Postmodernism was a movement which took place in the Arts from the 1930's to 1980's, which sought not just to act as a continuation of modernism, but to attempt to reform its modes, which had themselves become conventional, as well as breaking away from elite high art to forms of mass culture, such as television, advertising, cartoons, and popular music. .
Western morale was threatened by the world-wide economic crisis and political division of the 1930's this was later exacerbated by the experiences of Nazi totalitarianism, mass extermination, and the threat of the atomic bomb. In 1984, Orwell depicted society's fear of a totalitarian regime, as a mass consumer culture and centralised economy developed in the post-war period. There was a rejection of old ideals such as Marxism, Freudianism, and the Enlightenment Project. .
The literature of the period by authors such as Pynchon, Barthes, and Nabokov blended genres so as to avoid traditional classification, and the movement was also seen in Warhol's pop art, the musical compositions of John Cage, and the films of Jean-Luc Godard. .
The value of the term is debated; some welcome it as a liberation from the hierarchy of high and low cultures, while sceptics see it as mindlessly glamorising consumer capitalism and its moral vacuity. .
In no more than 1300 words, debate the relative strengths and weaknesses of Freudian and psychoanalytic perspectives, and feminist and gender studies as approaches towards Sons and Lovers. .
Psychoanalytical and feminist approaches are two relatively recent critical responses towards literary texts. When applied to D. H. Lawrence's Son's and Lovers, both can be insightful yet problematic at the same time. .
The theories of psychoanalysis, primarily identified with Sigmund Freud, can be applied to imaginative literature and art in general, in order to study their manifest and latent content, in the same way as Freud studied dreams.
