Modernism+vs.+Postmodernism

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
 * || Modernism || Post-Modernism ||
 * Time Period || 1920s-1945 || 1945- ||
 * Major Ideas || * disillusionment
 * innovative writing techniques
 * subjectivity of reality
 * false sense of objectivity || * Social and cultural pluralism, disunity, unclear bases for social/national/ethnic unity.
 * Sense of fragmentation and decentered self; multiple, conflicting identities.
 * Alternative family units, alternatives to middle-class marriage model, multiple identities for couplings and childraising.
 * Subverted order, loss of centralized control, fragmentation.
 * Trust and investment in micropolitics, identity politics, local politics, institutional power struggles.
 * A reaction to rationalism and objectivity of modernism. ||
 * Major Authors and Works || * Thomas Stern Eliot
 * "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
 * W. H. Auden
 * "The Unknown Citizen"
 * William Butler Yeats
 * The Second Coming
 * William Faulkner
 * F. Scott Fitzgerald
 * Ernest Hemingway
 * Langston Hughes
 * Tennesse Williams
 * Virginia Woolf
 * || * Kurt Vonnegut
 * Friedrich Nietzsche
 * Margaret Atwood
 * J.D. Salinger
 * The Catcher in the Rye
 * Ray Bradbury
 * Fahrenheit 451
 * Ayn Rand
 * Atlas Shrugged
 * Joseph Heller
 * Catch-22
 * William Golding
 * Lord of the Flies
 * George Orwell
 * Animal Farm
 * 1984 ||

THE SECOND COMING Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand; A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

A sorrow observer of the world in which he or she lives narrates "The Second Coming" with a tone that implies all hope is lost. The narrrator the general, global sentiments of the world's population in the years postceding World War I. For example, when the narrator says "The falcon cannot hear the falconer;\Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;\Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world," he describes his world in a perverse and disorderly state; miscommunication and disconnectedness separate the beings of his world from one another and nothing is operating even remotely close to the way it was intended to perform. The narrator expresses anxiety over the future, which history tells us that the world's population after World War I was completely justified in worrying about, in the last stanza with his or her personification of the past twenty centuries as twenty infants whose slumber was violently disturbed by war and strife and the introduction of a new era, depicted as a "rough beast."



Sources; http://www.thelearningcurve.net/handouts.html#MODERNISM VS. POSTMODERNISM [] [] [] []