Postmodernism Doesn't Exist

...or, rather, it's not what I thought it was. This idea has been slowly forming in my mind for the last three weeks. While I was at L'Abri Stefan Lindholm (I think), a worker, gave a talk on the Emerging Church and how it was interacting with postmodernism and he mentioned that postmodernism was just the logical next step to modernism.

However, in my hated Postmodern Poetry class all my professor talks about is how postmodern poetry was created in a reaction to the 'High Modernist' poetic ideals of the first half of the 20th century. Maybe all these small-scale rebellions and reactions are battles in the larger war of Modernism.

Because, as far as I can tell through studying the early part of the century and the beginnings of the modernist movement (which was in reaction to the Victorian/realist era), they had very similar characteristics to whatever is going on now. There was a lot of disjointed thought, self-focus, and an overall sense of futility.

The book I'm reading right now for my 'Cultural and Intellectual History since the Civil War' class is 1919 by John Dos Passos. It's fascinating. Just like the disjointed postmodernist literature he has these little vignettes and interjects little two page almost-poems in between them that are little more than gibberish. The characters all seem lost and ultimately self-centered in their search for meaning or love or something. Sound familiar?