Subjectivity as Agony and Exultation

Modernist, Postmodernist, and Beyond?

Modernist writers and artists experienced their subjectivity as separation and alienation: Kafka, Beckett, Musil, Woolf, Joyce. The audience shared with the artist a belief that this alienation or schism was the price we paid to attain a certain kind of reflective self-consciousness. This was understood as something precious, an achievement. We found a …