Aspects of Post-Modernism (ca.
1965-present)
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- An extension or a break with twentieth-century modernism. It continues to stress
modernist traits of fragmentation, solipsism, alienation, and subjective history.
- Yet is also rejects modernist interests in symbols and form for an interest in the
surface, chance, the impersonal and/or local.
- Strong interest in post-structuralism and deconstruction, theories that find
language’s ability to communicate highly problematic. All language is tied to what it
seeks to describe. No objectivity.
- Often stresses a cool, detached, emotionally uninvolved style.
- Argues that no coherent, unified reality is possible.
- The (dis)connection between modernism and post-modernism can also be seen not as
two discrete movements, but as two poles of an experience:
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Modernism
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Post-Modernism
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| romanticism/ symbolism |
surrealism/ dadaism |
| form/ function |
anti-form/ disjunction |
| purpose |
play |
| design |
chance |
| hierarchy |
anarchy |
| mastery/ logos |
exhaustion/ silence |
| art object/ finished |
process/ happening |
| creation |
deconstruction |
| presence |
absence |
| centering |
dispersal |
| root/depth |
surface/ rhizome |
| interpretation |
(mis)reading |
| grand narrative/universal |
local history only |
| erotic |
androgynous |
| origin and cause |
indeterminacy |
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[ Baroque ] [ Enlightenment ] [ Romanticism ] [ Realism/Naturalism ] [ Symbolism ] [ Modernism ] [ Postmodernism ]
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