Birth of Modernism & of Existentialism (in 1900 USA):

• Modernism

1. Break with traditional forms and techniques of expression; more experimental

in form/presentation - think Picasso.
2. Tone & theme addresses sense of loss, alienation, despair of individual who is
driven by unconscious desires/needs with will, passion, and instinct valued
over reason.
3. World view is chaotic, complex, uncertain, and irrational, manifested in the
collapse of traditional values and morality.

• Existentialism

1. Reflects modern temperament

2. Existence precedes Essence
3. Free Will + Responsible Choice/Action = Authenticity
4. Sense of Alienation & Despair == Loss of Religious Beliefs

• Literature

1. Regeneration of Short Story

2. Emphasis on character & mood & taboo subjects

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.

Existentialism – What It Is and Isn’t

Existentialism takes into consideration the underlying concepts:

• Human free will

• Human nature is chosen through life choices
• A person is best when struggling against their individual nature, fighting for
life
• Decisions are not without stress and consequences
• There are things that are not rational
• Personal responsibility and discipline is crucial
• Society is unnatural and its traditional religious and secular rules are arbitrary
• Worldly desire is futile
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Existentialism is broadly defined in a variety of concepts and there can be no one
answer as to what it is, yet it does not support any of the following:

• wealth, pleasure, or honor make the good life

• social values and structure control the individual
• accept what is and that is enough in life
• science can and will make everything better
• people are basically good but ruined by society or external forces
• “I want my way, now!” or “It is not my fault!” mentality

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.

Existentialism – Impact on Society

Existentialistic ideas came out of a time in society when there was a deep sense of
despair following the Great Depression and World War II. There was a spirit of
optimism in society that was destroyed by World War I and its mid-century
calamities. This despair has been articulated by existentialist philosophers well into
the 1970s and continues on to this day as a popular way of thinking and reasoning
(with the freedom to choose one’s preferred moral belief system and lifestyle).

An existentialist could either be a religious moralist, agnostic relativist, or an amoral

atheist. Kierkegaard, a religious philosopher, Nietzsche, an anti-Christian, Sartre, an
atheist, and Camus an atheist, are credited for their works and writings about
existentialism. Sartre is noted for binging the most international attention to
existentialism in the 20th century.

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.

Existentialism and literature

A number of existentialist philosophers used literary forms to convey their thought,

and existentialism has been as vital and as extensive a movement in literature as in
philosophy. The 19th-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky is probably the
greatest existentialist literary figure. In Notes from the Underground (1864), the
alienated antihero rages against the optimistic assumptions of rationalist humanism.
The view of human nature that emerges in this and other novels of Dostoyevsky is
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that it is unpredictable and perversely self-destructive; only Christian love can save
humanity from itself, but such love cannot be understood philosophically. As the
character Alyosha says in The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80), “We must love life
more than the meaning of it.”

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.

American Existentialism: Before the Fact

An existential mood or perspective has long been important in America.

Kierkegaard's theology of despair was anticipated in the Puritan's anguished religious
sensibility. The distance between the individual and God that defined Puritanism has
existential echoes, as the historian Perry Miller noted in his study of Jonathan
Edwards's theology. Herman Melville's character Captain Ahab in Moby-
Dick (1851) personifies the existential individual battling to create
meaning in a universe abandoned by God. Radical alienation and the search
for meaning in an absurd world are common themes in the work of the late-
nineteenth-century writer Stephen Crane. William James, professor of philosophy at
Harvard University, posited a pluralistic and wild universe. His vision promoted both
radical freedom and anguish of responsibility. For James, much like Sartre later,
consciousness is an active agent rather than an essence. Therefore, the individual
must impose order on the universe or confront a life without depth or meaning.
Similarly, turn-of-the-century dissenters from American optimism and progress,
such as James, Henry Adams, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., developed an
existential perspective that appreciated the tragic elements in modern life and that
upheld a heroically skeptical stance in the face of the absurd nature of existence. In
the 1920s, novelists from the Lost Generation, such as Ernest Hemingway
and F. Scott Fitzgerald, spiritually wounded survivors of World War I,
presented characters adrift, searching for existential meaning in their
lives.

The Fate of Existentialism

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.

MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM

Modernism = a general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of

experimental and avant-garde trends in the literature (and other arts) of the early
20th century, including Symbolism, Futurism, Expressionism, Imagism, Vorticism,
Dada, and Surrealism, along with the innovations of unaffiliated writers.

Modernist literature is characterized chiefly by a rejection of 19th-century traditions

and oftheir consensus between author and reader: the conventions of realism, for
instance, were abandoned by Franz Kafka and other novelists, and by expressionist
drama, while several poets rejected traditional metres in favour of free verse.

Modernist writers tended to see themselves as an avant-garde disengaged from

bourgeois values, and disturbed their readers by adopting complex and difficult new
forms and styles. In fiction, the accepted continuity of chronological development
was upset by Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner, while James
Joyce and Virginia Woolf attempted new ways of tracing the flow of characters'
thoughts in their stream-of-consciousness styles. In poetry, Ezra Pound and T. S.
Eliot replaced the logical exposition ofthoughts with collages of fragmentary images
and complex allusions. Luigi Pirandello and Bertolt Brecht opened up the theatre
tonew forms of abstraction in place of realist and naturalist representation.
Modernist writing is predominantly cosmopolitan, andoften expresses a sense of
urban cultural dislocation, along with anawareness of new anthropological and
psychological theories. Its favoured techniques of juxtaposition and multiple point of
view challenge the reader to reestablish a coherence of meaning from fragmentary
forms. In English, its major landmarks are Joyce's Ulysses and Eliot's The Waste
Land (both 1922).

Modernists felt a growing alienation incompatible with Victorian morality, optimism,

and convention. The Modernist impulse is fueled in various literatures by
industrialization and urbanization, by the search for an authentic response to a
much-changed world. Among English-language writers, the best-known Modernists
are T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf.

Differences between Modernism and Postmodernism

Modernism is an encompassing label for a wide variety of cultural movements.

Postmodernism is essentially a centralized movement that named itself, based on
socio-political theory, although the term is now used in a wider sense to refer to
activities from the 20th Century onwards which exhibit awareness of and reinterpret
the modern.

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.

Postmodernism may be seen as a continuation of modernism's alienated mood and

disorienting techniques and at the same time as an abandonment of its determined
quest for artistic coherence in a fragmented world: in very crude terms, where a
modernist artist or writer would try to wrest a meaning from the world through myth,
symbol, or formal complexity, the postmodernist greets the absurd or meaningless
confusion of contemporary existence with a certain numbed or flippant indifference,
favouring self-consciously ‘depthless’ works of fabulation, pastiche, bricolage, or
aleatory disconnection. The term cannot usefully serve as an inclusive description of
all literature since the 1950s or 1960s, but is applied selectively to those works that
display most evidently the moods and formal disconnections described above. It
seems to have little relevance to modern poetry, and limited application to drama
outside the ‘absurdist’ tradition, but is used widely in reference to fiction, notably to
the novels (or anti-novels) and stories of Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Italo
Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov, William S. Burroughs, Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie,
Peter Ackroyd, Julian Barnes, Jeanette Winterson, and many of their followers. Some
of their works, like Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973) and Nabokov's Ada (1969),
employ devices reminiscent of science fiction, playing with contradictory orders of
reality or the irruption of the fabulous into the secular world.

Reaction to modernism

Postmodernism was originally a reaction to modernism. Largely influenced by the

Western European "disillusionment" induced by World War II, postmodernism tends
to refer to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or
organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity,
diversity, interconnectedness or interreferentiality, in a way that is often
indistinguishable from a parody of itself. It has given rise to charges of fraudulence.

Postmodernity is a derivative referring to non-art aspects of history that were

influenced by the new movement, namely developments in society, economy and
culture since the 1960s. When the idea of a reaction or rejection of modernism was
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borrowed by other fields, it became synonymous in some contexts with
postmodernity. The term is closely linked with poststructuralism (cf. Michel
Foucault) and with modernism, in terms of a rejection of its bourgeois, elitist culture.

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.

Comparisons with modernist literature

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.