Modernism and
post-modernism
RAFITA FATMA
2211418083
René
Descartes
• “I think; therefore, I am,”
becomes the solid foundation on
which knowledge and a theory of
knowledge can be built.
• The only thing one cannot doubt
is one’s own existence.
• Certainty and knowledge begin
with the self.
Benjamin Franklin
• Franklin doesn’t abandon religion and
replace it with science. He rejects miracles,
myths, and religious superstitions.
• He doesn’t reject a belief in the existence
of God.
• According to Franklin, individuals must find
salvation within themselves.
• Franklin proclaims that human progress is
inevitable and will usher in a new golden
age.
• Franklin and modernity’s spirit of progress
permeated humankind’s beliefs well into
the twentieth century.
• The concept of the self is a conscious, rational, knowable entity.
• Reality can be studied, analyzed, and known.
• Objective, rational truth can be discovered through science.
• The methodology of science can and does lead to ascertaining truth.
Modernity’s core
characteristics
• The yardstick for measuring truth is reason.
• Truth is demonstrable.
• Progress and optimism are the natural results of valuing science and rationality.
• Language is referential, representing the perceivable world.
Writers and literary theoreticians—New critics, structuralists, and
others—believed that texts possessed some kind of objective
existence and could, therefore, be studied and analyzed, with
appropriate conclusions to follow from such analyses.
Jacques Derrida
• Postmodernism means “after
modernity” or “just after now,” from its
Latin root meaning “just now.”
• There is no such thing as
“objectivereality.”
• Truth are subjective, simply creations
of human minds.
• Truth itself is relative, depending on
the nature and variety of cultural and
social influences in one’s life.
Post-structuralism or post-
modernism
• Beginning in the 1960s
• The voice of the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), the
French cultural historian Michel Foucault (1926-198), the aesthetician
Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998), and the ardent American
pragmatist Richard Rorty (1931-2007) declare unequivocally the death
of objective truth.
• No individual or group can claim it alone understand or possesses
absolute truth.
• Tolerance of each other’s point of view, therefore, becomes the
postmodern maxim.
The post-modernist realizes that no such thing as the meaning—or,
especially, the correct meaning—of an aesthetic text exists.
• A skepticism or rejection of grand metanarratives to explain reality.
• The concept of the self as ever-changing.
• No objective reality, but many subjective interpretations
POSTMODERNISM’S
• Truth as subjective and perspectival, dependent on cultural, social, and
CORE
personal influences.
CHARACTERISTICS
• No “one correct” concept of ultimate reality.
• No metatheory to explain texts or reality.
• No “one correct” interpretation of a text.
Modernity to
modernism
• World War I marks a dramatic shift, especially in the arts. The arts
began to reflect society’s new concerns, emphasizing decay, loss, and
disillusionment.
• The term modernism is given to this aesthetic movement dated from
1914 to 195 that questioned the ideals of British Victorianism.
• Literary artist blurred the established distinctions among the various
genres, rejecting previously established aesthetic theories, choosing
to highlight unconscious or subconscious elements by employing the
psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.
