Expert answer:Modernity, Modernism and postmodernism
Expert answer:Discussion of Modernity, Modernism, and PostmodernismIn a well paragraphed, well cited short essay (at least 600 words), discuss the differences between modernity, modernism and postmodernism. Cite from at least three sources FROM THE CLASS as you write. DO NOT USE OUTSIDE SOURCES. Make cogent, well balanced observations about the ideas. Use the MLA citation style posted in the earlier module of the class on citing. The more clearly you understand these ideas, the better you are likely to do on the exam!
understanding_modernism.docx
2328_klages__essay_postmodernism.pdf
2328_klage_read_guide.pdf
2328_chart_for_americanliteraryperiods_1_.pdf
owl_purdue_essay_on_modernism_and_postmodernism__1_.pdf
Unformatted Attachment Preview
Understanding Modernism, A Summary
Modernism: What It Is
Unlike “the Enlightenment” or “Romanticism” this term is used a couple
different ways.
a) In its broadest, most general usage it may refer to the world given to us by
the Enlightenment and Romanticism. This what you refer to when you think
of your own and your “modern” American/Western culture’s basic
assumptions: secular, democratic republics, civil liberties and equality, a
belief that nature is beautiful etc.
b) As an artistic or literary movement it may refer to Modern Art such as Van
Gogh or to Modern Literature’s emphasis on realism, the individual, and the
inner life of the psyche or mind.
c) It’s also useful to think of Modernism as a “condition” rather than an
intellectual movement.
The Modern Condition
“The Modern Condition” can be understood as having its philosophical roots in
the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and its historical roots in the Industrial
Revolution, Colonialism and the major wars and genocide of the late
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
As you know, the Enlightenment argued that Rationality and Freedom would
save man from himself, and Romanticism argued that Love and Emotion
would correct the sterility and “heartlessness” of the Enlightenment, but
Modernism is in many ways a critique of the empty or impossible promises of
both previous movements: both the Enlightenment and Romanticism offered
some excellent ideas, but how many people really took them to heart
and/or act upon them? In other words, did they really improve our lot as
human beings or did they simply present another set of equally brutal
problems?
Thus, Enlightenment works such as Tartuffe and Candide conclude with well
balanced, moderate, rational solutions to social problems; in Romantic works
such as Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein realizes, albeit too late, that his lack
of love has created a monster and destroyed his own family, and the reader is
left clearly understanding the nature of the problem and its solution.
But the works of T.S. Eliot and Joseph Conrad mainly expose the problem and
despair over ever finding another solution: they expose the hypocritical
“whited sepulchers” of the Enlightenment and mourn the failure of love, and
yet they remain too jaded to offer up another easy solution.
In many ways, the Modern Condition is this willingness to realize and
honestly admit to the failure of previous solutions. Guernica
(Pablo Picasso 1937)
Why This Despair?
Darwin and The Origin Of The Species
Charles’ Darwin’s The Origin of the Species (1859) revolutionized modern
culture in a couple of ways:
First, like Kepler, Galileo and Newton, Darwin again proved that science
could explain the natural world or universe in ways that religion once had,
and when it did it did not confirm but rather disprove the prior religious
explanations.
As with Galileo but even more so, Darwin’s theory was (and still is) seen as an
attack on organized religion itself. This drove (and continues to drive) an
even larger wedge between those who turned to science and those who
turned to religion as a means of understanding existence, and unlike what
Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and Jefferson expected, the religious
backlash was vehement and continuing.
But more importantly, Darwin’s theory not only removed an all knowing
“creator” from the picture; it replaced it with chance and random
circumstance. Where religion had given us a universe with meaning and
order, Darwin gave us one of blind luck and empty blackness: not only were
we not at the center of the universe, science suggested, but the universe was
endlessly vast and we just another insignificant organism, made in the image
of bacteria rather than God.
This scared, and continues to scare, the shit out of us.
Colonialism: Unwillingness of “Enlightened” Western “Civilization” to truly
treat all peoples as “equal”. See Conrad and Achebe Notes
War:
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” – Yeats
The Enlightenment offered the promise of freedom and prosperity: through
rationality man would build new, democratic, egalitarian, just, utopias that
would harness emerging scientific technologies and deliver man from slavery.
Instead, the 19th and 20th Centuries proved vastly more bloody and brutal than
any other in written history. By many estimates, at least 170,000,000 civilians
were killed by their own governments during the 20th Century.
(http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM)
The American Civil War cost the States 618,000 lives. Even loving, Christian,
Enlightened Americans proved themselves willing to slaughter one another
for the right to enslave others.
World War I caused 9.7 million military and 6.6 million civilian deaths.
Modern technology proved itself adaptable to “modern warfare”, which
proved itself vastly more destructive than “primitive” technologies and
methods.
World War II caused 62 million casualties, 37 million of which were civilian.
The United States alone killed 500,000 Japanese civilians by firebombing 67
Japanese cities; the first, Tokyo, is estimated to have killed up to 100,000 in
one night. …Enlightenment technology had given us the means of killing each
other like never before without, seemingly, giving us the means of not killing
each other as we always had. Such power clearly reached its peak with the
atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Holocaust is perhaps the clearest representation or symbol of the failure
of Enlightenment and Romantic principles. Under Hitler and the Nazis, the
three most “civilized” elements of Western Civilization — modern
“Enlightenment” technology and rationalism, Romanticism, and both
Protestant and Catholic Christianity — teamed up to carry out the most
“barbaric” systematic extermination of people, ever.
Under both Mao and Stalin, the relatively “modern”, “rationally” based,
utopian Communist states led to the two greatest recorded acts of genocide,
ever. (We’ll study how Marxism is an outgrowth of both Enlightenment
rationality and Rousseau’s Romantic philosophy.)
Rational, scientific man, it turned out, had perhaps simply learned how to kill
more efficiently. Neither the spread of or end of Christianity seemed to alter
mankind’s thirst for evil — in the United States (Civil War) and Western
Europe (WWI and WWII) Christians slaughtered each other in larger numbers
than ever before, in numbers mimicked in Post-religious-Communist China
and Russia.
Freedom, The Primacy of the Individual, and Alienation
The Enlightenment call for greater civic freedoms and the Romantic call for
increased individual freedoms further led to a culture of alienation: freed
from the social constrictions of the church, Modern man found himself freed
from both community and recourse to faith. In other words, in times of need,
the Modern man found himself alone. Freed from the constrictions of formal
religion, Modern man was freed from the comforts of ritual and forced to
figure out life’s existential questions alone. Freed from the village and farm,
Modern man was freed from the security of family, common culture and
community. The alienation from the natural world bemoaned by the
Romantics only deepened as societies increasingly urbanized.
Industrialization further alienated Modern man from the product of his own
hands.
And so we find Conrad’s Enlightened Kurtz not simply armed with reason
but armed and dangerous, far from cultural constraints, reaching deep inside
only himself for morality, only to find…nothing. Or more aptly: Nothingness.
In Things Fall Apart, Achebe shows us that “enlightening” and “civilizing”
foreign cultures really means destroying those cultures so that we may exploit
them, and freedom from “barbaric” or “savage”, “uncivilized” customs and
beliefs leaves men like Okonkwo defeated and left with no defense but
violence and brutality.
We find the epic heroes of the classical age replaced with T.S. Eliot’s
scarecrow “hollow men”.
We find Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina freed from the constraints of traditional
marriage, a truly modern, sexually liberated woman, yet she is also utterly
alienated from her children, her church, her community.
Are Marx And Freud “Modern”?
If we look at “Modernism” this way, as a condition rather than a philosophical
movement, it may be helpful to think of Freudian and Marxist philosophy as
in many ways vestiges of the Enlightenment, as both still hold out hope that
scientific rationality can end human suffering.
However, both Marx and Freud (and Nietzsche) contribute greatly to the
growing sense that knowledge is existential and “contaminated” by our
subjectivity, emotions and human relationships. This will become the central
theme of “Postmodernism” but these seeds were clearly planted and
influential in the Modern era.
See Modern Literature
http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/engl_258/Lecture%20Notes/understanding_modernism.htm
Postmodernism
Dr. Mary Klages, Associate Professor, English Department, University of Colorado,
Boulder
http: www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klagespomo.html
Postmodernism is a complicated term, or set of ideas, one that has only emerged as an area of
academic study since the mid-1980s. 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,
the movement from which postmodernism seems to grow or emerge. Modernism has two facets,
or two modes of definition, both of which are relevant to understanding postmodernism.
The first facet or definition of modernism comes from the aesthetic movement broadly labeled
“modernism.” This movement is roughly coterminous with twentieth century Western ideas
about art (though traces of it in emergent forms can be found in the nineteenth century as well).
Modernism, as you probably know, is the movement in visual arts, music, literature, and drama
which rejected the old Victorian standards of how art should be made, consumed, and what it
should mean. In the period of “high modernism,” from around 1910 to 1930, the major figures of
modernism literature helped radically to redefine what poetry and fiction could be and do:
figures like Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Proust, Mallarme, Kafka, and Rilke are
considered the founders of twentieth-century modernism.
From a literary perspective, the main characteristics of modernism include:
1. an emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity in writing (and in visual arts as well); an
emphasis on HOW seeing (or reading or perception itself) takes place, rather than on WHAT is
perceived. An example of this would be stream-of-consciousness writing.
2. a movement away from the apparent objectivity provided by omniscient third-person
narrators, fixed narrative points of view, and clear-cut moral positions. Faulkner’s multiplynarrated stories are an example of this aspect of modernism.
3. a blurring of distinctions between genres, so that poetry seems more documentary (as in T.S.
Eliot or ee cummings) and prose seems more poetic (as in Woolf or Joyce).
4. an emphasis on fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives, and random-seeming collages of
different materials.
5. a tendency toward reflexivity, or self-consciousness, about the production of the work of art,
so that each piece calls attention to its own status as a production, as something constructed and
consumed in particular ways.
6. a rejection of elaborate formal aesthetics in favor of minimalist designs (as in the poetry of
William Carlos Williams) and a rejection, in large part, of formal aesthetic theories, in favor of
spontaneity and discovery in creation.
7. A rejection of the distinction between “high” and “low” or popular culture, both in choice of
materials used to produce art and in methods of displaying, distributing, and consuming art.
Postmodernism, like modernism, follows most of these same ideas, rejecting boundaries between
high and low forms of art, rejecting rigid genre distinctions, emphasizing pastiche, parody,
bricolage, irony, and playfulness. Postmodern art (and thought) favors reflexivity and selfconsciousness, fragmentation and discontinuity (especially in narrative structures), ambiguity,
simultaneity, and an emphasis on the destructured, decentered, dehumanized subject.
But–while postmodernism seems very much like modernism in these ways, it differs from
modernism in its attitude toward a lot of these trends. Modernism, for example, tends to present a
fragmented view of human subjectivity and history (think of The Wasteland, for instance, or of
Woolf’s To the Lighthouse), but presents that fragmentation as something tragic, something to be
lamented and mourned as a loss. Many modernist works try to uphold the idea that works of art
can provide the unity, coherence, and meaning which has been lost in most of modern life; art
will do what other human institutions fail to do. Postmodernism, in contrast, doesn’t lament the
idea of fragmentation,provisionality, or incoherence, but rather celebrates that. The world is
meaningless? Let’s not pretend that art can make meaning then, let’s just play with nonsense.
Another way of looking at the relation between modernism and postmodernism helps to clarify
some of these distinctions. According to Frederic Jameson, modernism and postmodernism are
cultural formations which accompany particular stages of capitalism. Jameson outlines three
primary phases of capitalism which dictate particular cultural practices (including what kind of
art and literature is produced). The first is market capitalism, which occurred in the eighteenth
through the late nineteenth centuries in Western Europe, England, and the United States (and all
their spheres of influence). This first phase is associated with particular technological
developments, namely, the steam-driven motor, and with a particular kind of aesthetics, namely,
realism. The second phase occurred from the late nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth
century (about WWII); this phase, monopoly capitalism, is associated with electric and internal
combustion motors, and with modernism. The third, the phase we’re in now, is multinational or
consumer capitalism (with the emphasis placed on marketing, selling, and consuming
commodities, not on producing them), associated with nuclear and electronic technologies, and
correlated with postmodernism.
Like Jameson’s characterization of postmodernism in terms of modes of production and
technologies, the second facet, or definition, of postmodernism comes more from history and
sociology than from literature or art history. This approach defines postmodernism as the name
of an entire social formation, or set of social/historical attitudes; more precisely,this approach
contrasts “postmodernity” with “modernity,” rather than “postmodernism” with “modernism.”
What’s the difference? “Modernism” generally refers to the broad aesthetic movements of the
twentieth century; “modernity” refers to a set of philosophical, political, and ethical ideas which
provide the basis for the aesthetic aspect of modernism. “Modernity” is older than “modernism;”
the label “modern,” first articulated in nineteenth-century sociology, was meant to distinguish the
present era from the previous one, which was labeled “antiquity.” Scholars are always debating
when exactly the “modern” period began, and how to distinguish between what is modern and
what is not modern; it seems like the modern period starts earlier and earlier every time
historians look at it. But generally, the “modern” era is associated with the European
Enlightenment, which begins roughly in the middle of the eighteenth century. (Other historians
trace elements of enlightenment thought back to the Renaissance or earlier, and one could argue
that Enlightenment thinking begins with the eighteenth century. I usually date “modern” from
1750, if only because I got my Ph.D. from a program at Stanford called “Modern Thought and
Literature,” and that program focused on works written after 1750).
The basic ideas of the Enlightenment are roughly the same as the basic ideas of humanism. Jane
Flax’s article gives a good summary of these ideas or premises (on p. 41). I’ll add a few things to
her list.
1. There is a stable, coherent, knowable self. This self is conscious, rational, autonomous, and
universal–no physical conditions or differences substantially affect how this self operates.
2. This self knows itself and the world through reason, or rationality, posited as the highest form
of mental functioning, and the only objective form.
3. The mode of knowing produced by the objective rational self is “science,” which can provide
universal truths about the world, regardless of the individual status of the knower.
4. The knowledge produced by science is “truth,” and is eternal.
5. The knowledge/truth produced by science (by the rational objective knowing self) will always
lead toward progress and perfection. All human institutions and practices can be analyzed by
science (reason/objectivity) and improved.
6. Reason is the ultimate judge of what is true, and therefore of what is right, and what is good
(what is legal and what is ethical). Freedom consists of obedience to the laws that conform to the
knowledge discovered by reason.
7. In a world governed by reason, the true will always be the same as the good and the right (and
the beautiful); there can be no conflict between what is true and what is right (etc.).
8. Science thus stands as the paradigm for any and all socially useful forms of knowledge.
Science is neutral and objective; scientists, those who produce scientific knowledge through their
unbiased rational capacities, must be free to follow the laws of reason, and not be motivated by
other concerns (such as money or power).
9. Language, or the mode of expression used in producing and disseminating knowledge, must
be rational also. To be rational, language must be transparent; it must function only to represent
the real/perceivable world which the rational mind observes. There must be a firm and objective
connection between the objects of perception and the words used to name them (between
signifier and signified).
These are some of the fundamental premises of humanism, or of modernism. They serve–as you
can probably tell–to justify and explain virtually all of our social structures and institutions,
including democracy, law, science, ethics, and aesthetics.
Modernity is fundamentally about order: about rationality and rationalization, creating order out
of chaos. The assumption is that creating more rationality is conducive to creating more order,
and that the more ordered a society is, the better it will function (the more rationally it will
function). Because modernity is about the pursuit of ever-increasing levels of order, modern
societies constantly are on guard against anything and everything labeled as “disorder,” which
might disrupt order. Thus modern societies rely on continually establishing a binary opposition
between “order” and “disorder,” so that they can assert the superiority of “order.” But to do this,
they have to have things that represent “disorder”–modern societies thus continually have to
create/construct “disorder.” In western culture, this disorder becomes “the other”–defined in
relation to other binary oppositions. Thus anything non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual, nonhygienic, non-rational, (etc.) becomes part of “disorder,” and has to be eliminated from the
ordered, rational modern society.
The ways that modern societies go about creating categories labeled as “order” or “disorder”
have to do with the …
Purchase answer to see full
attachment
How it works
- Paste your instructions in the instructions box. You can also attach an instructions file
- Select the writer category, deadline, education level and review the instructions
- Make a payment for the order to be assignment to a writer
- Download the paper after the writer uploads it
Will the writer plagiarize my essay?
You will get a plagiarism-free paper and you can get an originality report upon request.
Is this service safe?
All the personal information is confidential and we have 100% safe payment methods. We also guarantee good grades