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name the era - emphasized powers of the mind, works were steeped in irony, stresses need to think logically
enlightenment era
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Enlightenment works from this semester
- Swift, "A Modest Proposal"
- Voltaire, "Candide"
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name the era - emphasized Nature & Emotion (opposite of Enlightenment Era)
Romantic era
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Romantic Era works from this semester
- Goethe's "Faust"
- Douglass's -Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (classified as an autobiographical documentary)
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emphasized detachment of author and scientific thought - nature vs nurture is a common theme
Realism & Naturalism
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Realism & Naturalism Work(s) from this semester
Machado, "Rod of Justice"
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what is Modernism
authors stressed being new, wanted "new ways of saying" detachment of author
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Modernism works from this semester
- Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis"
- Tadeusz Borowski's - "This Way for the Gas"
- Nawal El Saadawi 's "In Camera"
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Authors stress being new; usually claim
to have achieved a more accurate representation for reality and a
better understanding of human condition
Modernism
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Modernism --Influences on early writers
- 1. WWI
- 2. Great Depression
- 3. WWII
- 4. Overthrow of monarchies
- 5. Technological advancement
- 6. Racism
- 7. Sexism
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Modernism literary responses
- 1. Stereotypes challenged; cultural parochialism (belief that there is only one correct view of the world) is attacked
- 2. Romantic notions attacked
- 3. Authority challenged -- women elevated, individual elevated above society, human values are questioned
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Modernism: Scientific Rationalism
- Beliefs:
- 1. we would soon master all secrets of universe
- 2. world is machine (Enlightenment idea) whose parts could be named and seen to funciton
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Modernism: Scientific Rationalism -- Nietzsche
- Philosophic reactions:
- German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (d. 1900) --focused on
- individual, not society, and admired only superhero who refused to be
- bound by prevailing socil paradigms of nationalism, christianity, faith
- in science, loyalty to the state, or bourgeois civilized comfort
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Modernism: Scientific Rationalism --Freud
- Philosophic Reactions:
- Sigmund Freud (d. 1939)
- Focused on the way everyday, rational behavior is shaped by unconscious impulses and hidden motivations
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Modernism: Scientific Rationalism -- Jung
- Philosophic Reactions:
- Carl Gustave Jung (d. 1961)
- Focused on common experience, the collective unconscious that all
- humanity shared -- a buried level of universal experience tapped by
- myth, religion, and art
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Modernism: Scientific Rationalism -- Literary Reactions
Exploits patterns of language to the limit of comprehensibility
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Modernism: Scientific Rationalism -- Literary Reactions
- Words and word-fragments combine to
- stress patterns of surface relationships --- Game theory: leads to a a
- view of all language as an endless networking of associations;
- communication and value judgment are impossible; leads to rereading
- because of many dimensions of meaning
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Modernism: Scientific Rationalism -- Literary Reactions
- Theater of the Absurd; humans are
- thrown into the world without any understanding of their fate, into
- absurd conditions -- a kind of existentialism
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Modernism: Embraces other "isms" of the century
- By definition refers to group of
- Anglo-American writers who favored clear, precise images and common
- speech and thought of the work as an art object produced by consummate
- craft rather than as a statement of emotion
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Modernism: Embraces other "isms" of the century
- An attempt to use language in a new
- way, to reconstruct world of art much as philosophers and scientists had
- redefined the world in their own disciplines
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Modernism: Embraces other "isms" of the century
Shifting and contradictory appearances to suggest shifting and uncertain nature of reality
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Modernism: Embraces other "isms" of the century
- Broke up the logically developing plot
- typical of the 19th century novel and offered unexpected connections or
- sudden changes of perspective
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Modernism: Embraces other "isms" of the century
Drew attention to style instead of trying to make it transparent
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Modernism: Embraces other "isms" of the century
Blended fantasy with reality
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Modernism: Embraces other "isms" of the century
Raised age-old questions of human identity in terms of contemporary philosophy and psychology
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Modernism: Varieties
Expressionism
- refuses the direct representation of
- reality or even impressions of it in favor of expression of an inner
- vision, emotion, or spiritual reality: subordinates conventional style
- to let emotion dictate the structure of the work (results in broken
- syntax, distorted imagery)
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Modernism: Varieties
dadaism
- Dadaism: a disgust for traditional
- middle-class values of patriotism, religion, morality, and rationalism;
- brings about a revolution of the mind, attacks mind and emotions to
- liberate the creative imagination
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Modernism: Varieties
Surrealism:
- a means of expressing the actual
- functioning of thought, the total recuperation of our psychic force by a
- descent into ourselves; encourages automatic writing (free writing) and
- creation of startling images to show relationships not to be discovered
- by the logical mind
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Like writers of early 20th century, later writers propose their own even more "accurate" representations of reality, exploit different subject matter, reach out to new audiences and explore different ways of relating to their readers
Modernism: Reality
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Great range of styles: from fragmented visions of society, from magical realism to medically accurate depictions of death
Modernism: Reality
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Some writers push to the limits the modernist refusal of positivism as they create works that are structures of ambiguity
1. Some attempt to achieve a "truer" reality by incorporating actual
documents such as personal letters, newspaper clippings, comments, and
drawings in margin
2. Reality termed "jagged" (Ezra pound) and needs to be represented with all its rough edges
Modernism: Reality
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General aim is to avoid creating any sense of completeness or any artificially fixed center in which to anchor our understanding
Postmodernism
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Anonymous character viewpoint
Postmodernism
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Individual characters do not develop a
consistent psychological identity (instead interact in a meaningless
void, reacting moment by moment without regard to past or future)
Postmodernism
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Burdens reader to find meaning in full awareness of reading process
Postmodernism
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Works do not provide aesthetic
completion suggested by term "literature" and thus are often called
"anti-literature", completion regarded as artificial
Postmodernism
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Awareness of cultural heterogeneity as
revealed in multicultural themes and social problems that do not have a
single right answer
Postmodernism
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Pluralism
male and female authors from various backgrounds, social situations, and ethnicities
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