From the Pre-modern to the Modern to the Postmodern Era: Historical Causes

Pre-modern to Modern

Historical Causes

• Social Mobility
• Breakdown of Authority Figures
• The Rise of the Middle Class
• Science
  • Copernicus
  • Galileo
  • Darwin
  • Einstein
• WWI

Signs of Modern Revolution

• Dadaism
• Surrealism
• Cubism
• Stream of Consciousness

Expressions of Modernism

Modernists attempted to show society as fragmented and to and create a new reality expressed in art, literature, etc.

• T.S. Eliot: He identified the modern condition as fragmented in his poem The Waste Land:
  • What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
    Out of this stony rubbish? Son of Man,
    You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
    A heap of broken images . . .
• Freud: He identified the complexity of the human psyche: our irrational unconscious.
• Picasso and Braque: They started cubism, "a style of painting . . . based on nature but which fragmented objects into flat surfaces so that the viewer could see different sides of an object simultaneously" (Anderson 35).

Modern to the Postmodern

Historical Causes

• WWII
  • The Holocaust: Such an extreme loss of life occurred from a single belief system gone out of control. The result was a general apprehension toward privileging one universal belief system.
  • The Atom Bomb: The world progressed to the point where we can destroy ourselves. We began and continue to question the idea of unchecked progress.
• Modernism went out of fashion. It was seen as elitist and became associated with fascism. It also just became old, overused, and sometimes even commercialized (e.g. the Mondrian-influenced L’Oreal logo).
• Abstraction and minimalism in art had possibly reached its limit.
• The Red Scare
• The conservative nature of 1950s America

Signs of Postmodern Revolution

• The 1950s and 60s Counterculture
• The Civil Rights Movement
• The Feminist Movement
• Punk

Counterrevolution

• Rise of fundamentalism in religion
• Polarization in politics

Characterizing Modernism and Postmodernism

A word of caution: Expressions of modernism and postmodernism are often difficult to tell apart. Both have tendencies to eclecticism. Furthermore, one can do a postmodern reading of a modern text or painting. Nevertheless, here are a few basics to keep in mind.

1.

In T.S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," Prufrock admits in frustration:

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

Modern reading: "It is impossible to say [exactly] what I mean!"[--although I will keep trying.]

Postmodern reading: "It is impossible to say [only] what I mean!" There is no ultimate truth or reality. Reality too varied, subjective, and complex to ever pinpoint.

2.

Modernism: Attempts to pick up the fragments of the premodern era and recreate them, forming a new, more sincere reality. Or, in the case of futurists, modernism tries to abandon the fragments altogether and create something completely new.

Postmodernism: Revels in the fragments. Humpty Dumpty remains broken--the fragments cannot be reconstructed; they can only be celebrated.

3.

Finally, postmodern society sees all reality as a social construction. For example, the outline that I have provided here is just a construct. It is only an attempt to present a "truth." If there is a "real" truth, it's too slippery to characterize.

However, we are still fond of constructing outlines in college.