Essay and Essayism Between Modernism and Postmodernism
Keywords:
literature and philosophy, literary genres, essay, modernism, postmodernism, utopia, particularityAbstract
The article is an attempt to show to what extent the essay, which is situated between philosophy and literature, is an anti-systematic genre open to individual experience and aiming at the particular phenomenon. Although this openness is a feature common to modernist and postmodern essayistic writing, developments in literature and philosophy show that modernist essayism (from Musil to Adorno) contained a utopian dimension which disappears in a postmodern constellation (from Robbe-Grillet and Fowles to Barthes) marked by a one-dimensional view of society. The question concerning an alternative social order is no longer raised in postmodern essayism.References
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