Mid & Later 20th Century Trends

  
 

English 104 - Introduction to Literature: Fiction, Fall 2003
Cora Agatucci, Humanities Dept., Central Oregon Community College

 

World War II (1939-1945)

World War I was not "war to end all wars": tensions brew in 1920s-1930s and finally erupt in "World War II":
  • world economic conflicts & competition among European and U.S. colonial powers
  • world-wide depression devastates the world by the early 1930s
  • rise of dictators  & ultra-nationalism: Fascist leaders (Hitler, Mussolini, Franco) vow to reverse decline of West and preserve "pure" European culture; these "Axis" powers will ultimately include imperialistic Japan (which began invasion and conquest of Eastern Asia in the later 1930s)
  • Western "democracies" try to "appease" (e.g. UK's Neville Chamberlain) or ignore (e.g. "isolationalist" U.S.A.) or manipulate for its own purposes (e.g. Stalin's totalitarian U.S.S.R.) Hitler's German Fascist power in the late 1930s (in the case of the U.S. until late 1941, when Axis ally Japan bombed Pearl Harbor).

Unprecedented scale of world conflict & devastation - a nightmare of suffering and devastation
Science, technology, industrialism [the elements of "Progress"] used for mass murder:
  • Aerial bombing & unprecedented civilian casualties
  • Genocide in the Death Camps
  • Atomic bomb (Hiroshima, Nagasaki): power to bring on apocalypse

The Aftermath: Post-WWII Responses

WW II politically defines world powers for the next 40 years - The "Cold War" ensues . . .
United Nations formed to prevent future world wars and re-build hope for future (and in the early 21st century we are better placed to judged just how successful this attempt has been - ?!!?)

WW II presents another radical crisis of faith in Western "enlightened" notions of progress, human reason, science, and education; profound moral and spiritual questions are raised regarding religious faith, human capacity for evil and the triumph of the "dark side":
 e.g. Where was God - not to mention human justice and goodness - . . . when the Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews and 2 million more people deemed "undesirable" ?  . . . when Japanese soldiers committed the massacre at Nanking, China?  . . . when the U.S.A. interned and stole the property of thousands of loyal Japanese-American citizens? . . . when the U.S.A. dropped atomic bombs on Japanese civilians of Nagasaki and Hiroshima?

Global Guilt: the passive immorality of whole people and nations who stood by and did nothing, or of those who didn't do enough, or of those who managed to survive while so many others perished.

Art in Crisis

Failure of the imagination before the unthinkable, and loss of reasons to go on living & make sense of the senseless horrors.

Building upon Literature of the Absurd (Franz Kafka’s heirs: i.e. the "real" is surreal and absurd!), comes
Existentialism (e.g. Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus): human condition = absurd, senseless, useless;
we are isolated beings cast into alien universe without truth, value, meaning; therefore, we must accept a new kind of radical responsibility for our being, existence - and enact this responsibility in art.

Artistic crisis and autonomy:
Heated debate: What kind of art, literature is viable, equal to the profound issues raised by WWII--its crises, disasters, horrors? What can art legitimately say or do in the face of such inhumanity and destruction?  Art must break from the past, its cultural traditions, & a world that’s lost all sense of justice, meaning, morality . . .
Can literature and other arts somehow help restore humanistic values in a post-World War II global society?
"Art Engage" is advocated by existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre:  a new authenticity of form and feeling is essential now (vs. Romantic sublime egotism and Art for Art's Sake = frivolous and irresponsible).

Survivor guilt & "inner emigration" (Hannah Arendt) - betrayal and withdrawal, forgetting & remembering.
Only years later do survivor "Eye Witnesses" begin to bear witness and testify to the unthinkable horrors of war.  E.g. Elie Wiesel takes "vow of silence" in 1945; then finally breaks his silence with Night, in 1960, and Legends of Our Time, 1968: Wiesel rejects fiction for confessional memoir, autobiography - acts of memory with truth value - authentic -  Obligation to the dead:  DO NOT FORGET!!

"Post-Modern" [a disputed concept, by the way]
 Metafiction: departs from traditions of Realism, Romanticism, & Modernism
      "The term postmodernism is sometimes applied to the literature and art after World War II (1939-45), when the effects on Western morale of the first war were greatly exacerbated by the experience of Nazi totalitarianism and mass extermination, the threat of total destruction by the atomic bomb, progressive devastation of the natural environment, and the ominous fact of overpopulation.  Postmodernism involves not only a continuation, sometimes carried to an extreme, of the countertraditional experiments of modernism, but also diverse attempts to break away from modernist forms which had, inevitably, become in their turn conventional, as well as to overthrow the elitism of modernist "high art" by recourse to the models of "mass culture" in film, television, newspaper cartoons, and popular music.  Many of the works of postmodern literature . . . so blend literary genres, cultural and stylistic levels, the serious and the playful, that they resist classification according to traditional literary rubrics" (120).

Source:  Abrams, M. H. "Modernism and Postmodernism."  A Glossary of Literary Terms.  6th ed.  Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1993.  118-121.

On Post-Modernism

Debates about Postmodernism have developed over the last four decades of the 20th-century, and continue today.  Some critics dispute whether mid- and later 20th-century Western and world arts (including literature) have ever really moved so definitively beyond, as to constitute a break from, the influence of Modernism.  Most Postmodern artistic practices are not new, but can be traced back to those of Modernists, as well as pre-Modernists.

Originating in late-1940s discussions of architecture, "postmodernism" was first used by literary critics in the 1960s to distinguish post-World War II fiction from the classics of high modernism (McGowan 585).  New writers of this fiction

bulletseemed lacking in the "high seriousness" of Modernist writers (e.g. Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Franz Kafka); the refusal to be serious expresses itself through "parody, play, black humour and wit"; through fragmentation that challenges "traditional notions of narrative coherence" (Lye);

bulletseemed contemptuous of "the well-made, unified literary work," valuing "heterogeneity" over unity--and promoting experimental anarchy and playful, self-reflexive language games (McGowan 585); 

bulletseemed addicted "to popular culture"--e.g. rock music & street arts--"ignor[ing] the old distinctions between high and low art"; this "post-modern populism opened the door to heterogeneous voices, mixed genres, and other breaches of decorum" (McGowan 585-586).  Postmodern artists construct their art out of the images and modes of popular culture, trying to manipulate them without being dominated by them (McGowan 586).  Put another way, postmodernists "attempt to integrate art and life" by integrating "popular forms, popular culture, everyday reality" (Lye).
[vs. Modernist writers who insisted on distinguishing their high art from popular culture, often cast themselves as heroically alienated from "the sordid daily concerns of bourgeois, commercial culture," and exalted the purity of individual imagination as the key creative source (McGowan 585, 586); or, another way to put it, Modernists attempted to create "a 'special world' for art, deliberately cut off from the variety and everydayness of life" (Lye).

Prof. John Lye adds these characteristics of "Post-Modernist Literature":

bullet"responses to such things as a world lived under nuclear threat and threat to the geosphere, to a world of faster communication, mass mediated reality, greater diversity of cultures and mores and a consequent pluralism";

bulletacknowledging and sometimes contesting "a world in which, under a spreading technological capitalism, all things are commodified and fetishized (made the object of desire), and in which genuine experience has been replaced by simulation and spectacle";

bullet"resultant senses of [reality as] fragmentation, of discontinuity"; "a sense of discontinuity, of the world as a field of contesting explanations none of which can claim any authority";  "a sense of life lived in a world with . . . nothing to guarantee . . . our being as meaningful moral creatures.  Life just is.  We no longer look for a pattern";

bullet"the writing of reflexive or meta-fiction: fiction which is  . . . aware of itself as fiction and which may dramatize the false or constructed nature of fiction, on the one hand, or the inevitable fictionality of all experience, on the other";

bullet"the challenging of borders and limits, including those of decency," and those "between fiction and non-fiction, between literary genres, between high and low culture"; postmodernists take "transgression" to the limits, necessarily violating "what appear to be standards of sense and decency but are (if the truth were known) methods of social and imaginative control";

bullet"the exploration of the marginalized aspects of life and . . . of society";

The populism of postmodernism has stimulated Western "interest in non-Western voices that offer different perspectives on the West's image of itself and its past" (McGowan 587), as well as in the voices and perspectives of U.S. "minorities"--i.e. multiculturalism.

"At the very least, postmodernism highlights the multiplication of voices, questions, and conflicts that has shattered what once seemed to be (although it never really was) the placid unanimity of the [so-called] great tradition and the West that gloried in it" (McGowan 587).

Many 20th-century world writers (variously categorized as "Third World," "colonial" and "post-colonial,"  "minority," U.S. "multicultural") have adapted ("appropriated") Western genres, and especially elements of Western literary Realism, to serve their own literary, cultural, and socio-political  purposes.  And many of these authors write and publish in regionalized/ethnicized European languages (e.g. African English, Columbian Spanish), which may, indeed, be their first languages (as a result of Western colonization and cultural imperialism, including imposed Western-centric education).  

Work Cited

Lye, John (Prof. of English). "Some Attributes of Post-Modernist Literature."   English 2F55: Modern Fiction.  16 Nov. 1999.  Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. 
Available: http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/2F55/post-mod-atrib.html [last accessed: 25 Nov. 2001].

McGowan, John.  "Postmodernism."  The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism.  Ed. Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth.  Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1994.  585-587.

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