Modernism is a bourgeois literary trend popular in European and American literary circles in this century. It is also a reflection of the social, spiritual and artistic crises in the contemporary Western world in the field of literature and art. It originates from the French Moderne and has the latest, modern and pioneering meaning.
In the early twentieth century, in some large European countries, a number of novel factions emerged in various fields of literature and art, such as abstraction in painting, anti-modalism in music, and Anti-realism, futurism in poetry, stream of consciousness in novels, expressionism in drama, etc. By the 1920s, the social scene gradually converged into the modernist trend of thought, or modernism. Its main characteristics are: it opposes the classical artistic tradition, strives for novelty and unconventionality in terms of subject matter and techniques, and is hysterical and crazy in spirit. What writers strive to explore is not the external objective world, but the author himself. A poor and empty inner world. They reject Balzac-style critical realism, believing it to be dull, monotonous, and mechanical; they admire Austrian pathologist Freud’s psychoanalysis, advocating the description of dreams and people’s subconscious realm, and pursuing the expression of people’s moments in time. Feel the "mysterious kingdom of abstraction". Western scholars generally refer to this kind of literary and artistic thought that advocates anti-realism and advocates writers' arbitrary behavior and crazy self-expression as modernism.
Modernism mainly includes German-centered Expressionism that emerged in the 1920s, Italian-centered Futurism, French-centered Surrealism, and British-centered Stream of Consciousness. Literature; also includes existential literature, absurdist drama, new novel school, "Beat Generation" and "black humor" that emerged from the 1930s to the 1960s, etc. It is generally believed that the British Joyce, the French Proust and the Austrian Jewish writer Kafka who wrote in German are representatives of European and American modernist literature.
Western modernism is the product of capitalism entering the monopoly stage, and also the product of various irrationalist philosophies and social trends of thought.
The collective name for various Western literary and artistic trends since the second half of the 19th century that are different from tradition, aiming to express the spiritual reflection of the profound changes that have taken place in the 20th century;
A theological trend that emerged within the Catholic Church from the 1890s to the early 20th century aimed at reinterpreting Catholic teachings with modern philosophy. In 1977, the American architectural critic Charles Jencks published a book. The title is "The Architectural Language of Postmodernism". In this book, Jencks declared that "modernist architecture is dead." He said clearly:
"Modern architecture died at 3:32 pm on July 15, 1972, in St. Louis, Missouri, USA... Fortunately, we can accurately determine the death date of modernist architecture. , it died after a violent blow. Many people did not notice this incident, and no one mourned it, but this does not mean that the theory of its sudden death is untrue."
Jenks. This strange remark refers to the fact that the high-rise apartments for blacks in St. Louis that Yamasaki designed in his early years were systematically bombed that day. Those apartment buildings were cleared as unsafe because of frequent violence. This was originally a matter of social security, but Jencks attributed it to a mistake in modernist architecture. The fact is that in 1951, the design of those apartments won an award from the American Institute of Architects.
Despite this, for a while, the theory of the death of modernist architecture became widespread. In the same year that Jenks published his book, another American, Blake, published a book that claimed to be an "indictment" against modernist architecture, titled "The Failure of Form Follows—Why Modernism Doesn't Work."
In 1979, the American "Time" magazine also got involved. There was a special article in the January 9th issue that said, "The 1970s was the age of the death of modern architecture. Its base was in the United States. In this hospitable land, the dreams of the pioneers of modern art and modern architecture were quietly buried. ”
Prior to this, people have noticed the emergence of architectural trends that are different from modernist architecture in the field of world architecture. Some people call it “non-modernist architecture” and “anti-modernist architecture”. Etc., but there is no consistent name. After James's book came out, the name "postmodern architecture" became a common term.
But the understanding of postmodern architecture is very divided. American architectural critic Huxtable said in his lecture "Modern Architecture in Hesitation" (1980): "Under the banner of postmodernity, people from different factions (which are not without friction with each other) gather together. These include the formalists, who turn all architecture into signs or symbols, and the compatibilists, who messily accept all historical and vernacular elements. These different schools are united only because they all believe that modernism is outdated... …
Italian architectural theorist Sevi said: “Postmodernism is actually a hodgepodge. I see two opposite trends.
One is the 'New Academic School', which plagiarizes classicism, but this school does not try to revive the true classical spirit, but just plays around with it... The other trend is to evade all rules and advocate 'do whatever you like' and A mixture of contradictory things. "
Both of the above-mentioned critics objected that modernism was dead. Huxtable said: "I think it is alive and well. "Sevey also said: "Modernist architecture is not dead... The fundamental reason is that Americans want to get rid of the influence of European culture.
Jencks later admitted that his statement that modern architecture "died in 1972" was to "add a bit of drama", but persisted. By 1983, he finally admitted that modernism It is unrealistic to say that architecture is dead.
Of course, modernist architecture, which was formed in the early 20th century, will not remain unchanged in the past sixty or seventy years, and there have been great changes in all aspects of the world, including architecture. It will also change with the times. However, the so-called postmodern architecture, as a creative trend, regardless of which school it belongs to, is mainly concerned with architectural image and architectural artistic style, and basically does not involve the function, technology, and economic aspects of architecture.
From a historical perspective, the so-called postmodernism should actually be regarded as an aesthetic and formal expansion, modification, variant, or one of the modernist architectures. School, that is, "postmodernist school", but for the sake of simplicity, we still use the name postmodernist architecture.
The author of this book believes that Jencks is strengthening the momentum of postmodernist architecture. He made great contributions and was an advocate. However, Venturi was extremely modest and never admitted that he had made this contribution. The idea was proposed as early as 1940 by an architecture professor at Princeton University. He was only associated with the postmodern architectural trend because he wrote two books. He said that he was an architect engaged in design. . At that time, he only wrote books because he had few design tasks.
In a talk in 1980, he said that modernism was great in the period when it was produced, and postmodernism was great. Architecture evolved out of modernist architecture. "It's easy to blame something from that period, it's become fashionable now," he said. One should not discount one movement in order to build another movement... In a sense, I think we ourselves are part of modernism, part of the development from it. ”
The survival soil of modernism is the industrial society for the purpose of commodity production, while postmodernism takes the post-industrial society as the background of the times.
Post-industrial society is an American sociologist A term coined by D. Bell. He used it in "The Coming of Post-Industrial Society" to describe the new social structure produced in industrialized society in the second half of the 20th century. He believed that this structure would lead to the emergence of the United States, Japan, the Soviet Union, and Western Europe in the 21st century. A new social form has emerged in the century.
So, can we conclude that post-industrial society only exists in capitalist countries?
Let us continue to pay attention to what Bell calls post-industrial society. The "axis principle" of "The central position of theoretical knowledge is the root of social innovation and policy formation". From an economic perspective, its sign is the change from a commodity production economy to a service economy; from a professional perspective, the professional and technical class. In terms of decision-making, it is to create new "knowledge technology", and these are precisely some of the important characteristics of China's current social development. Perhaps we can explain this: due to technological changes, Marxists are. The role given to the working class as the historical agent of social change has been replaced, and this replacement is as irreversible as historical development. Post-industrial society is bound to come.
Post-industrial society is a post-modernist culture. With the drastic changes in history, people will inevitably become tired of, doubtful, and even ridiculed by the old ideologies and values. They no longer believe that they are responsible for the development of society, and would rather leave their personal lives to randomness and chaos. In the state of order, the center becomes plural, eternity becomes change, absolute becomes relative, and the whole becomes fragmented... Postmodernism is not just a Western cultural phenomenon, its impact on us is inevitable.
< p>Faced with the oncoming "postmodern" trend, we need to have a deep understanding of its cultural characteristicsAmerican scholar Professor Frederick Jameson wrote in "Postmodernism and Culture." "Theory" summarizes the four basic aesthetic characteristics of postmodernist literature and art:
1. The disappearance of the subject. In the postmodern cultural atmosphere, traditional values ??and hierarchies have been reversed. Personality and style are completely eliminated, and the subject becomes some kind of broken illusion.
2. The theme of modernist art is the pursuit of utopian ideals and the expression of ultimate truth. Socialist art abandons the deep model of the work itself, no longer has thoughts, no longer provides explanations, refuses to explore any meaning, and only pursues the pleasure of language.
3. The sense of history is always in memory. Things, and memories always carry the feelings and experiences of the memory subject.
Modernist art is obsessed with historical consciousness because of its pursuit of depth, while in postmodernist art, history simply means nostalgia, and it appears in an image that caters to commercial purposes.
4． Distance disappears. From the perspective of modernist art, distance is not only the boundary between art and life, but also the boundary between the creative subject and the object. It is a conscious control method that allows readers to think about the work. In postmodern art, due to the disappearance of the subject, the work loses its depth and sense of history. It only has the stimulating effect on people's senses, but does not have any enlightening and exciting functions. In other words, it only emphasizes the desire itself.
It should be noted that due to political and cultural reasons, the impact of postmodernism on Eastern culture is more of a conceptual inspiration.
In literature, postmodern culture, as a narrative discourse and style, is characterized by no choice of techniques, no central meaning, and no complete structure. The narrative process is divergent, and the center of meaning is dissolved and diverged. to the margins of the text.
Affected by it, we have not only new realistic novels represented by Sun Ganlu, but also consumer literature and its representative "Wang Shuo phenomenon".
Looking at it now, it is still too early to tell whether postmodernism can become the mainstream of Eastern culture, but it should be noted that the complete elimination of spiritual indicators and existential dimensions and the dissolution of historical consciousness have gradually become a trend. A fashion.