Movements
Modernism
Modernism is the totality of artistic movements and the general aesthetic orientation of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century that radically renewed literature, rejecting realist 'verisimilitude' for the sake of seeking new forms to express the complexity of modern consciousness. Modernism inclines toward subjectivism, the symbol, myth, stream of consciousness, fragmentariness, and the destruction of the traditional plot. It encompasses Symbolism, Impressionism, Expressionism, Futurism, and Surrealism. World models are James Joyce's Ulysses, the poetry of T. S. Eliot, and the prose of Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka. In Ukrainian literature Modernism announced itself at the turn of the twentieth century: its aesthetic program was formulated by Mykola Voronyi, the 'Moloda Muza', and the journal Ukrainska Khata; its heights are the poetry of Lesia Ukrainka and the prose of Olha Kobylianska and Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, and later the turbulent flowering of the 1920s.
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Meaning, origins and distinction — side by side.
Distinction
Two epochs of modern art, separated by their attitude to meaning and wholeness. Modernism, disillusioned with realism, still BELIEVES in the possibility of a new, deeper meaning, seeking it in myth, symbol, stream of consciousness and elite form, tragically experiencing the world's disintegration. Postmodernism rejects the very belief in a single truth: irony, play, quotation, pastiche, the mixing of high and mass culture, the erasure of the line between original and copy. Modernism mourns the loss of wholeness; postmodernism plays with its fragments.
