ROLAND BARTHES (1914 – 1980) PART ONE Writing Degree Zero (1953) One of the most interesting facts of the life of Roland Barthes was that he was struck by a laundry van and, after lingering for a month, died of his injuries. “The Painter of Modern...
HAROLD BLOOM AND THE MODERNIST TRADITION Literary Criticism and Close Reading Although Harold Bloom (1930-), from the perspective of the 21st century seems like a historical figure, he was a liminal figure caught between Modernism and Postmodernism. It is one of the...
HAROLD BLOOM (1930 -) The Canon The most prolific upholder of the Modern “canon” is Harold Bloom, the quintessential Modernist holdout surrounded by a sea of Postmodern theorists. However, Bloom, always an interesting and prolific writer, is merely more frank than...
COMPARING MODERNISM AND POSTMODERNISM The comparison of these two time periods was an inevitable result of the desire of Postmodern theorists to critique Modernist theory. But comparison was an early impulse trapped in the very polarities of Modernism that...
POSTMODERNISM Coining the Term “Postmodernism” was a term coined by Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) early in the century to refer to the last quarter of the 19th century, a time where capitalism and imperialism and Western civilization in general began to...
