/lit/ - Literature

what does "modernism" mean in regards to literature?

>>10625669
this is really reductive but essentially self-consciousness

>>10625638
>pre-modernism: the academy knows what it's doing we're progressing masterfully and would like another 100,000 in silver
>modernism: we've met the people running the academy and they all like hookers and coke and naked people they're just pretending to have morals, we're here to report on this and how they've been trading silver for columbian marching powder and dancing girls
>postmodernism: i tried to go to college and everything was just hookers and coke and some guy talking about himself and/or aliens about turning in a report, i'm not sure, i'm just turning in the report like they told me to

>>10625638
>Enlightenment philosophy and the 'scientific ethos' are examples of Modernist movements
Wouldn't that be anachronistic?

>>10625711
I can almost imagine a world where you were smart and this was the clever analysis you thought it was.

My understanding is that modernism is the stripping down of all traditional/unnecessary elements and creating something new and more purely focused on the goal. In literature, probably the most notable broad modernist development was stream-of-consciousness. The general philosophy was to chuck out any and all traditions and doctrines, turn a conscious eye on what you're trying to do, and do it in a way that best achieves that goal.

Post-modernism is the rejection of the objectivity of that goal, or the ideal of progress as it was usually termed. It holds that there is no objective progress or forward direction, that there are just a lot of different directions, and any ideology that tries to push in a certain way is bunk. Multiple, often split perspectives, intertextuality, and an avoidance or explicit reversal of theming. The book that comes to mind for me is Pale Fire.

>>10625742
it's pretty simple, it's a world that's read wyndham lewis, waugh, burroughs, some BEE and vonnegut. though we probably know what world is stopping you from imagining significant bookends to any of those periods. reality

>>10625638 (OP)
I dont think there is one definition. I think this is the case because there is a whole crop of bad methodology coming from philosophy starting with Husserl in connection with German Idealism

This isnt to say that all idealism and and all phenomenology is simply wrong. It just doesnt lend itself well to certainty, for example with Husserl bracketing the real world and only focusing on the inner experience. It is difficult to think of how to justify this or that claim maid with that starting point, since what seems required is a proof but there is no agreed upon method for said proof of this or that essence, since personal experience is what validates this or that point. There are just theories of first principles it seems, and the principles dont lend themselves well to progress. I think because of this these movements both end up in a constant act of subversion since there is no single way to justify this or that claim

Then just imagine trying to lump all of these saboteurs who are constantly trying to subvert one another in the most fundamental way they can muster, into one term

Now imagine this spreads outside of philosophy

Thats how post modernism appears to me

>>10625638
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/

>>10625973
deserve to have your fingers crushed with an anvil for being such a fop

>>10626144
>fop
dandies have shit verse, fight me irl

>>10625884

Read Tradition and the Individual Talent, The Pound Era and On Deconstruction. You're very confused about what modernism is.

>>10626160
explain it!

God, no wonder you people are so enamoured with Jordan Peterson and his "postmodern, neo-marxist" catch all for everything he doesn't like. You know nothing and just like the man himself you're unwilling to actually do the work to find out what you're talking about.

>>10625638
Read some postmodernist literature to get an actual feel for what it means in this context. You can read all the definitions you like, but it will make more sense when you see it being done. It's not the bogeyman people make it out to be. Try Italo Calvino.

>>10625638
Generalizing here, but
In philosophy: skepticism of metanarratives
In literature: self-reflection turning into self-destruction

/lit/ can't even provide you with a definition of baroque literature, don't expect it to explain postmodernism. (I can't define those things either but I reject periodization of literature altogether, so I don't really care)

>>10625638
the most useful definition is
Modernists: people who Samuel Beckett read
Postmodernists: people who read Samuel Beckett

Here: https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/01/23/postmodernism-not-take-place-jordan-petersons-12-rules-life/

>>10625638
More or less. Now you just have to learn how the principles of postmodernism are talmudic in nature and stem from our, meaning whites, collective mistake of allowing jews to obtain power within our societies.

>>10628337
Modernists: people who Samuel Beckett read and couldn't understand
Postmodernists: people who read Samuel Beckett

>>10628363
this is actually really good

>>10628363
>He rose to fame when he was captured on video at a protest on the University of Toronto campus, telling transgender students he refused to use gender-neutral pronouns. He has since joined the ranks of Logan Paul and PewDiePie as a YouTube star.

Now I truly understand why vapid idiots like the Pauls are promoted by yt, the same reason flat-earth theory is pushed as a false flag theory to discredit any wrongthink.

postmodernism = moral and social relativism

>>10625638
I understand post-modernism as "Point de capiton". We didnt understant the various shit that was going on and suddenly with one word it all made sense.

>>10626219

Modernism is a complex intellectual and literary movement that can't be summarized accurately to understanding in a form as short as a 4chan post. You can read all the short summaries you want but it'll be like comparing a blurry photograph of two people fucking and an encyclopedia article on "copulation" to actually having sex.

Even reading a few essays or even a couple of books won't really give you a real sense of what it is, and what postmodernism in relation to it. You have to actually spend some time researching properly. These are technical terms, of a calibrated vagueness, used by scholars and misappropriated by hack polemicists.

Not everything in life can be understood using wikipedia.

>>10626841
ding ding ding

What essays or works should I read to get a handle on postmodern and post-structuralist theory? I would like some good entry points.

postmodernism and modernism are just specific eras marked by significant shifts in the collective consciousness

I'm only in this thread to attack people for their opinions of what postmodernism is and to derail it with constant references to peterson despite him being nowhere in the OP

>>10631782
How post-modern of you

>>10626124
This is as good of an explanation as you're going to get, OP. Though I still think it'll make more sense if you read postmodernist stuff. It's not a cohesive ideology. Read the article and then you should know enough to be able to google around a bit and find things labeled as "postmodernism" that pique your interest.
>>10631753
Read the above article, look at their references, and take it from there.

>>10630474
If you can't define it, you don't know what it is. Stop pretending to be an expert on something you clearly know nothing about.

>>10625638
I characterize modernism as, with the onset of modernity, a rapid expansion of both exterior and interior lives. Getting to know the self suddenly becomes very important because communities aren't small anymore; you must know both the expanded boundaries of the world and who you are in relation to that. That's why the stream of consciousness technique comes about, because it addresses this sudden need to understand one's own subjectivity. Worldview is something which needs to be seriously considered at this time. Ulysses is the perfect example because its emphasis on both the macrocosm of Dublin, and the ultimate positive affirmation (YES) of the interior life of Bloom in response that which hounds him from without.

Postmodernism comes at, yes postmodernity. The onset of corporatism, advertisement, and mass media. Suddenly the world is not a thing run by people but systems which use people as its appendages. Suddenly the previous self is besieged by these large impersonal powers from without. Alienation within a machine which carries on with or without you is the theme. Heads they win, tails you lose. Pynchon's novels are a good analog because novels like Crying give two distinct possibilities: first, that everything is run and predetermined by cabals of faceless entities, organizations, or people, that they've already won and uncovering or resisting it is a meaningless gesture; or the alternative Pynchon outlines in GR: "If there is something comforting – religious, if you want – about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long." And you can see these two points contrasted in Foucault and Derrida: Foucault on the side of the world in the grip of power dynamics, and on the other Derrida pointing out that there is such an overabundance of meaning in the world that we can only invent delusions which wrap everything up into neat packages when that is never as comprehensive as we pretend it is. Both are coping mechanisms. And the implications of this is no longer do we have the self, the self is a prisoner trapped behind the play of all the performances we have to take part in. For example you join the performance of social media and buy into the binding expectations of all that, or you reject it which brands you an alien because you won't participate with everyone else. You have a choice between alienation and anomie, or you become a small souled bugman like everyone else. That's postmodernism.

>>10631976
It's excellent posts like these why I keep coming to /lit/.

>>10631976
thank you daddy

>>10630474
>These are technical terms, of a calibrated vagueness, used by scholars

I don't know what it means, that must mean everyone doesn't know what it means!!!11! XD

You are so arrogant that you can't even slow down and admit that perhaps, you aren't the smartest person on the planet, and while you might not understand it, there are people out there that actually do.

>>10631976
All this is admirable nonsense.

>I characterize modernism as, with the onset of modernity, a rapid expansion of both exterior and interior lives . . . because it addresses this sudden need to understand one's own subjectivity.

So we have the "sudden need to understand one's own subjectivity" in modernity. So what about ancient Chinese philosopher with their profound analyses of the self, and writers like St. Augustine producing a biography of their souls, their interior lives?

There has always, always, always been a "sudden need to understand one's own subjectivity." It's just that the ancients didn't have enough paper and ink to jot down their inane self-absorbed ramblings like we moderns do.

>Foucault on the side of the world in the grip of power dynamics, and on the other Derrida pointing out that there is such an overabundance of meaning in the world that we can only invent delusions which wrap everything up into neat packages when that is never as comprehensive as we pretend it is. Both are coping mechanisms. And the implications of this is no longer do we have the self, the self is a prisoner trapped behind the play of all the performances we have to take part in.

As if power politics hasn't always been with us, and hasn't been written about before (e.g. Machiavelli). As if human beings haven't always been false to their inner selves in order to meet silly social expectations.

But this is one of the principal errors of modern thought: that somehow we're different from all of humanity that came before us. Nothing has really changed at all.

>>10633672
>Nothing has really changed at all.
So the world has always been the same and the change from modernism to postmodernism is cause by...? What exactly?

Post-modernist literature is pessimist neo-baroque.

>>10633694
>So the world has always been the same and the change from modernism to postmodernism is cause by...? What exactly?

Fashion, Appearances - the only thing the world knows how to change.

>>10633749
based

>>10633764
Fashion and Appearances is what caused the switch from modernism to post-modernism. Wow. Thanks man, this is what I'm going to start telling everyone.

>>10625638
>there is no objective truth
there must be truth otherwise not even this statement can be true

>>10633749
Nice

>>10625638

These are bullshit words for literature and art students. They bear no relevance in the real world, nor do they have any correspondence to anything real. Outside literature departments most people have no idea what these are.

>>10625638
Postmodernism is a purely historical term regarding anything that can be regarded as following a modernist trend, modernism usually being considered pre World War II

so like
Modern Art (vorticism, embedded ideals, cubism) -> Postmodern Art (viewer as art, found object art, mass produced commodity art)

Modern Architecture (cubist, futurist, post-imperial) -> Postmodern Architecture (reality bending, man vs gravity, pushing the limits of structural engineering and constraint calculus)

Modern Literature (confessional, introverted) -> Postmodern Literature (text as code, rhizomic text, fractal narrative, hyperlinked, paleocyberpunk, kabbalic)

Modern Philosophy (conclusion of the analytic, formal language, neoliberal ethics, universalist) -> Postmodern Philosophy (hermeneutic, constructivist logic, deconstructivist historiography, neotribal, geurilla ontology)

>>10633863
triggered

>>10633886
>pre ww2
so jesus is modernist
mesopotamia is modernist
finno-korean quantum-nuclear hyperwar is modernist

>>10633896
I have no doubt that the woke centrist roman-sympathizing jewish rabbi version of jordan peterson sternly warned of "these bloody yeshuists" towards the end of the empire as well

>>10633863
No, those words correspond to actual real epistemological trends guiding all kinds of activity, not just in the realm of the arts. The problem is when you start presenting things in such simple dichotomies everything tends to turn into pure polemical shit flinging.

>>10633672
So we've always had the ability to contact people across the continent instantly, for everyone to have personal rapid transport available, for communities breaking down for larger more diverse congealed masses? These are things which have no impact on quality of life whatsoever? The industrial revolution had no reprecussions on people's interior and exterior lives? Material reality is out there despite your romantic ideals of self consciousness. You take it entirely for granted. Note that "nobody ever talked about the self" is not the notion, that would be a ridiculous assertion, the 20th century was a matter of the amending and transformation of the self because it took a completely different meaning than it did before, especially given Freud. This is the basic history of ideas, this isn't something some faggot is making up on the fly to spite you.

>>10633749
Postmodernism has a baroque side to it, sure, Greenaway, Pynchon, blah blah blah, but there is also a very constrained / minimalist style, Beckett, Nouveau Realisme, Neoexpressionism and so on,
Stop trying to synthetize something that's most likely the first truly global situation mankind has been in into witty sentences, you're not Oscar Wilde.

>>10633886
You're not wrong except that most of the things you list as postmodern art were already happening in early modernism (viewer as art in the surrealist happenings and deambulations - and later of course, in the situationists, the tab closes of modernism - found object in Duchamp and Schwitters, mass produced commodity art in Duchamp as well. I guess hyperlinks are prefigured in modernism too but I don't know literary theory and history enough to make that claim. I actually accept recs on this if anyone has any.

thoughts on this article?
https://areomagazine.com/2017/03/27/how-french-intellectuals-ruined-the-west-postmodernism-and-its-impact-explained/?utm_content=buffer16f35&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

>>10636536
from the title alone it's really scapegoaty

the vic'd up unemployed ex-auto worker vietnam veteran drinking toxic water in michigan isn't in his current state because of some dead french hermeneuticists

>>10636536
the jump from "these are some edgy french philosophers" to "the west got ruined" is never made coherently

also this site is loading really slow, the layout is really terrible, and browsing the titles on the main page I'm fairly certain this is a clickbait site masquerading as a millennial/Gen Z discussion magazine

It's just weird gay art shit being pretentious for the sake of being pretentious with no real meaning behind it

>I can't define it.
>Therefore, it's true.

Postmodernism is silly.

>>10638419
>waah all art should be paintings of fields

>>10628363
this is actually the first unbiased review and critique of the book and peterson that i've read

>>10625638
jewish tricks

motherfuckers always want to look like they're smart
but i know a secret
they've never smart

you're not smart

>>10639672
>unbiased review
>90% of it refers to a lack of academic citation
>Maybe 5% of the article actually discusses philosophy
>muh white fragility

Did you read the article? Closely?

>>10639413
>everything is subjective!
>except for this! Subjectivity is objective!

>>10639755
gonna need you to quote a single postmodernist that claims this

>>10639755
>Subjectivity is objective!
Yes?

It's important to note that modernism and postmodern mean different things in different fields. For instance, postmodern literature it just a catch-all term for essentially all post WWII literature meaning that Thomas Berhard and Don Delillo are both technically "postmodern" even though they have very little in common stylistically.

Generally though, I break it down like this.

Modernism is a rejection of the traditions of classicism but with a reverence for the goals of classicism. It attempts to take those core themes which were primarily explored only by and for members of the upper class (because they were the only ones with the time to enjoy art, read philosophy, etc.) and repackage them for the general public. This involves stripping away anything that played to effete sensibilities of the upper class and focused on developing new techniques that more accurately reflect the common person's experience with the modern world. Overall, I'd say modernism's defining characteristic is a belief in the power of human rationality and ingenuity. When I think of Modernism, I think of the type of 1950s sci-fi optimism about the future.

Postmodernism is a reaction to that optimism. Its proponents look at WWI and WWII and they question that belief in human rationality because of the abuses and horrors that they view as being caused by that modernist belief in the power and innate good of rationality. The line of thinking is, if a panel of the most well informed and technically proficient scientists in history willingly got together to work on a bomb capable of killing millions of people in minutes, then what good is their contribution anyway? The postmodernists essentially say that the modernists were wrong to keep even the goals of the classicists and that there is something inherently wrong in those goals and world views if the abuses we see daily are still possible in modernism. The defining characteristic of postmodernism in my mind is a pessimism about the ability of humans to overcome their animalistic nature, it questions the very assumptions and goals that people say they have using as proof for their skepticism the long list of abuses in the modern world.

Overall, I don't like Post Modernism because it makes me feel bad, and I want to feel that optimistic modernism but when you look at the state of the world right now, I find it very difficult not to agree with that pessimism of the postmodern.

Postmodernism is the rejection of the idea that there are Grand Unifying Metanarratives that define history, society, culture, literature, etc.

It exists to question modernism, but not explicitly to undermine it.

>>10639810
>Postmodernism is the rejection of the idea that there are Grand Unifying Metanarratives

no that's just specifically Lyotard, ONE postmodernist

>>10639846
Not that anon. So what's postmodernism then?

see

>>10639850

>>10639850

meant

>>10633886

>>10639846
Wroooooong. That's a condition Lyotard DESCRIBES, not his philosophy.
>>10639850
Postmodernism is basically french faggots being tired of Marx, Hegel and Heidegger.

>>10639863
"Postmodernisme" is not a french word used to describe any of their philosophy

Do the ideas of modernism and postmodernism crop up in music? Was jazz modernist?

>>10639881
And where did I say the contrary u dumb frog

>>10639896
Whenever an American makes any sort of political commentary or analysis I immediately disregard it. Why?

Because the average American "thinker" is the ultimate armchair philosopher. They will proudly give their uneducated opinion on anything. They have no context, no real skin in the game because they haven't had war or conflict even close to their own soil since the 1800s. Their 'culture' is a fabrication made by Hollywood Jews to entice their youth with cowboy and soldier genres to serve their military industrial complex to work and die for Israel. 'Tradition' for them is stuffing themselves to the gullet with high-fat high-sugar foods and securing some shitty office 9-5 office or manual labor job enough to afford healthcare for their heart surgeries and medication.


American 'Alt-Righters' and 'traditionalists' are the worst among these. These half-breed mouth-breathing apes are the loudest advocates for an ethnostate, for the "day of the rope". Their genetic self-confusion is so dire that the word 'cuck' immediately resonates with them in any given discourse. Their understanding of the history of ideas has come from Wikipedia articles and state propaganda. They have no sense of nuance: anything even remotely resembling optimal collective activity is deemed "GOMMUNISM" as their own society institutions continues to become more bureaucratic, overrun by nonwhites, stagnant, and impoverished.

This would be all fine in dandy if these mutants were self contained, but since they outsource all their industry to street shitting cultures like China and India which expel the fetid masses of plastic and waste into our environment, the Amerimonkey's uncontrollable lust for consumption is destroy God's green Earth. We cannot tolerate it any longer.

What is to be done concerning the AQ (American Question)?

>>10639898
One of my favourite copypastas but I'm not an american.

>>10639884
stravinsky is a modernist composer par excellence

>>10625742
No, they were dead on and you are a brainlet fag.

>>10629552
This is accurate.

>>10639884
jazz is modernist in the "make it new" sense for sure.

>>10633649
>Im 2 dum 2 read other stuff spoon feed me plz

Sweet Christ.

>>10630474
>you're very confused about this subject
>explain it!
>well this subject is so complex that you cant explain it
fucking brainlet