ABSTRACT
Postmodernism ‘The new avant garde literature (neomodernist or postmodernist) partly carried modernism further, partly reacted against it-for example against its ideology and its historical orientation. What it consistently pretended to be (and sometimes actually was) was new. Determinedly self-destructive, it attempted to cut off its branch of the past, by proposing entirely new methods, a fresh ‘syllabus’ or canon of authors (Nietzsche, Freud, Saussure, Proust) and a new register of allusions’ (A History of English Literature, Alastair Fowler)
If the idea that identity exists through difference (we can say what something is by dint of what it is not) is taken as a startingpoint, then Modernism can be understood through what it differs from. Modernism is, for example, not realism, the dominant mode of the novel from its inception in Britain in the eighteenth century
with the rise of bourgeois capitalism to the present day. Realism, according to many critics, is characterised by its attempt objectively to offer up a mirror to the world, thus disavowing its own culturally conditioned processes and ideological stylistic assumptions. It also, modelled on prose forms such as history and journalism, generally features characters, language and a spatial and temporal setting very familiar to its contemporary readers and often presents itself as transparently representative of the author’s society. The hegemony of realism was challenged by Modernism and then postmodernism, as alternative ways of representing reality and the world. Realism itself was once a new, innovative form of writing, with authors such as Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) and Samuel Richardson (16901761) providing a different template for fiction from the previously dominant mode of prose writing, the Romance, which was parodied in one of the very first novels, Cervantes’ Don Quixote (160515), and survives in Gothic and fantasy fiction. Throughout modern literary history, realism remains the favourite style of writing for novelists, but many avant-garde, innovative and radical writers have sought to break its stranglehold. Very broadly speaking, the vast majority of attempts to offer alternative modes of representation from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century have at one time or another been termed Modernist, and this applies to literature, music, painting, film and architecture (and to some works before and after this period). In poetry, Modernism is associated with moves to break from the iambic pentameter as the basic unit of verse, to introduce vers libre, symbolism and other new forms of writing. In prose, Modernism is associated with attempts to render human subjectivity in ways more real than realism: to represent consciousness, perception, emotion, meaning and the individual’s relation to society through interior monologue, stream of consciousness, tunnelling, defamiliarisation, rhythm, irresolution and other terms that will be encountered later in the book. Modernist writers therefore struggled, in Ezra Pound’s brief phrase, to ‘make it new’, to modify
if not overturn existing modes of representation, partly by pushing them towards the abstract or the introspective, and to express the new sensibilities of their time: in a compressed, condensed, complex literature of the city, of industry and technology, war, machinery and speed, mass markets and communication, of internationalism, the New Woman, the aesthete, the nihilist and the flâneur.
