Comparative View on Modernism and Postmodernism

Modernism	Postmodernism
Modernism is defined as “a style and movement in art, architecture and literature popular in the middle of the twentieth century in which modern ideas, methods, and materials were used rather than the traditional one”	Postmodernism is defined as “a style and movement in art, architecture, literature, etc. in the late twentieth century that reacts against modern styles, for example, by mixing features from traditional and modern styles.
Modernism is “roughly coterminous with the twentieth century western ideas about art.” It is “the movement in visual arts, music, literature and drama which rejected the old  Victorian standards of how art should be made, consumed and what it should mean. The stalwarts of modernism in literature endeavoured to redefine what poetry and fiction could be and do. T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Mallarme, Rilke, etc, are the doyens of twentieth century modernism in literature	Postmodernism in relation to literary criticism owes its origin to Charles Olson who first used the term in his essays in 1950s. In the 1960s through 1970s critics like Ihab Hassan, Susan Sontag, Leslie Fiedler, Linda Hutcheon and Fredric Jameson have discussed postmodernism in relation to literature and other arts. Post-modernism, a complicated term, emerged as an area of academic study in mid 1980s of the   last century. Its scope is very wide and comprehensive.
Modernity which preceds modernism embraces a set of philosophical, political, social ethical ideas which form the basis for the aesthetic aspect of modernism. Modernity is the condition of being modern. It denotes order, rationality, rationalization and method. It stands for creating order out of chaos.
The following are the characteristics of modernism that are conspicuous from literary point of view: a.      Emphasis on subjectivity and impressions in writing as in the stream of consciousness technique. (Thus, impressionism in art and literature uses subjectivity to convey a truthful sense of reality. ... In addition, the impressionist movement focused on light and movement. It dismisses the still life images of its forebearers and rather depicts everyday life and cityscapes) b.      A departure from the apparent objectivity provided by the omniscient third person narrators, fixed narrative points of view and clear-cut moral positions. c.      Emphasis on fragmented forms, random-seeming   collages of different materials and discontinuous narratives. d.      Blurring of distinction between literary forms. For example, Eliot’s poetry seems more documentary and the prose of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf seems to be more poetic. e.      A rejection of formal aesthetic theories in favour of minimalist designs, spontaneity and discovery in creation. f.       A rejection of the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ or popular culture, both in choice of materials used to produce art and in methods of displaying, distributing and consuming art.	Postmodernism like modernism follows most of these same ideas, rejecting boundaries between high and low forms of art, rejecting  rigid genre distinctions, emphasizing pastiche, parody, bricolage, irony, and playfulness. Post-modern art stands for reflexivity and self-consciousness, fragmentation and discontinuity, ambiguity, simultaneity and an emphasis on the destructured and decentered and dehumanized subject. (pastiche means the imitation of one style by another but unlike parody it does not contain irony or satire)
Though postmodernism seems very much like modernism in many ways, it differs from modernism in its attitude. Modernism tends to present a fragmented view of human subjectivity and history, but present that fragmentation as something tragic, something to be lamented and mourned  at loss.	Postmodernism, in contrast, does not lament the idea of fragmentation, provisionality or incoherence, but rather celebrates. The world is meaningless. Let’s not pretend that art can make meaning, then let’s just play with nonsense.
Modernity is fundamentally about order: about rationality and rationalization, creating order out of chaos. The assumption is that creating more rationality is conducive to creating more order and that the more ordered a society is, the better it will function. Thus modern societies rely on continually establishing a binary opposition between ‘order’ and ‘disorder’.	Postmodern theorist Jean-Francois Lyotard equated that stability with the idea of ‘totality’ or a totalized system
Modernism cultivated austerity	Postmodernism is interested in pleasure.