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What is modernist How does it differ from post-modernist.?

The question posed relates to the development of literature that I believe emerged in the early twentieth century. I find it dificult to get my mind round the concepts that the two developments represent so far as literature is concerned, and what the essential differences are between either one or the other.


Best Answer - Chosen by Asker:

Both concepts are critical concepts, not concepts that either modernist or postmodernist writers themselves tended to use, so the idea that there are 'essential' differences between the two is a bit dodgy.

However. Modernism, in English-language literature at any rate, tended to manifest itself as a foregrounding of language - the language that you wrote in, or (let's say) your style, was at least as important as what you were writing about. The classic modernists - in poetry, the biggest names were Eliot/Pound/arguably Stevens, in prose maybe Joyce, but that's a dodgy call - tended to rely a lot on a kind of deadpan pastiche of pre-existing language/style. Pre-modernist writers, it could be said, seemed to believe that it was possible for a writer to 'find' his or her 'true voice'. Modernist writers seemed to have despairingly concluded that all such 'voices' were merely a style like any other, and theoretically or even practically emulatable, if that's even a real word. Many of them (Eliot, Pound) seized on extreme political/cultural positions that were, in the context of the period they were writing in, highly eccentric, as a way of defending the kind of writing they wanted to do anyway.

In postmodernist writers such as Barth, Barthelme, Davenport, Gass, Sorrentino, and later on Leyner and so on, there is a similar reliance on pastiche, but usually there is less of a sense of extremity to the pastiche; the postmodernists tend to be less worried than the modernists, and more smug. For the more academically-minded postmodernists (Barth, Gass, Davenport, Sorrentino), it can be a bit boring to witness them showing off how good they are at mimicking existing styles. The more street-level postmodernists (Barthelme, Acker) are more willing to be at least apparently un-ironic and directly emotional.