Postmodernism Summary and Analysis

Modernism dominates art and culture through the first part of the twentieth century until postmodernism develops in the 1980s. Modernism originates in Vienna to counter the structuralism in painting, music, literature and architecture and spreads to all of Europe and England. Modernist trends appear in painting styles like Cubism and Surrealism. A key element of modernism rejects fundamentals for abstraction. For example, the use of pitched roofs, wood and domes is replaced architecturally with simple geometrical forms of glass and concrete. Writers like T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf represent modernism in literature from 1910 to 1930. Five features of modernist writing includes an emphasis on how rather than what is seen, trends away from objectivity, the tendency towards mixing poetry and prose in a work, and the fragmentary forms and reflexivity about nature, status and role of poems, drama and...