Defining

“I haven’t changed my mind about modernism from the first day I ever did it…It means integrity; it means honesty; it means the absence of sentimentality and the absence of nostalgia; it means simplicity; it means clarity. That’s what modernism means to me.” - Paul Rand

 1910s – 1960s  Northern America and Europe  Poets  Ezra Pound  e. e. cummings  Robert Frost  Authors  William Faulkner  Flannery O’Connor

 Began shortly after the end of WWI  Say goodbye to the optimism from before the war  Replaced by disillusionment and uncertainty of life  Did not trust the ideas and values of the world, since they had led to the war  What is going to become of humanity?

 Sought to capture the essence of modern life through both form AND content  Instead of seeing progress, modernists saw a decline in civilization  Ex: Computers have made our students lazy  Just more cold machinery and capitalism ▪ Led to feeling alone and alienated by others

 Showed fragmentation of the world by constructing their work out of fragments of traditional literature  Abandoned form and meter in for free verse  Themes were implied instead of stated ▪ Forced the reader to draw their own conclusions  First person stream of consciousness  Continuous flow of uninterrupted events  No concrete beginning, middle, and end

 A poetic movement that rebelled against the sentimentality of traditional poetry  Demanded hard, clear expression, concrete images, and everyday language  Instead of the flourished ideas found in Victorian or Romantic literature

“Postmodernism was a reaction to modernism. Where modernism was about objectivity, postmodernism was about subjectivity. Where modernism sought a singular truth, postmodernism sought the multiplicity of truths.” - Miguel Syjuco

 1940s-??  Northern America and Europe  Famous Authors  Vladimir Nabokov  Adrienne Rich  Leslie Marmon Silko

 Addressed the impersonal and commercial nature of today’s world  Wanted to capture the essence of contemporary life  Influenced by the growth of information technology  Not quite as cynical as the modernist movement

 Stopped believing there was a dividing line between high and low class art  Allowed for pop art and cartoons to reestablish  Shifted idea of the “carefully constructed art” to the process of creating art

The main idea about Postmodernism is that it’s still growing and changing today. The focus is on the art itself, and the fact that it’s evolving. There’s no easy definition for Postmodernism, because the movement is still occurring.