Modernism Postmodernism

The concepts of 'Modernism' and 'Postmodernism' constitute the single most dominant issue of twentieth-century literature and culture and are the cause of much debate. In this influential volume, Peter Brooker presents some of the key viewpoints from a variety of major critics and sets these additionally alongside challenging arguments from Third World, Black and Feminist perspectives. His excellent Introduction and detailed headnotes for each section and essay provide an indispensable guide to interpreting the many different opinions, and prove to be valuable contributions in their own right.

This systemic study discusses in its historical, cultural and aesthetic context the postmodern American novel between the years of 1960 and 1980. A general overview of the various definitions of postmodernism in philosophy, cultural theory and aesthetics provides the framework for the inquiry into more specific problems, such as: the broadening of aesthetics, the relationship between aesthetics and ethics, the transformation of the artistic tradition, the interdependence between modernism and postmodernism, and the change in the aesthetics of fiction. Other topics addressed here include: situationalism, montage, the ordinary and the fantastic, the subject and the character, the imagination, comic modes, and the future of the postmodern strategies. The authors whose fiction is treated in some detail under the various aspects thematized are John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, Raymond Federman, William Gaddis, John Hawkes, Jerzy Kosinski, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Ronald Sukenick, and Kurt Vonnegut.

In this overview of twentieth-century American poetry, Jennifer Ashton examines the relationship between modernist and postmodernist American poetics. Ashton moves between the iconic figures of American modernism - Stein, Williams, Pound - and developments in contemporary American poetry to show how contemporary poetics, specially the school known as language poetry, have attempted to redefine the modernist legacy. She explores the complex currents of poetic and intellectual interest that connect contemporary poets with their modernist forebears. The works of poets such as Gertrude Stein and John Ashbery are explained and analysed in detail. This major account of the key themes in twentieth-century poetry and poetics develops important ways to read both modernist and postmodernist poetry through their similarities as well as their differences. It will be of interest to all working in American literature, to modernists, and to scholars of twentieth-century poetry.

In The Story of Post-Modernism, Charles Jencks, the authority on Post-Modern architecture and culture, provides the defining account of Post-Modern architecture from its earliest roots in the early 60s to the present day. By breaking the narrative into seven distinct chapters, which are both chronological and overlapping, Jencks charts the ebb and flow of the movement, the peaks and troughs of different ideas and themes. The book is highly visual. As well as providing a chronological account of the movement, each chapter also has a special feature on the major works of a given period. The first up-to-date narrative of Post-Modern Architecture - other major books on the subject were written 20 years ago. An accessible narrative that will appeal to students who are new to the subject, as well as those who can remember its heyday in the 70s and 80s.

This study examines the feminist, African-American and populist avant-garde that flourished in the era of American modernism.

The concepts of 'Modernism' and 'Postmodernism' constitute the single most dominant issue of twentieth-century literature and culture and are the cause of much debate. In this influential volume, Peter Brooker presents some of the key viewpoints from a variety of major critics and sets these additionally alongside challenging arguments from Third World, Black and Feminist perspectives. His excellent Introduction and detailed headnotes for each section and essay provide an indispensable guide to interpreting the many different opinions, and prove to be valuable contributions in their own right.

In these lectures, delivered at Harvard University in March 1983, the differences between Modernism and Postmodernism are discussed in semiotic terms, based on a contrastive analysis of semantic and syntactical (compositional) features. They present the major results of research into the literary conventions of Modernism (Gide, Larbaud, V. Woolf, du Perron, Th. Mann) and the innovations of Postmodernism (Borges, Fuentes, Barthelme, Calvino, Hermans). The investigation of innovation in literary history is based on a concept of literary evolution, launched by the Russian Formalists and elaborated by reception theory and semioticians such as Lotman and Eco. The author argues for further corroboration by means of empirical – textual as well as psychological – research.

Modernism-Dada-Postmodernism collects, updates, integrates and contextualizes the critic Richard Sheppard's essays on the historical avant-garde. Sheppard's topic in all of these essays is the modernist writers', artists', and philosophers' linguistic and visual responses to a changed sense of reality and human nature. Beginning with an overview of the problematics of European modernism, Sheppard establishes the dialectical relationship between the cultural crisis that occurred during the period 1880-1936 and the different responses from European modernists and the avant-garde. With its combination of classic and new essays and its perspective on the theoretical avant-garde/modernism debate in the United States, Sheppard's volume should give the specialist as well as the general reader an insight into the highest sample of European scholarly discourse on this subject.