The aim of this paper is to investigate the complex relationship between literature, as an artistic form, and the very notion of modernity. As the literary is often found mingling in the maze of mythology, it also brings about some questions concerning modernity's stance toward tradition. These will be argumentatively developed starting with Plato's first definition of the all-deciding relationship between language and myth. I will then follow the path of the philosophical thematization of literature up to literary modernity, modernism and postmodernism. Finally, I will contextualize the issues of modernity within the broader notion of time and point to the specificity of the Western-Christian understanding of modernity as linked to an always present idea of occasion.