 |
The Concept of Postmodernism
|
Below is one of our free research papers on The Concept of Postmodernism. If the term paper below is not exactly what you're looking for, you can search our essay database for other topics.
UNIVERSIDAD CENTRAL DE VENEZUELA
Facultad de Humanidades y Educación Escuela de Idiomas Modernos Departamento de Inglés Cultura, Temas y Textos 2 2do lapso – 2009-2010 Profesor: Reygar Bernal POSTMODERNISM By ROBERT B.RAY Because in common usage the word ‘modern’ simply means ‘contemporary’, the term ‘postmodernism’ has seemed, from the start, like the vocabulary of science fiction. How, after all, can something which exists now be said to come after the present? The word’s apocalyptic tone, its connotations of nihilistic rejection, issue from this oxymoronic aspect which seems to provide a way of speaking about the impossible. To say ‘I am postmodern’ would be, for most people, something like saying ‘I am asleep’—it can be done, but what does it mean? Of course, the confusion vanishes when we replace ‘modern’ with ‘modernism’ and explain that the latter refers less to historical time than to a specific movement in the arts. Even with this refinement, however, the words ‘postmodern’ and ‘postmodernism’ have not yet lost their fundamental strangeness—a strangeness corresponding perhaps to the radical break with traditional assumptions about meaning which the postmodern situation has effected. As we grow used to the word ‘postmodernism’, we may also get used to its implications. In 1924, two years after the annus mirabilis of Ulysses and The Waste Land, Virginia Woolf suggested that modernism, or at least ‘the modern world’, had begun ‘on or about December 1...
|