علی حسن پور دربندی

Modernism is one of the most significant and informative books written in the field of literary theory and criticism. It is an easy-access, wide-ranging and efficient book that tries to explore different aspects of Modernism and its neighboring concepts. Despite its limited space, it has fully rendered the humongous burden of Modernism and demonstrating its various aspects. The book comprises an introduction and three main chapters. It starts off with a set of definitions for Romance, Realism, Modernism, and Postmodernism. Childs endeavors to approach the discussion in a comparative light, particularly the comparison between Modernism and Postmodernism in the introduction. The book is more concerned with the close analysis of movements in contexts and literary works rather than entangling with pure abstract definitions. The discussion about Modernism is accompanied by adjacent movements such as Postmodernism and Realism and marginalized points are included as well. Instead of coming up with rock-solid definitions, Childs seeks to look for traces of each movement in the other and how these terms are overlapped and intertwined.

The commitment of literature stirred up controversy in the face of European cataclysm of the post-war period. The significance of literature in political spheres fell under suspicion. It came to be looked at as a passive, impractical activity that could not express the horrors of W WII. Jean-Paul Sartre, the leading literary figure of existentialism in France, faced with such criticisms, decided to investigate the role of the writer and the reader, and endeavored to open a gateway for writers to participate in their societies actively. This study is concerned with the first three chapters of the monograph including “What is Writing?,” “Why Does One Write?,” and “For Whom Does One Write?” The present analysis does not address Sartre’s Existential philosophy per se; however, it briefly examines the roots of Sartre’s conception of literature in continental philosophy and the critical responses to his work from the perspectives of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Theodor W. Adorno. This paper endeavors to give a clear insight into Sartre’s idea of commitment and the freedom of the writer, and what he introduced as “human right literature” as an antithesis to both Marxism and Capitalism.