Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf

The western world has gone through many different worldviews for the past few centuries. Each one can be conceptualized as an evolution from previous worldviews or from current events. Realism began shortly after the French revolution and rejected romanticism. While, in the American society, modernism was born from the conflicting feelings regarding the Vietnam war and the growing industrial revolution. From the history of those two worldviews came post-modernism. Through works such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Raising Arizona, and The Leftovers, post-modernism can be understood as a more tolerant worldview that blurred the class lines between high and popular culture and accepted the absurdities of life. Unlike realism and modernism,

It involved ideas that were introduced in the realism worldview such as portraying life as complicated and absurd as it was. It also included ideas that was introduced in modernism. Having taken form during the booming of technology and science, modernists’ rejection of the higher authority did not only shift to themselves but also to what they discovered during their searches. Scientific knowledge began to take the center stage and eventually, it became the absolute truth despite the insistence in rejecting any ideas that claimed to be absolute. As postmodernism evolved, it retained the skepticism of modernism, but it also applied it to scientific knowledge. With those two different backgrounds, post-modernism does not possess a unified doctrine. However, it can be portrayed as a web of various ideas that take roots from skepticism of life while trying to capture life exactly as it

This was the idea that “The text, as really constructed by the reader, was thereby liberated and democratized for the free play of the imagination. Meanings became the property of the interpreter, who was free to play, deconstructively, with them” (35). In the concept of the death of the author, the audience was the main interpreter of the text or film. The ideas of the author no longer matter because it all depended on how the audience perceived the scene. This was where the high culture and the popular culture blended. Authors had been known to use the stories of the common man as a source of inspiration behind their works. Now that their ideas were taken out of the works, people from both cultures were able to see what they wanted to see. With the availability of movie theaters and other forms of art to the common people, the story of the common man was no had the high importance it had during realism. People on both cultures were able to see themselves being represented. Along with the death of the author, history became tangled with the way it had been previously