Author Archives
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Historiography
The postmodern idea of history repudiates the humanist notion that it corresponds faithfully to reality and asserts that it is textual and mediated in order to validate power centres. Thus, while “history” deals with the past, “historiography” deals with the… Read More ›
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Bakhtin’s Impact on Postmodern Sensibility
Although active in the debates on aesthetics and literature that took place in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language,… Read More ›
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Foucault’s Concept of Power
Although the interrogation of power on a wider scale is implicit in Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism- the belief that language provides access to truth — the interest in power and its workings that dominates the poststructuraiist criticism of the 1980s… Read More ›
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Foucault’s Influence on Postmodern Thought
Michel Foucault, best known for his critical studies of social institutions, such as psychiatry, medicine, the human sciences, and the prison systems as well as for his work on the history of human sexuality, has been tremendously influential on postmodern… Read More ›
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Frankfurt School’s Contribution to Postmodern Thought
From top left to right: Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Leo Löwenthal, Friedrich Pollock, Franz Leopold Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin. The Frankfurt School of philosophers, cultural critics and social scientists, the leading figures of which included Max Horkheimer,… Read More ›
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Fredric Jameson’s Concept of “Depthlessness”
Fredric Jameson, best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, called postmodern culture as one of “depthlessness” and as the cultural logic of late capitalism. “Late capitalism” implies that society has moved past the industrial age.and into the information… Read More ›
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Baudrillard’s Concept of Hyperreality
Baudrillard‘s concept of hyperreality is closely linked to his idea of Simulacrum, which he defines as something which replaces reality with its representations. Baudrillard observes that the contemporary world is a simulacrum, where reality has… Read More ›
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Postmodernism’s Critique of Modernism
Postmodernism is a term applied to a variety of artistic, cultural and philosophical movements that arose as a result of modernism. While modernism frames itself as tahnedculmination of in response to Enlightenment‘s quest for authoritatively rational aesthetics, ethics and knowledge,… Read More ›
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The postmodern as “the incredulity towards metanarratives”
Jean Francois Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition famously described Postmodernism as the “incredulity towards metanarratives”. Postmodernism attacks specific notions of monolithic universals and encourages fractured, fluid and multiple perspectives. Lyotard observes that modernism relies on metanarratives or grand recits —… Read More ›
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Postmodernism
Postmodernism broadly refers to a socio-cultural and literary theory, and a shift in perspective that has manifested in a variety of disciplines including the social sciences, art, architecture, literature, fashion, communications, and technology. It is generally agreed that the postmodern… Read More ›
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The Waste Land as a Modernist Text
TS Eliot‘s The Waste Land, which has come to be identified as the representative poem of the Modernist canon, indicates the pervasive sense of disillusionment about the current state of affairs in the modern society, especially post World War Europe,… Read More ›
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Existentialist Movement in Literature
Existentialism is a term applied to the work of a number of philosophers since the 19th century who, despite large differences in their positions, generally focused on the condition of human existence, and an individual’s emotions, actions, responsibilities, and thoughts,… Read More ›
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Symbolist Movement in Poetry
A term specifically applied to the work of late 19th century French writers who reacted against the descriptive precision and objectivity of realism and the scientific determinism of naturalism, Symbolism was first used in this sense by Jean Moreas in… Read More ›
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Imagism: An Introduction
Influenced by the poetic theory of TE Hulme and by the style of Japanese Haiku, Imagism emerged as a movement spearheaded by Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, Amy Lowell and others, revolting against the looseness of texture of the Georgian poetry,… Read More ›
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Avant-Garde’s Relation to Modernist Thought
The dates of Modernism are disputable, it can be rightly claimed that nascent Modernism budded with the Avant-Garde (a military metaphor, meaning ‘advance guard’) which refers to a small, self-conscious group of artists and authors who deliberately undertook, in Ezra… Read More ›
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Modernism: On or About December 1910 Human Nature Changed
“On or about December 1910 human nature changed.” – Virginia Woolf wrote in her essay Mr Bennett and Mrs. Brown in 1924. “All human relations shifted,” Woolf continued, “and when human relations change there is at the same time a change… Read More ›
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Techniques of Fragmentation Used in Modernism
Modernism, which emerged out of an “immense panorama of futility and anarchy“, rightly represented in Klee’s painting, The Angel of History, found its radical expression in literature through the techniques of impressionism and subjectivity as exemplified in the stream-of-consciousness method… Read More ›
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Modernist Metropolis
Modernism was the first literary movement to take urban life as a given, as a form of experience that was categorically different from any other kind of life. Baudelaire was fascinated by the “flaneur”, the man who strolls the city… Read More ›
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Modernist Use of Myth
In an age that was wrought with scientism, technology and loss of spirituality, many of the major modernist writers realised and asserted the employment of integrative mythology in order to give “shape and significance” to the contemporary fragmented reality. The… Read More ›
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Modernism: Literature between the Wars
In 1924, Virginia Woolf wrote, “On or about December 1910 human nature changed. All human relations shifted, and when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.” It was an era… Read More ›
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