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• Modernism
• Existentialism
• Literature
Existentialism – A Definition
Existentialism in the broader sense is a 20th century philosophy that is centered
upon the analysis of existence and of the way humans find themselves existing in the
world. The notion is that humans exist first and then each individual spends a
lifetime changing their essence or nature.
In simpler terms, existentialism is a philosophy concerned with finding self and the
meaning of life through free will, choice, and personal responsibility. The belief is
that people are searching to find out who and what they are throughout life as they
make choices based on their experiences, beliefs, and outlook. And personal choices
become unique without the necessity of an objective form of truth. An existentialist
believes that a person should be forced to choose and be responsible without the help
of laws, ethnic rules, or traditions.
There is a wide variety of philosophical, religious, and political ideologies that make
up existentialism so there is no universal agreement in an arbitrary set of ideals and
beliefs. Politics vary, but each seeks the most individual freedom for people within a
society.
Each basically agrees that human life is in no way complete and fully satisfying
because of suffering and losses that occur when considering the lack of perfection,
power, and control one has over their life. Even though they do agree that life is not
optimally satisfying, it nonetheless has meaning. Existentialism is the search and
journey for true self and true personal meaning in life.
Most importantly, it is the arbitrary act that existentialism finds most objectionable-
that is, when someone or society tries to impose or demand that their beliefs, values,
or rules be faithfully accepted and obeyed. Existentialists believe this destroys
individualism and makes a person become whatever the people in power desire thus
they are dehumanized and reduced to being an object. Existentialism then stresses
that a persons judgment is the determining factor for what is to be believed rather
than by arbitrary religious or secular world values.
In the 20th century, the novels of the Austrian Jewish writer Franz Kafka, such as
The Trial (1925; trans. 1937) and The Castle (1926; trans. 1930), present isolated men
confronting vast, elusive, menacing bureaucracies; Kafka's themes of anxiety, guilt,
and solitude reflect the influence of Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche. The
influence of Nietzsche is also discernible in the novels of the French writers André
Malraux and in the plays of Sartre. The work of the French writer Albert Camus is
usually associated with existentialism because of the prominence in it of such themes
as the apparent absurdity and futility of life, the indifference of the universe, and the
necessity of engagement in a just cause. Existentialist themes are also reflected in the
theater of the absurd, notably in the plays of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco. In
the United States, the influence of existentialism on literature has been more indirect
and diffuse, but traces of Kierkegaard's thought can be found in the novels of Walker
Percy and John Updike, and various existentialist themes are apparent in the work of
such diverse writers as Norman Mailer, John Barth, and Arthur Miller.
In the late 1970s, existentialism's popularity waned for a host of reasons. The
existential imperative for the individual to choose, in the hands of pop psychologists,
was stripped of its anguish and despair and corrupted into a rather facile expression
of unlimited human potential. In academic culture, universalist ideals of the human
condition and freedom conflicted with poststructural and postmodernist thought. But
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existentialism, like postmodernism, viewed identity as something created, albeit
with a greater sense of anguish. Today, existentialism remains a symbol of alienation
and a critique of confident individualism.
Postmodern theory would assert that the attempt to canonise Modernism "after the
fact" is doomed to undisambiguable contradictions.
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In a narrower sense, what was Modernist was not necessarily also Postmodern. Those
elements of Modernism which accentuated the benefits of rationality and socio-
technological progress were only Modernist.
Postmodernism = a disputed term that has occupied much recent debate about
contemporary culture since the early 1980s. In its simplest and least satisfactory
sense it refers generally to the phase of 20 th-century Western culture that succeeded
the reign of high modernism, thus indicating the products of the age of mass
television since the mid-1950s. More often, though, it is applied to a cultural
condition prevailing in the advanced capitalist societies since the 1960s,
characterized by a superabundance of disconnected images and styles—most
noticeably in television, advertising, commercial design, and pop video. In this sense,
postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia,
disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally
valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are
evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals. As applied to
literature and other arts, the term is notoriously ambiguous, implying either that
modernism has been superseded or that it has continued into a new phase.
Reaction to modernism
POSTMODERN LITERATURE
Notable influences
Postmodernist writers often point to early novels and story collections as inspiration
for their experiments with narrative and structure: Don Quixote, 1001 Arabian
Nights, The Decameron, and Candide, among many others. In the English language,
Laurence Sterne's 1759 novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, A
Gentleman, with its heavy emphasis on parody and narrative experimentation, is
often cited as an early influence on postmodernism. There were many 19th century
examples of attacks on Enlightenment concepts, parody, and playfulness in literature,
including Lord Byron's satire, especially Don Juan; Lewis Carrol's playful
experiments with signification; the work of Arthur Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde.
Playwrights who worked in the late 19th and early 20th century whose thought and
work would serve as an influence on the aesthetic of postmodernism include Swedish
dramatist August Strindberg, the Italian author Luigi Pirandello, and the German
playwright and theorist Bertolt Brecht. In the 1910s, artists associated with Dadaism
celebrated chance, parody, playfulness, and attacked the central role of the artist.
Tristan Tzara claimed in "How to Make a Dadaist Poem" that to create a Dadaist
poem one had only to put random words in a hat and pull them out one by one.
Another way Dadaism influenced postmodern literature was in the development of
collage, specifically collages using elements from advertisement or illustrations from
popular novels (the collages of Max Ernst, for example). Artists associated with
Surrealism, which developed from Dadaism, continued experimentations with chance
and parody while celebrating the flow of the subconscious. André Breton, the founder
of Surrealism, suggested that automatism and the description of dreams should play
a greater role in the creation of literature. Surrealist René Magritte's experiments
with signification are used as examples by Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault.
Foucault also uses examples from Jorge Luis Borges, an important direct influence on
many postmodernist fiction writers. He is occasionally listed as a postmodernist,
although he started writing in the 1920s. The influence of his experiments with
metafiction and magical realism was not fully realized in the Anglo-American world
until the postmodern period.
Both modern and postmodern literature represent a break from 19th century realism,
in which a story was told from an objective or omniscient point of view. In character
development, both modern and postmodern literature explore subjectivism, turning
from external reality to examine inner states of consciousness, in many cases drawing
on modernist examples in the stream of consciousness styles of Virginia Woolf and
James Joyce, or explorative poems like The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. In addition,
both modern and postmodern literature explore fragmentariness in narrative- and
character-construction. The Waste Land is often cited as a means of distinguishing
modern and postmodern literature. The poem is fragmentary and employs pastiche
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like much postmodern literature, but the speaker in The Waste Land says, "these
fragments I have shored against my ruins". Modernist literature sees fragmentation
and extreme subjectivity as an existential crisis, or Freudian internal conflict, a
problem that must be solved, and the artist is often cited as the one to solve it.
Postmodernists, however, often demonstrate that this chaos is insurmountable; the
artist is impotent, and the only recourse against "ruin" is to play within the chaos.
Playfulness is present in many modernist works (Joyce's Finnegans Wake or Virginia
Woolf's Orlando, for example) and they may seem very similar to postmodern works,
but with postmodernism playfulness becomes central and the actual achievement of
order and meaning becomes unlikely.
The prefix "post," however, does not necessarily imply a new era. Rather, it could also
indicate a reaction against modernism in the wake of the Second World War.