Postmodernism affirms the minor note that emerged in modernist expression--negative, desperate, unfulfilled. This affirmation is a bridge that connects them. Modernism tried and failed to resolve a fundamental conflict. That is, modernism put the residual commitment to a totalistic vision of human experience into conflict with the evidence of fragmentation offered up by the experiences of the twentieth century. It transformed the totalistic vision into new and controversial terms; for example, moderns transmuted the older commitment to a God-centered view into a commitment to the transcendence of the work of art.
The World War I "lost generation" embodied this conflict and transformation in their work. It was not for them, however, to leap out of that battlefield and seize a different resolution. An imaginative leap of that extent was called for by the extremes of meaning and experience that accompanied the change to a modern culture in the West. But modern artists lacked the power to make such a leap: the move from modernist to postmodernist temper was made in steps and stages. The ability to accommodate psychologically the abandonment of a vision rooted in The Enlightenment had to be acquired through trial and error. The postmoderns finally were willing, as their precursors were not, to cut themselves completely away from a commitment to a total view, seriously entertained as representative of the real condition of the world. They thus were the first to choose sides in a contest that started long before they were born.
ESSAY TWO REGRET: reflecting on the origins of the modernist temper.
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