The Paradox Of Modernity In Brave New World By Berman

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The chapter talks a lot about culture and arts or even how cities were built at that very time. However Berman furnishes a very interesting description. He argues that people all over the world share nowadays a certain mode of vital experience which includes that they deal with themselves and the others and that they have the chance to see which options are given by life without underestimating the dangers. This is how Berman defines the term ‘modernity’. Being modern means to be ready for some happiness, strength and exploration offered by the milieu. But we are also able to go through changes or see the world transforming itself. At the same time, there exists always the risk of losing what we possess, being damaged or having destroyed our …show more content…

Nevertheless there is a paradox because it seems that there is a disunity inside of the unity, all the people are put in a vortex where fragmentation, restoration, struggle, inconsistency, fear and equivocality is a daily occurrence. Bergman cites Marx who claimed that ‘to be modern is to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air’. (p.11) The text mentions that modernity is said to be rather disrespectful towards the own past while letting apart the one of the slightest pre-modern social regime. Furthermore, modernity implicates a violent disruption with the former historical conditions and it can be seen as a procedure with internal splits and fragmentation and it seems to crumble within itself. Habermas suggests that the expression ‘modern’ has a far more older history than one might think first. He refers to a ‘project of modernity’ which came up in the eighteenth century (p.12). Language and seeking to show the eternal truth has always been a concern of modernism. Everything what the person wished to attain is down to a improvement in language and in means of illustration (p.20, …show more content…

It should help to better comprehend a statement, posed already in 1984 by Andreas Huyssen. He trod more warily and states inter alia that there is cultural shift which arises slowly but surely in Western civilisations and in which context the expression ‘post-modern’ is fully advisable for the time being (p.39). Moreover, this chapter points to McHale, who came up in 1987 with the fact that the postmodern novel shows a clear move from an ‘epistemological’ principal to one that is rather ‘ontological’. This implies a change from the perspectivism, in which the modernist could find himself in a sense better in a delicate, yet unique reality. Light was shed on how the diverse truths are able to exist at the same time or strike each other. One should highlight that the postmodernist protagonists frequently have a hard time to differ in which world they stand in and how they should behave while esteeming it. In the novel ‘The book of Illusions’ we also come across this instance when observing the development of the characters. Jorge Luis Borges, an author which also influenced Paul Auster, lets one of his characters ask the question: ‘Who was I? Today’s self, bewildered, yesterday’s, forgotten; tomorrow’s, unpredictable? (p.41). Then the text claims that one might have obviated the modernist perceptions, without having a structure of thought present in order to supersede them. There is also a

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