Modernism and Post Modernism in Literature Defining Briefly free essay sample

Henri Bergson  (1859–1941), on the other hand, emphasized the difference between scientific, clock time and the direct, subjective, human experience of time[3]  His work on time and consciousness had a great influence on twentieth-century novelists, especially those modernists who used the stream of consciousness technique, such as  Dorothy Richardson,  Pointed Roofs  (1915),  James Joyce,  Ulysses  (1922) and  Virginia Woolf  (1882–1941)  Mrs Dalloway  (1925),  To the Lighthouse  (1927). Also important in Bergsons philosophy was the idea of  elan vital, the life force, which brings about the creative evolution of everything  His philosophy also placed a high value on intuition, though without rejecting the importance of the intellect. These various thinkers were united by a distrust of Victorian positivism and certainty. Modernism as a literary movement can be seen also, as a reaction to industrialization,  urbanization  and new technologies. Modernist literature attempts to take into account changing ideas about reality developed by  Darwin,  Mach,  Freud,  Einstein,  Nietzsche, Bergson  and others. We will write a custom essay sample on Modernism and Post Modernism in Literature : Defining Briefly or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page From this developed innovative literary techniques such as stream-of-consciousness,  interior monologue, as well as the use of multiple points-of-view. Important literary precursors of Modernism were:  Fyodor Dostoyevsky  (1821–81) (Crime and Punishment  (1866),  The Brothers Karamazov  (1880));  Walt Whitman  (1819–92) (Leaves of Grass) (1855–91);  Charles Baudelaire  (1821–67) (Les Fleurs du mal),  Rimbaud(1854–91) (Illuminations, 1874);  August Strindberg  (1849–1912), especially his later plays, including, the trilogy  To Damascus  1898–1901,  A Dream Play  (1902),  The Ghost Sonata  (1907). At the beginning some modernists fostered a utopian spirit, stimulated by innovations in  anthropology,  psychology,  philosophy,  political theory,  physics  and  psychoanalysis. The poets of the  Imagist movement, founded by  Ezra Pound  in 1912 , as a new poetic style gave Modernism its early start in the 20th century,  were characterized by a positive spirit, rejecting the sentiment and discursiveness typical of Romantic and Victorian periods. or poetry that favoured a precision of  imagery, brevity and  Free verse. This idealism, however, ended, with the outbreak of World War I, and writers created more cynical works that reflected a prevailing sense of disillusionment. Many modernist writers also shared a mistrust of institutions of power such as government and religion, and rejected the notion of absolute truths. Later modernist works, such as  T. S. Eliots  The Waste Land  (1922), were increasingly self-aware, introspective, and often explored the darker aspects of human nature The term modernism covers a number of related, and overlapping, artistic and literary movements, including  Imagism,  Symbolism,Futurism,  Vorticism,  Cubism,  Surrealism,  Expressionism, and  Dada. Postmodernism in Literature Postmodernism   is in general the era that follows  Modernism. [1]  It frequently serves as an ambiguous overarching term for  skeptical  interpretations of  culture,  literature,  art,  philosophy,economics,  architecture,  fiction, and  literary criticism. It is also confused with  deconstructionand  post-structuralism  because its usage as a term gained significant popularity at the same time as twentieth-century post-structural thinker. One of the most well-known postmodernist concerns is deconstruction, a concern for philosophy, literary criticism, and textual analysis developed by  Jacques Derrida. The notion of a deconstructive approach implies an analysis that questions the already evident deconstruction of a text in terms of presuppositions, ideological underpinnings, hierarchical values, and frames of reference. A deconstructive approach further depends on the techniques of close reading without reference to cultural, ideological, moral opinions or information derived from an authority over the text such as the author. At the same time Derrida famously writes: Il ny a pas de hors-texte (there is no such thing as outside-of-the-text). [2]  Derrida implies that the world follows the grammar of a text undergoing its own deconstruction. Derridas method frequently involves recognizing and spelling out the different, yet similar interpretations of the meaning of a given text and the problematic implications of binary oppositions within the meaning of a text. Derridas philosophy influenced a postmodern movement called  deconstructivism  among architects, characterized by the intentional fragmentation, distortion, and dislocation of architectural elements in designing a building. Derrida discontinued his involvement with the movement after the publication of his collaborative project with architect Peter Eisenmann in  Chora L Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman. Structuralism  was a philosophical movement developed by French academics in the 1950s, partly in response to French  Existentialism. It has been seen variously as an expression of  Modernism,  High modernism, or postmodernism[by whom? ]. Post-structuralists  were thinkers who moved away from the strict interpretations and applications of structuralist ideas. Many American academics consider post-structuralism to be part of the broader, less well-defined postmodernist movement, even although many post-structuralists insisted it was not. Thinkers who have been called structuralists include the anthropologist  Claude Levi-Strauss, the linguist  Ferdinand de Saussure, the Marxist philosopher  Louis Althusser, and the semiotician  Algirdas Greimas. The early writings of the psychoanalystJacques Lacan  and the literary theorist  Roland Barthes  have also been called structuralist. Those who began as structuralists but became post-structuralists include  Michel Foucault,  Roland Barthes,  Jean Baudrillard,  Gilles Deleuze. Other post-structuralists includeJacques Derrida,  Pierre Bourdieu,  Jean-Francois Lyotard,  Julia Kristeva,  Helene Cixous, and  Luce Irigaray.