Edit: preferably in relation to literature, art and cinema, but a handrail overview of the associated values would be cool too
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Modernism was a movement from the early 1900s that was a reaction to how the world had drastically changed since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (mid-1800s). People were starting to see that society wasn’t just a self-correcting thing, and began to notice serious flaws in society–overindulgence, inequality, hypocrisy, treating people as objects, technology replacing personal contact, etc. Artists and writers saw these problems and basically asked, “this is the terrible condition of the modern world, what do we do now?” A big part of modernism was the reaction to the horrors of World War 1–for the first time, people really questioned whether war truly was glorious, whether it was right to send naive young men out to die, and so forth, and they saw and heard firsthand accounts of man’s brutality towards his fellow man. The response was less about glorifying humanity’s excellence and more about trying to preserve what good things we still had left. In contrast to the preceding Victorian era, which was about how people SHOULD act and how to BE good, Modernism examined how they DO act and whether they CAN BE good. Their proposed solutions, however tentative, were to try to figure out the nature of truth and enforce truth in society, to find a way to live that is sustainable and not self-destructive or fake, and to enjoy the few truly good things we have left (quality art, genuine emotion, independent thought, appreciation of beauty) that haven’t been corrupted by society itself. Two of my favorite examples of Modernist authors who really exemplify the movement are Joseph Conrad and T.S. Eliot. In his novel Heart of Darkness, Conrad examines how superficial and hypocritical Western society was at the time, and ponders whether there’s any hope for redemption or whether we’re just as bad as we were before we created the veneer of society to hide things we don’t like from ourselves. Eliot (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land) paints a bleak (though not entirely hopeless) picture of the major flaws he sees in society at large and people in particular, and while he’s not exactly apocalyptic, he considers us pretty close to the brink.
Postmodernism, on the other hand, was/is the movement that started in response to World War 2. After the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, rather than more gloom and doom, there was kind of a paradoxical, almost insane reaction of “well, the world might end any second, why be so serious about it?” Truth was no longer seen as a unified whole, but as a bunch of fragmented, independent smaller truths without a big capital T truth–relativism over objectivity. See Tim O’Brien’s The Things they Carried, a novel in which the author himself says that the events he claims are autobiographical may or may not have happened, and asks whether the truth really matters in the first place. Authors and artists began to play with things that were previously taken very seriously. Look at Salvador Dali’s absurdist realism and Jackson Pollock’s experiments to see how far you can go with art and still be able to call it art. The prevailing emotion was no longer apprehension and resignation about the future, but rather “irony” and “sarcasm,” which don’t exactly play out according to the strict dictionary definitions of those words, but nevertheless are the hallmarks of Postmodernism. Playfulness and rebellion against tradition and propriety were the new norm. Some people say we’re still in the Postmodern era, while others think there are other labels that fit some new trends (Hypermodernism, post-Postmodernism, “the New Sincerity,” etc.), but I doubt there will be any real consensus for the next decade or two at least.
Source: I took several college courses on both movements as they pertain to literature, and have had an essay published on Conrad and Eliot’s Modernist views of society.
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