Modernism and Postmodernism: A Literary Comparison
Unit 6: Paradigm Shift / Postmodernism
As with structuralism and post-structuralism, there is a great deal of debate about how exactly modernism and postmodernism differ. The two concepts are of different vintage, ‘Modernism’ being a long-standing category which is of crucial importance in the understanding of twentieth-century culture, whereas the term ‘postmodernism’, as is well known, has only become current since the 1980s.
Modernism: A Cultural Earthquake
‘Modernism’ is the name given to the movement which dominated the arts and culture of the first half of the twentieth century. Modernism was that earthquake in the arts which brought down much of the structure of pre-twentieth-century practice in music, painting, literature, and architecture. One of the major epicenters of this earthquake seems to have been Vienna, during the period of 1890-1910, but the effects were felt in France, Germany, Italy and eventually even in Britain, in art movements like Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism. Its after-shocks are still being felt today, and many of the structures it toppled have never been rebuilt. Without an understanding of modernism, then, it is impossible to understand twentieth-century culture.
Metafiction in Postmodernism
In postmodernism, we can find metafiction. Metafiction is fiction about fiction: novels and stories that call attention to their fictional status and their own compositional procedures. The granddaddy of all metafictional novels was Tristram Shandy, whose narrator’s dialogues with his imaginary readers are only one of many ways in which Sterne foregrounds the gap between art and life that conventional realism seeks to conceal.
Metafiction, then, is not a modern invention; but it is a mode that many contemporary writers find particularly appealing, weighed down, as they are, by their awareness of their literary antecedents, oppressed by the fear that whatever they might have to say has been said before, and condemned to self-consciousness by the climate of modern culture. In the work of English novelists, metafictional discourse most commonly occurs in the form of “asides” in novels primarily focused on the traditional novelistic task of describing character and action. These passages acknowledge the artificiality of the conventions of realism even as they employ them; they disarm criticism by anticipating it; they flatter the reader by treating him or her as an intellectual equal, sophisticated enough not to be thrown by the admission that a work of fiction is a verbal construction rather than a slice of life. This, for instance, is how Margaret Drabble begins Part Three of her novel, The Realms of Gold, after a long, realistic and well-observed account of a suburban dinner party given by the more repressed of her two heroines.
Contemporary Literature: Post-War Fiction
There is no one dominant trend in fiction after World War II. The white, middle-class domination of culture which persisted up to the war has gradually been eroded by the appearance of working-class, feminist and ethnic minority writers.