlem Renaissance
Ezra Pound "poem"
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black, bough.
Analysis
Online, there are detailed analyses of the poem - check out LitCharts for an example.
If people can produce an extensive analysis of a couplet, you can compile a sophisticated analysis of longer poems.
The ability to discuss a couple of modernist poems will unlock a number of possible WACE questions.
Introduction to Modernism)
"Ideas first, conventions second"
