Comparing Modernism And Postmodernism: Literature And Visual Art

Distinctions and Similarities Between Modern and Postmodern Literature

The first key distinction between modernist and postmodern literature is that they embodied different interpretations of what language was for. For a modernist poet, words, sentences, and syntax were there to manipulate in order to find meaning. With all its nuance, historical allusion, and myth, T. S Eliot’s The Waste Land is an emotive poem by nature. Coming out just after World War I, Eliot addresses a futile, lonely state of urbanity that post-war Europeans could resonate with. The Waste Land, though, is an incredibly confusing poem. It bounces from mythological present conversations to memories, all while maintaining an undertone of desolation. When reading the poem for the first time, it is not the overall narrative that the reader easily latches onto, it is individual lines or episodes. In the final episode of the first section beginning with “Unreal city, under the brown fog of the winter dawn”, for instance, Eliot describes London filled with ghostly pedestrians. Using this language to present this image after so much death had struck Europe, exemplifies the power of words as vessels for meaning. In 1921, Eliot reiterated his goal with language by saying, “The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning” (289). The linguistic odyssey through The Waste Land can be contrasted with postmodern poet Christian Bök’s “Vowels,” John Ashberry’s “Paradoxes and Oxymorons,” and Kenneth Goldsmith’s No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96.

For a postmodernist, language was something to play with. In a world of unoriginality, poets referred to the poems themselves; they were self-reflexive. There may not have been an underlying meaning, but a poem could still be important even if it was about the words, letters even, themselves. Vowels begins with “loveless vessels,” and every word in the poem is made up of only the letters in ‘vowels,’ (1). We would not have such an expansive language without vowels. They are the sanctity of the English language, as love is to human kind. The poem represents an almost bleak interpretation of love and language using words like ‘less,’ ‘woe,’ ‘losses,’ ‘low,’ and ‘loose.’ The final line, “wolves evolve,” may elude to human evolution, but the poem could also be read as a wordy poem about words. This is even more true of Goldsmiths book No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96. This work contains hundreds of pages of rhymes organized alphabetically. The hard ‘r’ sound is central to the piece, but it is difficult to find much meaning in the hodge podge of sounds. John Ashberry’s “Paradoxes and Oxymorons” then, begins with a clear sentence “This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level,” goes on to personify the poem itself by calling it “sad,” and ends with. “This poem is you”. Ashberry thus breaks the fourth wall of poetry by using language itself to assert symbolic human meaning, rather than using the language to describe an image or scenario that carries meaning.

A second difference is in the complexity of some modernists works versus the simplicity of postmodern works. This point also relates to the elitism of the modernist era versus the populism of postmodernism. Though modernists were interested in asserting meaning through language, they typically tossed so much at the reader that it could feel like an unorganized mess similar to Goldsmiths No. 111 2.7.93-10.20.96. Eliot alluded to a dozen outside sources, used three different languages, and made up surreal stories. To understand even the smallest section of The Waste Land, “Death By Water,” the reader must know about Phoenicia, understand the bible well enough to recognize that the form of this stanza mimics a parable, and then make the connection that Phlebas’ death fulfills a prophecy from the first section of the poem. Therefore, the reader has to have a layer of knowledge outside the words on the page to comprehend Eliot’s complete intentions. Because woman in the 1920s were unable to reach the education status of men unless they were of high society, and many men did not complete higher education, it is unlikely that the nuances of The Waste Land reached the populace. Much postmodern poetry, though still not as easy to codify as Romantic literature, escaped some of the complexity of modernism. Postmodern scholar Fredric Jameson describes the merging of high and low culture as a key element of postmodernism saying, “The second feature of this list of postmodernisms is the effacement in it of some key boundaries or separations, most notably the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so called mass or popular culture”. Frank O’Hara’s “Poem,” brings out this point because the poem is about a tabloid story of Lana Turner falling. Tabloids are emblematic of the shameful elements of culture with news of scandals and superficial headlines. The narrator in the poem is walking in awful weather, late even, when he saw the headline. Not only is Lana Turner’s collapse worthy of literature, it is also worthy of a pause during a busy day. More evidence of this populist pattern comes from Albert Ginsberg’s “Howl” which has the stream of consciousness elements of The Waste Land, but there are no unrecognizable words, and the subject being the underbelly of urban life ties in a group of Americans who were commonly outside the poetic realm. By starting many lines off with a repetitive “who,” he gives odes to “the Angelheaded hipsters,” and those “who let themselves be fucked in the ass”. In many ways, postmodern literature was for this everyday citizen.

The third key distinction between postmodern and modern poetry can be illustrated by comparing modernist William Carlos Williams with postmodernist Allen Ginsberg. Essentially, the postmodern poet stripped away the final semblance of Victorian era courtesy. Where modernists took great care to craft a futurist, intelligent persona through their writing, and though they attempted to abolish Romantic guidelines, they maintained order. In his “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste”, Ezra Pound gave rules such as “Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something” (200). William Carlos William’s is famous for his idyllic, American poetry. Unlike Eliot, Williams strayed from overly complex language or form, but like Eliot, he was an imagist. His most famous work “The Red Wheelbarrow” briefly depicts a red wheelbarrow sitting next to chickens. It is a single snapshot that brings up other images of rural America to the reader. His poetry is clean, and clear, and it represents a peaceful America. Though modernist literature shocked, it did not typically offend. The same can not be said of Ginsberg’s “Howl.” In comparison, Postmodern poets had an ‘I don’t care’ mentality about what should or should not be in a work of art. “Howl” abandoned any rules and expressed themes of drugs, suicide, war, homosexuality, and sex. In addition, Ginsberg’s poem is about his experience in New York City. Where modernists crafted images that anyone could have viewed, postmodernists illustrate experiences unique to individuals. Instead of glazing over controversial issues, Ginsberg shoved them into a single poem and used the language he might use on the streets of the Bronx. Both poets represent an authentic element of American life, but Williams’ is PG and simple; Ginsbergs’ is R-rated and packed with “superfluous words.” While modernists poets contemplated every word to ensure its necessity in the final piece, postmodernists allowed the excess.

With these three distinctions being prominent, postmodernist literature is not easily distinguishable from modernist literature since “The concept of postmodernism is not widely accepted or even understood today”. The two literary frameworks share many similarities including a reverence for the past and an intent to show rather than tell.

By trying to be different from yesterday, a creator is tied to who they were yesterday. Even though the common notion of modernism is that it completely broke off from the past as critic Habermas wrote, “Modernity revolts against the normalizing functions of tradition; modernity lives on the experience of rebelling against all that is normative,” there is an alternative view that some modernist writers embraced their place in time. As the author of the crowned jewel of modernist poetry, T.S Eliot espoused in his “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that the best writers draw from centuries of written history, and that only by embracing this “historical sense” could one be a timeless traditionalist. In fact, even if a writer refused to recognize the past “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone”. Therefore, the tradition lived and breathed with every modernist even if they chose to deny it. Postmodern writers were connected to the past and to the present. Many modernists including Eliot, Pound, and Williams inspired postmodernists and experienced the same World War II mania. This means that the historical shift that brought on postmodernism was felt within many modernists as well. Postmodernists and modernists alike were connected to the world’s timeline.

The intent to show rather than tell permeated the entire 20th century. For poetry, this was done with imagism, streams of consciousness, and intentional capitalization and stanza formation. In novels, such as the modern Ms. Dalloway and the postmodern Slaughterhouse Five, this was done by shifting the narrator, pulling the main characters out of the present, and detailing the characters perceptual experiences. In this way, the reader experiences Ms. Dalloway’s shopping day the way she does. To illustrate, when someone steps outside their door, they may not be thinking about the birds in the sky, the color of concrete, or any of the things that common novels describe to help the reader visualize a moment. Rather, someone may walk out their door, see their annoying neighbor, and think about how they should consider moving. They may see a puddle and remember getting splashed the day before, and then immediately jump to thinking about the keys they forgot in the house. Many cognitive and perceptual experiences happen outside the physical world and that is what modernists aimed to show. Postmodernists did this too. In Slaughterhouse Five the reader is given a glimpse into what it may feel like to survive a war by joining Billy Pilgrim in the flashbacks that he believes are time travel. Author Kurt Vonnegut was a soldier during the war, and he was held in Dresden after being captured by the Germans. Just as Pilgrim questions the concept of fate throughout the novel, it is likely that Vonnegut did the same during his time in battle. He was able to show wartime turmoil, rather than simply depict it. Woolf was similarly able to the show the inner workings of an unhappy wife, rather than simply explain it.

Distinctions Between Modern and Postmodern Visual Art

Modernist artists pulled the definition of ‘good art’ away from realistic portraits of apples in a basket, played with concepts of time and subjectivity, and brought art closer to representing images or sculptures coupled with emotion, but they did not stretch the bounds of visual art as far as postmodernists. Famous modernist painters Édouard Manet and Paul Cezanne, for example, predominately painted oil on canvas images from real life experiences. Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) and Olympia (1863) were painted using models, and his numerous depictions of café culture in Paris were based off sketches. Cezanne often painted the same Montagne Sainte-Victoire, and some of the models for his still lifes can still be found in his French studio. Though some works of both painters were demoted to the Salon des Refusés, they had their works displayed in galleries so those with an interest in art could view them. Manet and Cezanne became famous for interpreting the world around them, rather than simply painting it as it was. Therefore, the average modernist painter, usually white and male, conferred with other painters, painted, presented their art, and continued to evolve with the times. Edgar Degas’ The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer (1880) sculpture of a tired Belgian dancer with real hair and textile, as well as Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) sculpture of a urinal represent breaks with this trend, but these pieces are exceptions. In fact, Fountain and Duchamp’s readymades were so outside of the modernist norm that they inspired some postmodernists like Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol. Modernists broke many barriers but held onto others. Granted, paintings in galleries and museums will probably always be a central component of visual art in contemporary society, but postmodernists expanded this framework. By broadening on typical art forms, postmodernist also merged the modernist imposed line between high and low art. A postmodern consumer didn’t need an anthology of aesthetic terminology to appreciate Claes Oldenburg’s Giant Hamburger (1962) or Barbara Kruger’s collages and exhibition pieces.

In Oldenburg’s 1961 essay, “I Am for an Art,” he describes common, low class features of life that he thinks should be deemed art stating, “I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum”. His Giant Hamburger is a large, soft sculpture of it’s namesake. His unconventional subject matter of a popular American food blown up, and called art, completely obliterates the notion of high culture. It compliments his idea that anything can be art, as well as the general postmodern notion that expression doesn’t have to be existential. Making the sculpture soft instead of hard, as many modernist sculptures were, gives the piece an ephemeral nature and distinguishes it from the rigidity of modernist order. Kruger experimented with new mediums such as layered black and white photographs with red text. Kruger “work[ed] with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are and who we aren’t”. Therefore, she chose her medium to represent humans as honestly as she knew how to. Her photos are often of 1950s women, but the text is for a modern feminist. Her untitled silkscreen with the words “Your body is a battleground,” was made for the 1989 Women’s March in Washington, DC to protest anti-abortion sentiment. Rather than leaving her work entirely up to critical interpretation, her pieces directly articulate the purpose. Many postmodern visual artists thus took the modernist idea to interpret their world a step further by interpreting the new world without a canvas.

Beyond form, postmodernist artists embraced the commodification and unoriginality of art. Modernists hung on to a desire for meaning and newness in their work. In regard to Modernism, Habermas said “The avant-garde must find a direction in a landscape into which no one seems to have yet ventured”. ‘Avant-garde’ is a military term that refers to the first wave of soldiers or the ‘advanced guard.’ Many modernists, therefore, considered themselves to be a new wave of artists. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque’s cubism used primary forms to give their pieces a fragmented, two-dimensional feel. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) portrays five nude women with disjointed features and angular, unrealistic faces. If someone put this piece next to the original women, it would be difficult to match them to the faces in the painting. This blatant departure from realism was ‘avant-garde’ and the meaning in the painting depended on the opinion of the viewer, the painter, the critic, and the era. Scholar Jameson believed that a key component of postmodernism, even the catalyst of postmodernism, was commodification in a capitalist culture. Coupled with this consumer culture was a reverence for the unoriginal. Kruger pointed out that, “I don’t see this division between what is commercial and what is not commercial” because her pieces used communication styles and were often silkscreens.