Modernism, Post-Modernism...What?

[Benny Profane]

OK, this has been bothering me for a little while now and if someone could help clear this up for me I would appreciate it.

In terms of labeling literature, are there any good reasons for calling any given period or school of literature "modernism"? Modern means, like, up-to-date, ya know? Isn't that a moving target instead of a given time period?

If you stick the years 1880 to 1950 with the "modern" label for all time, then obviously you're stuck with "postmodern" for what comes next. And then after that you're just stuck. Maybe that's the problem with literature these days? It's so non-descript.

Why not choose a descriptive, if slightly more humble name? There
are boatloads to choose from.

Looking at previous World Lit, you've got periods like the Enlightenment -- something like that would be good. How about, "the disillusionment" instead of modernism? And then, instead of "postmodernism", "The Experimentation"
which can still be going on....

I know it doesn't matter much what labels you paste on something. To quote the standard cliche of our time, "it is what it is". But I've been reading a lot of Pynchon lately and trying to find out all I can about the guy, and everywhere I look I get this "post-modern" shit slung back at me, as he is the quintessential post-modern author in the eyes of many. Like what the hell does that even mean?

I'm sure this is all available in some text book somewhere, but I'm 9 years removed from school.

[lovejuice]

somewhat agree. it seems like a lazy way to pronounce a movement: by calling it "the new thing" and "even newer than that new thing."

then again, the problem with a suitable name for "post-modernism" is the movement is not quite a solid entity. i'm not sure i like the name "experimentation" since it sounds like an in-between state.

[Milky Joe]

I'm taking a class in Modernism right now, and it's problematic to just give a time period and say "this is when Modernism starts and ends." Modernism was more of an approach to writing than it was a "genre" per se... it basically came straight out of Pound and Eliot... who were fed up with the then-current literary traditions, or perhaps fed up is not the right word... but they knew that they were living in their own time and so that they should be writing in a style that would represent that time, rather than just aping all of the traditions that had come before them. What Eliot/Pound did was synthesize all of these literary traditions that had come before them into their own poetry. "The Waste Land" is a great example of this, which is filled to the brim with allusions to past works but comes together to form its own very distinct whole.

"Post-modernism" is comparatively much harder to pin down. Pynchon, Wallace, Delillo... it's sort of like modernism except with more technological influence. Don't take that as gospel, though, as I said, I'm taking "modernism," not "post-modernism."

[dreamdead]

The biggest distinction I've always seen is that modernism is founded more on issues of anxiety and dread (see Woolf and Beckett especially), whereas postmodernism views that initial anxiety as a liberating agent with which to play (see Pynchon and Auster). As such, these later texts become far more self-conscious in their construction, with notes that this is merely a narrative.

Also, whereas modernism was trying to find the grand narrative that contained modernity in it, postmodernism is all about making definitively clear that these texts are representational acts, that an audience must be suspicious of any claims toward it being a grand narrative (as such an act forces epistemic truth on a text that isn't "truth").

The other big differences between the two are that postmodern texts are more likely to move beyond engagement with a city's issues into an engagement with transnational issues.