Chapter 14: Critical Exercise:

Modernism/Postmodernism

The terms "Modernism" and "Postmodernism" are often variously defined: as chronological periods corresponding to aesthetic presumptions and styles; as generalized cultural trends that characterize even broader periods of time (for example, when speaking of the Renaissance as "Early Modern"); as sets of aesthetic practices that coexist, define, and supplement one another.  Because of the multiple ways in which they can be used, Modernism and Postmodernism would seem to be imprecise labels that refer, depending on context, to sets of ideas that overlap.

What then might be the utility of learning to distinguish between the two as they appear in literary texts?  What is the value of identifying any particular literary style or movement?

Identifying the assumptions and aesthetic practices of literary texts is a mode of active reading in which readers enter into a conversation among texts—texts that help both define and reflect modernism or postmodernism (or aspects of both), and the ways literature reflects contemporaneous ideas or plays out cultural conflicts about what is valuable.  Thinking about the philosophical and aesthetic context of a story helps readers know how to read—what to expect and how to understand literature as a part of broader cultural phenomena.

 Postmodernism and Knowledge

Consider what the following passages say about the nature of postmodernism:

The last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by sense of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the "crisis" of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.); taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasingly called postmodernism.

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991, 1

What is "millenarianism"?  What would it mean to "invert" that?  What is the difference between a premonition of the future and the sense of large institutions, such as social class, ending?  What "feel" or attitude might be associated with this feeling of things ending?

Modernists like Eliot and Joyce have usually been seen as profoundly humanistic . . . in their paradoxical desire for stable aesthetic and moral values, even in the face of their realization of the inevitable absence of such universals.  Postmodernism differs from this not in its humanistic contradictions but in the provisionality of its response to them: it refuses to posit any structure, or what Lyotard . . . calls master narrative—such as art or myth—which, for such modernists, would have been consolatory.

Linda Hutcheon, "Beginning to Theorize Postmodernism," 247

What might be thought of as an "aesthetic or moral value"?  (Clue: Beauty) What would be a "provisional" response to such values?  How would "art" be a "master narrative"?

I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermaneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, xxiii

What does it mean to "legitimate" something?  What would be a "grand" or master narrative of the creation of wealth?  "The hermaneutics of meaning"? 

I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, xxiv

If "metanarrative" means the same thing as a "grand" or master narrative, what does this sentence say postmodernism is?

Postmodernism and Art

The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable.

Jean-François Lyotard, "What Is Postmodernism?" 81

What is the unpresentable?

A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar categories to the text or the work.

Jean-François Lyotard, "What Is Postmodernism?" 81

The following is Ihab Hassan's table comparing the characteristics of Modernism and Postmodernism

Modernism	Postmodernism
Romanticism/Symbolism Form (Conjunctive, closed) Purpose Design Hierarchy Mastery/Logos Art Object/Finished Work	Distance Creation/Totalization Synthesis Presence Centering Genre/Boundary Semantics Paradigm Hypotaxis Metaphor Selection Root/Depth Interpretation/Reading Signified Lisible (Readerly) Narrative/Grand Histoire Master Code Symptom Type Genital/Phallic Paranoia Origin/Cause God the Father Metaphysics Determinacy Transcendence

‘Pataphysis/Dadaism

Antiform (disjunctive, open) Play Chance Anarchy Exhaustion/Silence Process/Performance/Happening

Participation Decreation/Deconstruction Antithesis Absence Dispersal Text/Intertext Rhetoric Syntagm Parataxis Metonymy Combination Rhizome/Surface Against Interpretation/Misreading Signifier Scriptible (Writerly) Anti-narrative/Petite Histoire Idiolect Desire Mutant Polymorphous/Androgynous Schizophrenia Difference-Differance/Trace The Holy Ghost Irony Indeterminacy Immanence

These traits again are generalizations and tendencies instead of absolute truths.  But given the comparison, where would you locate this textbook—as Modernist or postmodernist?  Why?

Identifying (Post)Modernity

Indicate whether you think each of the following three passages is characteristic of Modernism, Postmodernism, or both and in what specific ways:

1.

So much for the effort and ingenuity of Montmartre.  All the catering to vice and waste was on an utterly childish scale, and he suddenly realized the meaning of the word "dissipate"—to dissipate into thin air; to make nothing out of something.  In the little hours of the night every move from place to place was an enormous human jump, an increase of paying for the privilege of slower and slower motion.

Modernist or postmodernist?   In what ways?  Review the discussion above.

2.

Clarita.  She is twenty, twenty-five, she is thirty or more?  Pretty, ugly, what?  She is a woman lounging by the side of a road, in jeans and a sweater, hitchhiking, or she is slouched on a stool at a counter in some roadside diner.  A hard line of jaw.  Curious eyes.  Amused eyes.  Behind her eyes processions move, funeral pageants, cartoons.  She says, "I never can figure out why girls like you bum around down here.  What are you looking for anyway?"  An odor of tobacco about her.  Unwashed underclothes or no underclothes, unwashed skin, gritty toes, hair long and falling into strands, not recently washed.

Modernist or postmodernist?   In what ways?  Review the discussion above.