How is postmodernism different than modernism

Storytelling should mimic a Lockean ideal of how we experience the natural world. Post Modern literature and film: realism is no more "real" than fantasy. We are free to tell stories any damn way we want to.

Modernism or Enlightenment Empiricism and Humanism. Postmodernism or The Post Truth Era? Reason and science are Ideologies in the Nietzschean or Marxist sense: simply myths created by man. Conceptual art, as defined by the American artist Sol Lewitt , provided a particularly radical approach to modern art.

While at the beginning of the 20th century, artist movements such as the Bauhaus in Europe placed the function of art above its form, Sol Lewitt made the idea of the producing factor of art.

The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. In this sense, artist Joseph Kosuth had already reflected on the different codes of one chair in his conceptual artwork One and Three Chairs Postmodernists like Lyotard, Heidegger, Derrida but also phenomenologists like Lacan or Merleau-Ponty critically examined the concept of an objectively perceivable reality.

From theorists like the above-mentioned come ideas which assume that there is no objective truth and identity. Newly emerging theories of perception were also addressed and processed in the art of postmodernism. An interesting work in this context comes from the New York concept and video artist Dan Graham. In his complicated work Two Delay Room made of mirrors and screens, Graham confronts visitors to his work with the function and limits of their own perception.

In his two rooms, each equipped with two screens and cameras, Dan Graham plays with the technical and human observation of his own existence. A time delay in the transmission of the camera images to the screens imitates human perception.

I admit that this text represents a rather fast ride through the history of art from almost two centuries. But this quick run-through and the juxtaposition of modernism and post-modernism in six facts clearly shows different things. Firstly, it is clear that the movement that modernism and postmodernism are making in art as a whole is a movement in the sense of development.

However, this movement takes place differently in the two eras. The change in form is also the most obvious. While at the beginning of modernism artists still painted on canvas, postmodernism has produced works of art that are absolutely space-filling, as the last work by Dan Graham shows.

Modernism vs. Modernist authors deliberately broke away from traditional styles of writing and focused on inner self and consciousness in their writings. The stream of consciousness was the major technique introduced during this movement. However, postmodernist writers deliberately used a mixture of earlier styles.

They also used techniques such as fragmentation, intertextuality, unreliable narrator, parody, dark humor and paradox. This is the main difference between modernism and postmodernism in literature. The difference between modernism and postmodernism in literature depends on their themes and literary and narrative techniques. Available here 2. Available here 3. Available here. Modernism and postmodernism lose this faith in objectivity, and they focus instead on subjective modes of narration.

Modern writers disagree with realist ones the real world can be merely translated, transmitted or reflected — every act of writing is essentially creating a new world. Modernism rejects realist conventions, such as detailed descriptions or the third-person impartial narrator. Both modernism and postmodernism recognize that the fictional world is mediated through frames particular narrative choices which are always subjective. Postmodern writers argue that every reading of a work of fiction creates a different version of the text in the minds of readers, as every interpretation is unique.

This multiplicity of texts goes against the impartiality and singularity of vision that realist writers believed in. According to realism, the fictional world exists in its entirety and is analogous to the real world. Postmodern writers object to these views for the following reasons:. As a fictional world cannot exist outside of language, only things that are described by the narrator exist in a fictional world. Yet, it is simply impossible to depict the infinite number of objects that should exist in a world that is analogous to ours.

Every act of telling involves selection, organization, and interpretation on the part of the narrator. This partiality of narration is suppressed by realism, which for postmodern writers is dishonest and potentially dangerous. From a referential point of view, what happens in fiction is literally nothing. Modernism gradually rejects the referential function.

But this creates a problem, as coherence is lost. Modernism is a cul-de-sac — there is nowhere to go from this radical refusal of meaning. Literature was becoming a jumble of incoherent sentences that no-one could understand. Postmodernism offers a solution. It preserves the realist referential function ironically by being both self-reflexive and referential. Postmodernism, at its heart, is characterised by paradox. This is a realist painting. You may want to compare it with modern art.

Armstrong, Tim, Modernism: a cultural history Cambridge: Polity, Re:Jon - Hm, I wouldn't agree. Ex: When approaching a black hole, an object is seen going slower and slower and redder. But from the POV of the object, it falls right in, with no slowing down at all. So basically, it's as if two different things happen at once.

Plus, it isn't true that science is entirely objective - for example, in certain cases, light is said to be a particle, while in others a wave. The thing is - and it can be seen in specific experiments - the two are clearly contradictory. How is this objective? The idea that relativity divorced science from objectivity is pure nonsense. Einstein's model of spacetime only says that motion can affect observations. That doesn't in any way imply that observations are subjective.

Rather, one can transform anyone's frame of reference to any other, and qualitative predictions can be precisely made regarding what the new reference frame will see. In other words, there is no subjectivity, only interactions between reference frames. Therefore, scientific theories are certainly objective. In fact, here is one objective way of viewing the world, and that way is the scientific method. The clear distinction between modern and post modern period is really very much vague