The Modern Transcendent Moment and Postmodern Perpetual Present: A Passage from the Sublime to the Mundane

Abstract: Modernists T. S. Eliot's and W. B. Yeats's treatment of the transcendent moment, and postmodernists Samuel Beckett's and Graham Swift's handling of the perpetual present form two conflicting time worlds. The modernists' transcendent moment signifies a temporary release from the progressive stream of time. As a sudden flash of awareness, it offers a transcendental vision of reality. Contrariwise, the postmodernists' perpetual present is cut off from the past as well as the future, suggesting the infinite time of the middle. It is dissociated from a transcendent reality and has no room for revelatory moments, which establishes its bleak character.