h Department

h Year

Modernism and Post Modernism

in Literature
Dr. Lamees Elgafi
 Modernism
• Modernistic literature is the expression of
the modern era (1901-45). It tends to revolve
around themes of individuality, the
randomness of life, mistrust of government
and religion and the disbelief in absolute truth.
 Modernism
• Influences of modern literature The three thinkers who influence the
Modern Era and Modern literature the most are probably Charles Darwin
(1809-1882), Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Sigmund Freud.  This is not to
say that Modern authors were ardent evolutionists, or Marxists or even
practitioners of Freudian psychology;  rather, these thinkers simply fuelled
and framed the perspectives and debates that formulated so much Modern
art and literature. Today, Freud's specific theories are largely dismissed as
unscientific.  Still, these ideas had a profound influence on art and
literature as much as on our common, daily perceptions/conceptions of
existence and reality:
 Modernism
• Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was a
poet, dwelling chiefly on his spiritual relations
with god, his poetry only became recognized
in 1918 when he became published in Robert
Bridges edition. The late publication
effectively made the difficulties of his work
anticipate modern poetry, and so he made a
major influence on later writers.
 Modernism
• James Joyce (1882-1941) was an Irish novelist, short
story novel writer, poet and playwright born in
Dublin.
Joyce wrote several volumes and an autobiographical
novel which follows his life from infancy to his first
departure for Paris. Joyce subsequently wrote an
unsuccessful play published in 1918 and furthermore
a slight volume of verses. These were amid the
beginnings of his two great works to come, Ulysses
and Finnegan’s Wake. These both occupied the
remainder of his life.
 WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
(13 June 1885- 28 January 1939) 
William Butler Yeats was one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. In 1923 he was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly
artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation."

 YEATS WAS INTERESTED MAINLY IN THE LIKES OF:

mysticism, spiritualism, occultism and astrology

In 1916, Yeats quite suddenly decided that he didn't want to write pretty poems anymore - he wanted to write
realistic poems: poems as urgent and as uncluttered as a newspaper article.
He even wrote a poem about his decision: "A Coat".

So some characteristics of Modernism in Yeats include:

Demotic language (not poetic language)
Political subject matter
Ugliness and violence, where these are appropriate to the subject matter (no attempt to make everything
aesthetically pleasing in a poeticised vision of loveliness).
 
CONTRAST IN YEATS POETRY
TRADITIONAL YEATS
POEM:
HE WISHES FOR THE CLOTHS OF HEAVEN
HAD I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
 
MODERNIST Yeats
POEM:
THE SECOND COMING
TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and
everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity
 Modernism

Virginia Woolf
During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society
and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the
novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and
the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A
woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
 POST MODERNISM
• The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain
characteristics of post–World War II literature, relying
heavily, for example, on fragmentation, paradox,
questionable narrators.
• Unifying features often coincide with Jean-François Lyotard's
concept of the "metanarrative" and "little narrative",
Jacques Derrida's concept of "play", and Jean Baudrillard's
"simulacra." For example, instead of the modernist quest for
meaning in a chaotic world, the postmodern author eschews,
often playfully, the possibility of meaning, and the postmodern
novel is often a parody of this quest.
 Post Modernism
Jean Francois Lyotard
Lyotard's work is characterised by a persistent opposition to universals, he is
fiercely critical of many of the 'universalist' claims of the Enlightenment, and
several of his works serve to undermine the fundamental principles that generate
these broad claims.

Lyotard was a frequent writer on aesthetic matters. He was, despite his

reputation as a postmodernist, a great promoter of modernist art. Lyotard saw
'postmodernism' as a latent tendency within thought throughout time and not a
narrowly-limited historical period. He favoured the startling and perplexing
works of the high modernist avant-garde. In them he found a demonstration of
the limits of our conceptuality, a valuable lesson for anyone too imbued with
Enlightenment confidence. Lyotard has written extensively also on few
contemporary artists of his choice: Valerio Adami, Daniel Buren, Marcel
Duchamp, Bracha Ettinger and Barnett Newman, as well as on Paul Cézanne
and Wassily Kandinsky
 Post Modernism
• Kurt Vonnegut is a well known Post modernist author, with his works winning fame after they were
published in 1969. The classic combines science fiction elements with an analysis of human condition. The
novel is based on Kurt Vonnegut's own experience in World War II. Slaughterhouse Five treats one of the
most horrific massacres in European history, the firebombing of Dresden.
• Kurt Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that became classics of the
American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and ’70s. Dog-
eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms
on campuses throughout the United States.
• Kurt Vonnegut used humour to tackle the basic questions of human existence:
 Post Modernism
• Why are we in this world?
• Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making
people suffer, wishes them well?

In 1998, Mr. Vonnegut

returned to a former World War II
air-raid shelter in Dresden, Germany,
where he was a prisoner of war.
His experience there was the basis
for his novel, "Slaughterhouse-Five."

Kurt Vonnegut not only wrote metaphysical themes.

With a blend of SCIENCE FICTION, PHILOSOPHY
and JOKES, he also wrote about the banalities of consumer culture, eg,
the destruction of the environment.
 Post Modernism
Ian McEwan
Atonement by Ian McEwan employs several characteristics of postmodernism in its
narrative techniques that foreground the conflict between differing perceptions of
truth and the elusiveness of memory.

Recent film adaption starring Kiera Knightly.

 Post Modernism
Atonement and its Characteristics of Postmodernism
Atonement questions not only authorial authority but
also the consciousness of the mind, which distorts
truth and history, and ardently illustrates "how easy it
was to get everything wrong, completely wrong". The
structure of the narrative foregrounds the conflict
between the different perceptions of truth, facts and
beliefs, and truth and illusion, and reflects on a
smaller scale the similarly written, similarly
constructed history of the Second World War.
 Post Modernism
Louis de bernierres

Postmodernism is hard to define, because it is a concept that appears in a wide

variety of disciplines or areas of study, including art, architecture, music, film,
literature, sociology, communications, fashion, and technology. It's hard to locate it
temporally or historically, because it's not clear exactly when postmodernism
begins. Perhaps the easiest way to start thinking about postmodernism is by
thinking about modernism. (at the beginning)
 16

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