Index

The Book

A Bit of Barthes

Modernism

Postmodernism

Decentred

Author Options

Hypertechniques

Bibliography

The term modernism refers to the radical shift in aesthetic and cultural sensibilities evident in the art and literature of the post-World War One period. The ordered, stable and inherently meaningful world view of the nineteenth century could not, wrote T.S. Eliot, accord with "the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history". "Modernism thus marks a distinctive break with Victorian bourgeois morality; rejecting nineteenth-century optimism, they presented a profoundly pessimistic picture of a culture in disarray. This despair often results in an apparent apathy and moral relativism. In literature, the movement is associated with the works of Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound.

In their attempt to throw off the aesthetic burden of the realist novel, these writers introduced a variety of literary tactics and devices: The radical disruption of linear flow of narrative; the frustration of conventional expectations concerning unity and coherence of plot and character and the cause and effect development thereof; the deployment of ironic and ambiguous juxtapositions to call into question the moral and philosophical meaning of literary action. Recognizing the failure of language to ever fully communicate meaning the modernists generally downplayed content in favour of an investigation of formand as a result is often criticised for abandoning the social world in favour of its narcissistic interest in language and its processes.

It could be argued that the achievements of the Modernists have made little impact on the practices of reading and writing as those terms and activities are generally understood. Hypertext fiction also promotes similar "high art" literary aspirations. With its reliance on expensive technology and its interest in re-thinking the linear nature of The Book, hypertext fiction may find itself accused of the same elitism as its modernist predecessors. On the most basic level it first must contend with problems associated with it's dependence on the screen, which many readers insist is unsuitable for reading large amounts of text.

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