Modernism and Postmodernism

Paper Summary:

This essay generally discusses the concept of Postmodernism. It moves through basic attributes of Postmodernism and assesses the movement's originality by comparing passages and quotes from both Postmodernist and Modernist authors, including James Joyce, ee cummings, Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, William Carlos Williams, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Frost, John Steinbeck, Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut.

From the Paper:

"Postmodernism as a literary movement began after World War II, following a long era of the Modernist period. Both Modernism and Postmodernism are typically characterized as the "playful" eras because they played with, or discarded, the Victorian ideas of "how art should be made, consumed, and what it should mean" (Klages). With the end of the conventional rules of literature, the Postmodernists prided themselves on being the celebrators of nothingness, innovative and spontaneously creative. While individual writers may have achieved these goals in their own works, as a whole, the movement was not an all-original upheaval. Postmodernism took not only its name, but many of its elements, from Modernism. In one way or another, the rejection of traditional concepts about point-of-view, the shift of emphasis from meaning to method, and the variations of disunity and unity in the work were all transmutations of Modernism."

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