Eng426 20th century english literature

1.0 INTRODUCTION

Postmodernism is a reaction to the basic values and assumptions of modernism. It deals with this and the realities of the two world wars. Postmodernist approach to the realities of the world war is less serious and tragic than the modernist’s. This unit reminds you of the basic assumptions of modernism while discussing the similarities and differences between the two literary movements.

0. OBJECTIVES

At the end of this Unit you should be able to:

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  highlight at least four features of literary postmodernism,
  
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  differentiate between modernism and postmodernism; and
  

0. MAIN CONTENT

1. 
   Modernism
   

Modernism is a revolutionary movement that affected the creative world from the 1890s to 1900s, a period during which artists and writers sought to liberate themselves and their works from the conventions and tradition of the strict Victorian period. Modernism became popular after the World War I, a very traumatic event that physically devastated, psychologically disillusioned and affected the economy of the West in an entirely unprecedented way. As against the tradition of the Victorian era, modernism employed a different aesthetic tradition. For example modernist fiction lacks a coherent, linear or organic plot, and is oftentimes “plotless”. Where a coherent plot may be identified, it is usually cyclical, broken-down, and open-ended to give a picture of life that is never conclusive or ended, but one in which there are possibilities and the individual is always on a quest for meaning. Characters in modernist fiction are not presented as products of social or environmental events as we have them in Victorian literature. Rather, they are shown to be anti-social, ahistorical and introverted loners, who sometimes dwell in the gloom of their minds as mere observers and thinkers, perpetually sad and unable to associate with one another.
In modernist literature, there are no heroes whose fall symbolically implies the fall of the community. There are usually only anti-heroes whose lives negate every fabric of the ideals and beliefs that their societies extol. The characters are alienated, isolated, detached from the external world. The omniscient third person narrator is rarely favoured, and where it is used at all, it is radically revised, sometimes confusing the reader, for example The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man where the stream-of-consciousness technique almost overshadows the author’s attempt at using the omniscient third person narrator. The scepticism to what is the Truth or the Meaning of life in modern existence led writers to be less assertive in that quest for relative meaning; hence, there is no need for a know-it-all narrative voice. The modern novel preferred a multiple perspective that privileged the stream-of-consciousness technique and the internal monologue, as a way of understanding the psychic reality of humans.

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