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HUMANITIES: MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM
Guest Lecturer: Valerie Edge MA in Liberal Studies candidate
MODERNISM (LATE 19TH TO MID-20TH CENTURY)
Ò Events: WWI, industrialism, expansion of cities
Ò New ideas, growth in education
Ò “Make it new”- Ezra Pound, mantra of Modernism
Ò Contrast to Romanticism and Realism
Ò Break with traditional aesthetic forms
Ò Baudelaire coined term modernity
PROMINENT WRITERS
Ò Joseph Conrad É The Heart of Darkness É “The Horror!”
Ò James Joyce É Ulysses É A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Ò Virginia Woolf É Mrs. Dalloway É Jacob’s Room
Ò T.S. Eliot
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T.S. ELIOT
Ò Return to tradition Ò Rejection of Romanticism Ò Reinvention of past Ò Defy growing
commercialization of literature and art
Ò Greater attention to style, form and technique
Ò Artists’ work to make sense of world
THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PRUFROCK
Ò Earlier work, 1915 Ò Later works become
more religious Ò Captures essence of
Modernism as seen by Eliot
Ò Themes: É Anti-Romanticism É Reworking of tradition É Neutrality É Anti-Realism
POSTMODERNISM (1950S-?)
Ò Extension of and development from Modernism Ò Skeptical of generalizations Ò Social construction Ò Writerly versus readerly texts
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THEMES
Ò Irony Ò Intertextuality Ò Pastiche Ò Metafiction Ò Temporal distortion Ò Magic Realism Ò Hyperreality Ò Fragmentation of identity
POMO WRITERS
Ò Literature: Vladimir Nabokov, William Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Paul Auster, Salman Rushdie, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Chuck Palahniuk
Ò Philosophy: Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler
