Herman Dana An 3 | IT-EN

The change in the modernist vs. postmodernist views on fiction and writing.

Differences between modernism and postmodermism.

Modernists believed that the presence of human freedom and autonomy were forces that could reject the basic tendencies of Enlightenment and Romanticism visions of harmony. The scientific and rational foundations of the Enlightenment were rejected because modernists discounted the objective truth was possible or attainable. They also rejected the Romantic visions of harmony and unity in that the modernists were convinced that fragmentation and disunity were the only true elements in the world and within individual consciousness. The modernists sought to create and compose art in this setting, reflecting these ideas. The expression of these ideas took form through literature, and while modernity was severely criticized, the form of doing so was still within the traditional boundaries of what had been done prior. In this light, modernists sought to criticize the setting in new and innovative ways through traditional form. Postmodernism sought to move modernism to a new level by criticizing everything, including the form. The postmodernists believed in the ideas of fragmentation and disunity, but sought to explore the principles that lay underneath such a reality. This led to a complete overhaul of both content and manner in which it is presented. Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" is a play that radicalizes what the play genre can include. Ionesco does the same. Thinkers like Foucault sought to underscore and analyze the basic premises of power and its construction in society. Postmodernists sought to transcend language and traditional forms of expression of self. Yet, in order to articulate this, some level of standard form was needed, so while postmodernists really sought to do something different,

there is much within it that had to represent a starting point, so that there is not a complete repudiation of what is there, but rather a smaller version of resurrecting the death in order to kill it. James Joyce James Joyce s A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is an autobiography and the narrative is limited to Stephens consciousness and there is no narrator who explains the differences between Stephens reality and the objective reality. The fragment has a psychological fiction and a stream of consciousness technique and capture the illogical associations made by the human mind and jumps from topic to topic. Modernist writing often portrays the very real problems of characters that may not have considered literary enough in times past. Stephen , the hero of the novel, increasingly feels the pull of the intangible phantoms, that presumably include the ambition to be an artist, but the pull to be a gentleman and a good Cathollic threaten to include him from a life devoted to art. The fictionality is seen in these fragment by using of phamtoms and the ghost of the ancient kingdom of the Danes.

John Fowles John Fowles The French Lieutenants Woman is regarded as a compelling historiograpfic metafiction in contemporary British literature. The critic Linda Hutcheon has called The French Lieutenants Woman a historiographic metafiction. Within this narrative , Hohn Fowless play of intertextuality in the dimension of Victorian womans social and sexual emancipation is explored. The diversity of intertextuality and intrusion of novelist-srrogate significantly presenta Fowless breakthrough in the traditional literary narrative. The interweaving of historical and literary sources of Victorian Era is characteristic of the novel. This intertextuality reinforces the historical verosimilitudinous connection with Victorian Age and simultaneously it materializes Fowless constant conversation with forms of literature and the Victorian world. Nevertheless. With self-consciousness about the form of fiction and the intrusion of modern novelist-surrogate that intrerrupts the coherence of narrative illusion of historical reality is disrupted. Such paradoxes of fictionality or reality and the present or the past in the novel demonstrate Fowles breakthrough in the traditional liteary narrative. Moreover, Within the historiographic matafictiona structure , Fowles emplys the parodu of vitorian romance- an imitation with critical difference- to reconstruct the Victorian world , to subvert the traditional fixed denoument and to create a unique woman of emancipation.

In conclusion both paragraphs have a unique stiyle of writing and use the same point of view modernism withdrew and postmodernist writers often re-enter. Satire is used in both paragraphs and also intertextuality and stream of consciousness. Non-linear narrative is used in those paragraphs for describeing the reality and fantasy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Holmes, Frederick. The Novel, Illusion, and Reality: the Paradox of Omniscience in The French Lieutenants Woman. Metafiction. Ed. Mark Currie. New York: Longman Group, 1995. 206-20.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. -

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