Modernism and Postmodernism Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Modernism and Postmodernism - Research Paper Example The researchers of modernism have always noted a special interest of its members in creating new forms, defiantly opposed to the harmonic forms of classical art, as well as emphasis on the subjectivity of the modernist worldview. The first modernists are the people of the late 19th century raised by the general crisis of European culture. Many of them rejected the methods of social and political radicalism in the change of lifestyle, but they were all ardent supporters of the spiritual revolution, which, in their view, was inevitably born by the crisis of the old world. Spiritual revolution, as a new quality of consciousness and a new concept of life, demanded a new ideological platform. This platform was formulated on the basis of Henri Bergson’s intuitionism, Nietzscheanism, Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, Sigmund Freud’s and Carl Jung’s psychoanalysis, Soren Kierkegaard’s and Martin Heidegger’s existentialism. The works of these authors no t only cemented the ideological platform of modernist art searches in the period, but allowed this artistic school to act retrospectively, capturing the events of preceding culture, and prospectively, leaving the field for experiments in the future (postmodernism). Modernism, fighting for liberation and renewal of forms in art, could not exist without common ties with the history of culture, recognizing in this way the principles of historicism in its own trend: â€Å"the creation of a usable past was a key means of both coming to terms with and keeping at bay the pressures and the alleged chaos of the modern world at the turn of the twentieth century†.... ly confronted with the further development of the qualities generated not by modernism, but by the Romantic era of the French Revolution and radical sentimentalism of Johann Herder and Gotthold Lessing. This, for example, is the emphasis on the place of the individual consciousness in life in the cosmos. However, the romantic individualism of the 18th century and modernist individualism are fundamentally different phenomena. In romanticism the individual was either the owner of all spiritual riches of the universe, or this individual grieved about the unavailability of absolute values and universal ideals not denying the possibility of their existence. Modernists, on the contrary, recognized the insolubility of these issues, came to a denial of the spiritual and moral â€Å"absolutes.† At the same time, they tried to revive the myth-creating method, which, in their opinion, was able to restore the integrity of the organic and human life in a single cosmological system by the m eans of art. The poetry of modernism had a deep sympathy to the ideas of a new, mystical ideas and myth. In the effort to speak the language of new images the symbolists did not reject the traditions of classical poetry, but on the contrary, tried to build a new language based on ancient archaic images. Modernist poets paid a lot of attention to classical mythology (Paul Valery, Thomas Eliot), national folkloric characters (William Yates), ancient esoteric teachings and their modern modifications, like theosophy or anthroposophy (Yates, for example, created his own mystical system). The foundation of the modernist prose was laid by the Austrian writer Franz Kafka. According to him, the whole world order is most tragic and hostile to man, who is powerless and doomed to suffer. Plots of Kafka’s