1) Modernism emerged in the early 20th century and questioned traditional modes of social organization, religion, morality, and concepts of self through thinkers like Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Frazer. 2) Modernist works like Joyce's Ulysses and Eliot's The Waste Land experimented with form in response to a fragmented social order. Techniques included automatic writing, Cubism, and Futurism. 3) Postmodernism arose after World War 2 and further extended modernist experiments while also incorporating mass culture influences from film, television, and popular music to challenge elitism.

1. Modernism and
Postmodernism
by
Dr. Lt. Hardeepsinh Gohil

2. Modernism.
✣Modern comes from the Latin word MODO,
meaning “just now”.
✣Around 1127, the Abbot Suger began
reconstructing his abbey of St. Denis in Paris. He
didn’t know what to call it, so he fell back on the
Latin, opus modernum, A modern work.
The term modernism is widely used to identify new and
distinctive features in the subjects, forms, concepts,
and style of literature and the other arts in the early
decades of the present century, but especially after
World War I (1914-1918).

4. .
The specific features – questioned the certainties that had
supported traditional (A.) modes of social organization, (B)
religion, (C) morality, (D) and also traditional ways of conceiving
the human self. Ex. Friedrich Nietzsche, Marx, Freud and
Frazer.
James Joyce’s Ulysses And Eliot’s The Waste Land

5. Eliot while writing the review of Ulysses in 1923 mentions
that the inherited mode of ordering a literary work, which
assumed a relatively coherent and stable social order,
could not accord with “the immense panorama of futility and
anarchy which is contemporary history.”

6. Modernism.
✣The experiments - automatic writing (writing that has been
freed from - control by the conscious, purposive mind).,
Cubism, Futurism and Abstract Expressionism, Avant-
garde.

7. Cubism
.

8. Futurism.

10. Post- Modernism.
✣The term is often applied to the literature and art produced
after World War II (1939-45).
✣When the effects on the Western Morale were greatly
exacerbated by the experience of (A) Nazi totalitarianism and
mass extermination
(B) the threat of total destruction by the atomic bomb (C) the
progressive devastation of the natural environment (D) and the
ominous fact of overpopulation.

11. Post- Modernism.
✣Postmodernism involves not only a continuation, sometimes
carried to an extreme, of the countertraditional experiments of
modernism, but also diverse attempts to break away from
modernist forms which had, inevitably, become in their turn
conventional, as well as to overthrow the elitism of modernist
“high art” by recourse to the models of “mass culture” in film,
television, newspaper cartoons, and popular music.

12. Post- Modernism.
✣The works of postmodern literature-by Jorge Luis Borges,
Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nobokov, Thomas Pynchon, Roland
Barthes and others – produced the blend of
(A)the literary genres
(B) Literary and stylistic levels,
(C) the serious and the playful
It placed them to resist classification according to traditional
literary rubrics.

13. Post- Modernism.
✣All such anomalies are paralleled in other arts by phenomena
like pop art, op art, the musical compositions of John Cage, and
the films of Jean-Luc Godard and other directors.
✣The notable in some postmodernist writings-prominently in
Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and other authors who belong to
the school of absurd – is to subvert the very foundations of our
accepted modes of thought and experience – which can help in
revealing the meaninglessness of existence and the underlying
“abyss”, or “void”, or “nothingness” on which any supposed
security is conceived to be precariously suspended.

18. ✣Even contemporary Garba
in Jeans and Nike is also an
example of Postmodernism!