Yeats's High Modernism and Disney's Postmodernism: A Contrast in Ideal Worlds

Abstract

Students often have difficulty understanding the significant differences between modernism and postmodernism, especially because neither of those terms has a fixed definition and because in many ways postmodernism carries out important aspects of the modernist agenda. However, a comparison/contrast between William Butler Yeats's Byzantium in Sailing to Byzantium' and Byzantium2 and the Disney Corporation's Magic Kingdom at Disney World in the 1990s illustrates some of the most telling differences between the high modernism of the first three decades of the twentieth century and the postmodernism of the past ten to twenty-five years. Moreover, an analysis of the Magic Kingdom can speak directly to many students' personal experiences and provoke them to apply academic skills to their own lives. In this way both the literature and the academic analysis will become more relevant and compelling for students. Inspired by Walt Disney, the Disney Corporation built the Magic Kingdom during the era of consumer capitalism in order to make a profit and to entertain its customers by recreating aspects of history, especially the American past, and by inciting wonder and stimulating imaginations. Yeats was more personally and aesthetically motivated. Writing during the heyday of heavy industry, Yeats dealt with such characteristically modernist themes as alienation and the problems of integrating artistic expression and individual, spiritual fulfillment into what he perceived to be a highly materialistic, depersonalizing society in which the arts were marginalized from the mainstream of communal activity. Therefore, in his poetry he idealizes the Byzantine Empire under the Emperor Justinian, who flourished during the early sixth century A.D. Yeats wrote in his autobiographical work, A Vision,