Postmodernism

Subject: Postmodernism Thu Nov 13, 2008 12:57 am

Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a complicated term, or set of ideas, one
that has only emerged as an area of academic study since
the mid-1980s. Postmodernism is hard to define, because it
is a concept that appears in a wide variety of disciplines or
areas of study, including art, architecture, music, film,
literature, sociology, communications, fashion, and technology.
It's hard to locate it temporally or historically, because it's
not clear exactly when postmodernism begins.

Perhaps the easiest way to start thinking about postmodernism
is by thinking about modernism, the movement from which
postmodernism seems to grow or emerge. Modernism has
two facets, or two modes of definition, both of which are
relevant to understanding postmodernism.

The first facet or definition of modernism comes from the
aesthetic movement broadly labeled "modernism." This
movement is roughly coterminous with twentieth century
Western ideas about art (though traces of it in emergent
forms can be found in the nineteenth century as well).
Modernism, as you probably know, is the movement in
visual arts, music, literature, and drama which rejected
the old Victorian standards of how art should be made,
consumed, and what it should mean. In the period of
"high modernism," from around 1910 to 1930, the major
figures of modernism literature helped radically to redefine
what poetry and fiction could be and do: figures like Woolf,
Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Proust, Mallarme, Kafka, and
Rilke are considered the founders of twentieth-century modernism.

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