Originality in Modernism and Postmodernism Essay

Originality in Modernism and Postmodernism - Essay ExampleThe essay Originality in Modernism and Postmodernism highlights the phenomenon of originality in modernism and postmodernism. Often, attempting to be original in these schools of lit just results in a sacrifice in meaning and viscidity, and ultimately comes at the expense of the reader. In this essay I wish to argue that originality is scarcely another literary convention which modern writers have now become fixated with. In attempts to produce the most unanticipated and rare piece of work, meaning and coherence become compromised. To show this I will look at T.S. Eliots The Waste Land, John Barths Lost in the Funhouse, and John Bergers G A Novel. In the modernist numbers The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot attempts to break every possible rule of poetic structure, by alternately mixing multiple types of structures and abandoning any type of structure at all. He adds in near-random quotes from various religious texts and literary s ources and switches into German and a few other languages at certain points in the text. The five sections tell seemingly uncorrelated stories about characters who have nothing to do with one another. The reader is supposed to get the overall sense of futility in modern life. As Vicki Mahaffey puts it, it takes place in a shared cultural nightmare a devastated Europe in the wake of the First World War. If the point of the poem is simply to convey a feeling of futility and nihilism, it does that very well. However, any larger plot is lost on readers.