Modernism is a philosophical, religious, and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new forms of art, philosophy, and social organization which reflected the newly emerging industrial world, including features such as urbanization, architecture, new technologies, and war. Artists attempted to depart from traditional forms of art, which they considered outdated or obsolete. The poet Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make it New" was the touchstone of the movement's approach.
Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse characterized by skepticism toward the "grand narratives" of modernism; rejection of epistemic (scientific) certainty or the stability of meaning; and sensitivity to the role of ideology in maintaining political power. Claims to objectivity are dismissed as naïve realism, with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses. The postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization.
Postmodern art is a body of art movements that sought to contradict some aspects of modernism or some aspects that emerged or developed in its aftermath. In general, movements such as intermedia, installation art, conceptual art and multimedia, particularly involving video are described as postmodern.
Ferit Orhan Pamuk is a Turkish novelist, screenwriter, academic, and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. One of Turkey's most prominent novelists, he has sold over 13 million books in 63 languages, making him the country's best-selling writer.
Mark Naumovich Lipovetsky is a Russian literary, film, and cultural critic who advocates the position that postmodernism is replacing socialist realism as the dominant art movement in Russia. His major interests include 20th century Russian literature, Russian postmodernism, fairy-tales, Mikhail Bakhtin's carnival, and totalitarian and post-communist cultures.
Stephen Michael Erickson is an American novelist. The author of influential works such as Days Between Stations, Tours of the Black Clock and Zeroville, he is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award and a Guggenheim fellowship.
German studies is the field of humanities that researches, documents and disseminates German language and literature in both its historic and present forms. Academic departments of German studies often include classes on German culture, German history, and German politics in addition to the language and literature component. Common German names for the field are Germanistik, Deutsche Philologie, and Deutsche Sprachwissenschaft und Literaturwissenschaft. In English, the terms Germanistics or Germanics are sometimes used, but the subject is more often referred to as German studies, German language and literature, or German philology.
Post-postmodernism is a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture which are emerging from and reacting to postmodernism.
In the visual arts, late modernism encompasses the overall production of most recent art made between the aftermath of World War II and the early years of the 21st century. The terminology often points to similarities between late modernism and post-modernism although there are differences. The predominant term for art produced since the 1950s is contemporary art. Not all art labelled as contemporary art is modernist or post-modern, and the broader term encompasses both artists who continue to work in modern and late modernist traditions, as well as artists who reject modernism for post-modernism or other reasons. Arthur Danto argues explicitly in After the End of Art that contemporaneity was the broader term, and that postmodern objects represent a subsector of the contemporary movement which replaced modernity and modernism, while other notable critics: Hilton Kramer, Robert C. Morgan, Kirk Varnedoe, Jean-François Lyotard and others have argued that postmodern objects are at best relative to modernist works.
Simon E. Gikandi is a Kenyan Literature Professor and Postcolonial scholar. He is the Class of 1943 University Professor of English at Princeton University. He is perhaps best known for his co-editorship of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature. He has also done important work on the modern African novel, and two distinguished African novelists: Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. In 2019 he became the president of the Modern Language Association.
Ackbar Abbas is a professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine. Previously he was chair of comparative literature at the University of Hong Kong and also co-director of the Centre for the Study of Globalization and Cultures.
Rita Felski is an academic and critic, who holds the John Stewart Bryan Professorship of English at the University of Virginia and is a former editor of New Literary History. She is also Niels Bohr Professor at the University of Southern Denmark (2016–2021).
Martin Puchner is a literary critic and philosopher. He studied at Konstanz University, the University of Bologna, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, before receiving his Ph.D. at Harvard University. Until 2009 he held the H. Gordon Garbedian Chair at Columbia University, where he also served as co-chair of the Theater Ph.D. program. He now holds the Byron and Anita Wien Chair of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is the founding director of the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research at Harvard University.
E. Ann Kaplan is an American professor, author, and director. She currently teaches English at the Stony Brook State University of New York, and is the founder and director of The Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University. She coined the term "“Future-Tense Trauma Cinema” for a select group of films, a sub-set of the Science Fiction film, that focus on human and natural causes of complete social collapse instead of, as in standard Sci-Fi, displacing cultural anxieties into allegories of aliens invading planet Earth from elsewhere."" She is also one of the precursors of the Madonna studies.
The 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk "who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures."
Inge D. Halpert was an academic, German professor, Chair of the German Department at Columbia University, and executive editor of The Germanic Review. She was the author of several textbooks for language learning.
Harro Müller is a German literary scholar, Emeritus Professor of Germanic languages at Columbia University, a former Chair of the German department at Columbia (1996-1999), and a former executive editor of The Germanic Review (1996-2002).
André von Gronicka was a Russian-born American literary scholar who taught German at Columbia University (1942–1962) and was Professor and Chair of the German department at the University of Pennsylvania (1962–1980). Gronicka's research focused on modern German literature and the interconnections between Russian and German literature.
