Realism, Modernism, Post-modernism, Part I

~ Clarissa

Reader el asks:

I wondered whether you would like to write about the differences between Victorian, modernist and post-modernist (especially about the last two, which may sound as a Chinese to non-professional) literature, and which one you like best & why.

This is a very interesting question for me. Victorian literature is part of the great European realist tradition that I absolutely love. This is what I read for enjoyment and what I choose every single time I want to have fun reading. Intellectually, I realize how important and beautiful modernism and post-modernism are but I rarely feel actual love for these books.

Modernism fascinates me as an artistic, cultural, and social phenomenon. This is why instead of reading books by modernists, I read many books about modernism. Last night, for example, I stayed up until 3 am because I couldn’t drag myself away from a book titled Lesbian Scandal and the Culture of Modernism (2012). The book is sensational, and I will publish I review when I’m done, by the way. But as for actual modernist artists, I only like very few. Faulkner, for instance. Virginia Woolf bores me. James Joyce is a bane of my existence. Valle Inclan gives me nightmares. I recognize that they are great writers, but I don’t like reading them. I do slightly better with modernist poetry, especially in Russian (Tsvetayeva, Pasternak, Mayakovsky, Mandelshtam).

Among post-modernist writers, I have a few favorites, mostly from Spain and Latin America. Juan Goytisolo, Jose Donoso, Manuel Vilas.

I will write separate posts on my understanding of realism, modernism, and post-modernism because otherwise this post would be interminable. I ask the purists among us to understand that a blog post is not an equivalent of a conference talk or a scholarly volume. I will be simplifying and condensing a lot. Also, I obviously have my own vision of these movements, and it’s perfectly fine to have several competing visions.

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Published by Clarissa

5 thoughts on “Realism, Modernism, Post-modernism, Part I”

  1. I was away for the weekend at Darkovercon, a science fiction/fantasy convention in Timonium MD. There were two author panels that seem somewhat relevant here. One was on whether gender and sexual orientation of characters matters and if so how it plays into a story. The other was on how authors reinvent or ignore religion in a fantasy or future novel, and whether it matters. These panels were at the same time; I chose to go to the religion one. My only regret was that it was only an hour long. But I heard that the sexuality one was also very interesting.

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  3. And big thanks for answering me!

    Another topic I thought of, after recently reading “The Awakening” by Kate Chopin, was the comparison between her and Anna Karenina. You mentioned loving this novel, so I wondered about your take on it.

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    1. This is a very good question in terms of the differences between modernism and realism. Tolstoy is a hard-core realist. Like every good realist, he is extremely controlling, manipulative, and moralizing. (This is why I love realist authors so much, obviously.) Chopin is a realist, too*. However, she is already going in the direction that will eventually bring us to modernism. She is somewhat of a proto-modernist. Her work is more open-ended, less controlling. She doesn’t beat you over the head with her opinions and her worldview like hard-core realists and naturalists (Tolstoy, Galdos, Balzac, Zola, Dreiser) do.

      * I have no idea what the official position on Chopin is. This is just my reading as a semi-non-specialist.

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