Communication, Modernity & History

Author Name

May 24 , 2010

Modernity and Literature

Introduction

Modernity by itself is a very abstract concept which can be associated with all new experiences in history . It is largely temporal because what is modern today is the old or obsolete tomorrow . Modernity is said to be a logic of negation because it tends to give importance to the present over the past , and at the same time also frowns over the present with respect to the future

From a purely historical perspective however , the society which evolved in

Europe after the French Revolution of 1789 can be termed as modern in so much so that there is a marked difference or break in the way of thinking , living and enterprise between the societies after and before the French Revolution . The evolution of the modern society was not a process that happened overnight . The roots of the modern society and its gradual evolution can be traced back to the beginning of the eighteenth century . In fact the period from that point in history to the French Revolution is termed as the period of intellectual Enlightenment when there was a radical change in philosophy , science , politics , arts and culture . It was on these new forms of knowledge that the foundation of the modern society or modernity was based

Defining the Traditional

Many scholars have tried to analyze the basic or instinctive nature of human beings in attempts to track back how modernity could have affected the core individual . In his book...