Modern Literary Movement
Modern Literary Movements
(My lecture note)
1- ANGRY YOUNG MEN
Angry young men, term applied to a group of English writers of the 1950s whose heroes share certain rebellious and critical attitudes toward society. This phrase, which was originally taken from the title of Leslie Allen Paul's autobiography, Angry Young Man (1951), became current with the production of John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger (1956).
Included among the angry young men were the playwrights John Osborne and Arnold Wesker and the novelists Kingsley Amis, John Braine, John Wain, and Alan Sillitoe.
The works of this movement are often characterized by class conflict, with the protagonists no longer fitting in with the environment from which they originated but also not being accepted by the middle and upper classes where they fit educationally.
On a literary level, these post-war writers tended to avoid the high modernism and internationalism and the apocalyptic and dramatic tone of the war poets, and instead write technically conservative realistic portraits of characters experiencing some form of displacement in social class.
Look Back in Anger by John Osborne fits all these generic characteristics, in terms of both literary technique and theme, especially the protagonist, Jimmy, who is too educated, clever, and creative to be happy with working in a shop, but cannot find work suited to his abilities.
John Osborne - Look Back in Anger
Arnold Wesker
Kingsley Amis
John Braine
John Wain
Alan Sillitoe
2- THEATER OF THE ABSURD
The term 'Theater of the Absurd' is applied to a number of dramatic works which share the view that the human condition is essentially absurd by which is meant a lack of meaning in life.
Absurdist playwrights adhered to the theories of French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus, in particular his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, published in 1942. In this essay, Camus introduced his Philosophy of the Absurd, in which he argues that man's quest for meaning and truth is a futile endeavor; he compares man's struggle to understand the world and the meaning of life to Sisyphus, a famous figure in Greek Mythology condemned to an existence of rolling a heavy stone up a mountain only to watch it roll to the bottom.
The movement flourished in France, Germany, and England, as well as in Scandinavian countries. Several of the founding works of the movement include Jean Genet's The Maids (1947), Eugene Ionesco's The Bald Soprano (1950), Arthur Adamov's Ping-Pong (1955), and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1953). Beckett's death in 1989 is said to mark the close of the movement's popularity.
Minimal setting, repetitive dialogue, the theme of the meaninglessness of life are the hallmarks of the theater of the absurd. It rejects realistic settings, logical reasoning, meaningful dialogues and evolving plot.
In Beckett's Waiting for Godot, for instance, the entire play consists of two characters waiting indefinitely for a so-called individual (Godot) to arrive, and their lack of information about who Godot is and when he will arrive supposedly comments upon human uncertainty about whether or not God exists.
Albert Camus- The Myth of Sisyphus
Jean Genet- The Maids
Eugene Ionesco- The Bald Soprano
Samuel Beckett-Waiting for Godot
3-EPIC THEATER
Epic Theatre is a revolutionary form of drama developed by the Germen playwright Bertold Brecht from the late 1920s under the influence of Erwin Picastor. It rejects the Aristotelian models of dramatic unity in favour of a detached narrative. The purpose of this movement was to emphasize more on the meaning of a play rather than the aesthetics of it.
It presents in a succession of loosely related episodes interspersed with songs and commentary by a chorus or narrator. As a Marxist, Brecht turned against the bourgeois tradition of theatre.
Brecht and his fellow epic theatre artists devised a set of staging and acting techniques meant to teach their audience to criticize the injustices and inequalities of modern life. Two keys to their technique are the notion of "theatricalism" and the concept of the "distancing" or "alienation" effect. The first, theatricalism, simply means the audience aware that they are in a theatre watching a play. He thought that by keeping stage sets simple, showing exposed lighting instruments, breaking the action into open-ended episodes, projecting labels or photographs during scenes, or using a narrator or actors to directly address the audience, a production would allow an audience to maintain the emotional objectivity necessary to learn the truth about their society. The second key to epic theatre, the "distancing" or "alienation" effect in acting style, has these same goals.
The best examples of this drama are Brecht’s plays The Threepenny Opera (1928), Mother Courage (1941), and The Good woman of Setzuan (1943)
4- EXISTENTIALISM
A European philosophical tendency that flourished in the mid-20th century, although partly prefigured in the 19th by Soren Kierkegaard and Friedich Nietzsche, achieving some influence upon English writers in the 1950s and 1960s. It was not a school with an agreed doctrine, but a broad current with divergent atheist and Christian versions.
Existentialism is the theory that humans are free and responsible for their own actions in a world without meaning. It has two divisions: Christian existentialists and Atheistic existentialists. Christian existentialists follow the teachings of the Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard. He says that we human beings must believe in God Almighty and this belief will give meaning to the life in this world and makes us free from all kinds of tension. Atheistic existentialist believes that man is alone in a godless world.
Its fundamental premise, that existence precedes essence, (refer below given note) implies that we as human beings have no given essence or nature but must forge our own values and meanings in an inherently meaningless or absurd world of existence. Jean-Paul Sartre, Simon de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty were the more influential thinkers of this group.
Some of the concerns of French existentialism are echoed in English in Thom Gunn's early collection of poems, The Sense of Movement (1957), and in the fiction of Irish Murdoch and John Fowles.
Soren Kierkegaard
Friedich Nietzsche
Jean-Paul Sartre
Simon de Beauvoir
Albert Camus
Merleau-Ponty
Note: [existence precedes essence:
മനുഷ്യൻ ജീവിക്കുന്നതിനു മുൻപ് അവനെ സംബന്ധിക്കുന്ന യാതൊരു സത്തയുമില്ല; യാതൊരർഥവുമില്ല. മനുഷ്യപ്രകൃതിയെക്കുറിച്ചോ മനുഷ്യൻ എന്തായിത്തീരുമെന്നതിനെക്കുറിച്ചോ മുൻകൂട്ടി ഒന്നും വിധിക്കുക സാധ്യമല്ല. മനുഷ്യൻ ആദ്യം ജീവിക്കുന്നു. പിന്നീട് എന്തെങ്കിലും ആയിത്തീരുന്നു. തന്നെത്താൻ നിർവചിക്കുന്നു. ഇതാണ് 'സത്തയ്ക്കുമുൻപ് അസ്തിത്വം' എന്നതിന്റെ അർഥം. സാർത്രിന്റെ വാദവും ഇതുതന്നെ. ഒരുദാഹരണംകൊണ്ട് സാർത്ര് ഇതു വ്യക്തമാക്കുന്നു. ഒരു കത്രികകൊണ്ടുള്ള പ്രയോജനത്തെപ്പറ്റിയുള്ള ബോധം അതിന്റെ നിർമ്മാണത്തെ സാധ്യമാക്കുന്നു; അതായത് കത്രികയുടെ സത്തയ്ക്ക് അതിന്റെ ഉത്പത്തിക്കു മുൻപുതന്നെ അസ്തിത്വമുണ്ട്. അതുകൊണ്ട് ഇക്കാര്യത്തിൽ അസ്തിത്വത്തിനു മുൻപ് സത്ത എന്നാണ് പറയേണ്ടത്. എന്നാൽ മനുഷ്യരുടെ കാര്യത്തിൽ നേരേ മറിച്ചാണ് ക്രമം. മനുഷ്യൻ എന്താണ്, എങ്ങനെയാണ്, എന്തിനാണ് എന്നൊക്കെ കത്രിക നിർമ്മിക്കുന്നവനെപ്പോലെ ആരും കാലേകൂട്ടി ചിന്തിച്ച് തിട്ടപ്പെടുത്തുന്നില്ല. സ്വയം എന്തായിത്തീരുന്നുവോ അതാണ് മനുഷ്യൻ.]
5-MODERNISM
A general term applied to the wide range experimental trends in the literature of the early 20 the century, including Symbolism, Expressionism, Imagism and Surrealism, along with the innovations of unaffiliated writers. Modernist literature is characterized chiefly by a rejection of 19th century traditions. Ezra pound’s maxim to “Make it new” is a tag word of modernism. The conventions of realism were abandoned by Franz Kafka and other novelists while several poets rejected traditional metres in favour of free verse. Modernist writers disturbed their readers by adopting complex and difficult new forms and styles. In fiction, the accepted continuity of chronological development was upset by Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust and William Faulkner, while James Joyice and Virginia Woolf used the Stream of consciousness technique. In poetry, Ezra pound and T.S. Eliot replaced the logical exposition of thoughts with collages of fragmentary images and complex illusion.
Ezra pound
Franz Kafka
Joseph Conrad
Marcel Proust
William Faulkner
James joyice
Virginia Woolf
Luigi Pirandello
Bertolt Brecht
6-AVANT-GARDE
Avant-garde (a French military metaphor: “advance-guard”) is a small group of artists and authors who deliberately undertake, in Ezra pound’s phrase, to “make it new”. By violating the accepted conventions, they set out to create ever new artistic forms and styles. They tried to introduce hitherto neglected and forbidden subject matter.
One of the key things about being avant-garde in literature is that it is all about breaking the existing rules about writing. James Joyce is one of the biggest exponents of Avant-Garde experimentation in literature.
7-THE MOVEMENT
A term applied since 1954 to a loose group of English poets whose work appeared in the anthology New Lines (1956), edited by Robert Conquest. The Movement poetry is a reaction against the excesses of modernism, and a cultivation of poetry as a disciplined craft. The group included Kingsley Amis, Donald David, D.J. Enright, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin and John Wain.
The poetry of the Movement seeks to establish a direct relationship between the poet and his audience; and that is why it deals with ordinary and common themes in an ordinary and plain style.
Writers:
Robert Conquest
Kingsley Amis
Donald David
D.J. Enright
Thom Gunn
Elizabeth Jennings
Philip Larkin
John Wain
8- SURREALISM
Surrealism is an anti-rational movement of imaginative liberation in European art and literature in the 1920s and 1930s, launched by Andre Breton in his Manifeste du surrealisme (1924). The term surrealiste had been used by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917 to indicate an attempt to reach beyond the limits of the real. Surrealism seeks to break down the boundaries between rationality and irrationality, exploring the resources and revolutionary energies of dreams, hallucinations, and sexual desire. Influenced by the symbolists and by Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious. Although surrealist painting is better known, a significant tradition of surrealist poetry established itself in France, in the work of Breton, Paul Eluard, Lous Aragon, and Benjamin Peret.
9- STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
The term stream of consciousness applies to the continuous flow of thoughts, feelings and memories in the human mind; or a literary method of representing such a blending of mental processes in fictional characters. It was used by William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890) to describe the unbroken flow of thoughts and feeling in the waking mind. The term first used by Scottish philosopher Alexander Bain in the book The Senses and the intellect.
The term is often used as a synonym for interior monologue, but they can also be distinguished, in two ways: in psychological sense and literary sense
In psychological sense, the stream of consciousness is the subject matter while interior monologue is the technique for presenting it.
In literary sense, stream of consciousness is a special style of interior monologue: while an interior monologue always presents a characters thought directly, it does not necessarily mingle them with impressions and perceptions, nor does not violate norms of grammar and logic; but the stream of consciousness technique also does one or both of these things.
Writers and Works:
Dorothy Richardson – Pilgrimage
James Joyce – Ulysses
Virginia Woolf- Mrs. Dalloway
William Faulkner – Sound and Fury
10- IMAGISM
A movement of English and American poets calling themselves Imagists, between 1912 and 1917. Led by Ezra Pound and then by Amy Lowell, the group rejected most 19th century poetry as cloudy verbiage (needless use of many words), and aimed instead at new clarity and exactness in the short lyric poem.
Apart from Pound and Lowell, the group also included Richard Aldington, Hilda Doolittle, F.S Flint, D.H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, and William Carlos Williams.
Imagist poems appeared in the American magazine Poetry and the London journal The Egoist. Pound edited Des Imagistes: An Anthology (1914), while the three further anthologies, all entitled Some Imagist Poets, were edited by Lowell.
Members:
Ezra Pound
Amy Lowell
Richard Aldington
Hilda Doolittle
F.S Flint
D.H. Lawrence
Ford Madox Ford
William Carlos Williams
11- EXPRESSIONISM
Expressionism is a German movement in literature and other arts that existed around the First World War years and was revolt against the artistic and literary tradition of realism, both in subject matter and in style. These artists wanted to paint about emotion. It could be anger, anxiety, fear, or peacefulness. Expressionism was an important factor in the painting, drama, poetry and cinema of German-speaking Europe between 1910 and 1924.
The precursors in painting were Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and the Norwegian Edvard munch. Prominent among the literary precursors of the movement in the nineteenth century were the French poets Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the germen philosopher Friedeich Nietzsche.
It also can be seen in the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and other Beat Writers and in the prose fiction of Samuel Becket, Joseph Heller and Thomas Pynchon.
In English speaking world, expressionist dramatic technique were adopted in some of the plays of Eugene O’Neill and Sean O’Casey , in poetry T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land May be considered in its fragmentary rendering of post-war desolation.
In further sense, the term is sometimes applied to the belief that literary works are essentially expressions of their authors’ moods and thoughts; this has been a dominant assumption about literature since the rice of Romanticism.
Note: To simply understand with help of pictures visit www.ducksters.com- Art history and Artists- Expressionism
12- IMPRESSIONISM
In the literary sense borrowed from French painting, Impressionism is a rather vague term applied to work or passages that concentrate on the description of transitory mental impressions as felt by an observer, rather than on the explanation of their external causes.
In literature, it is found in Symbolist and Imagist poetry, and in much modern verse, but also in many works of prose fiction since the late 19 the century, as in the novel of Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf.
Impressionistic criticism is the kind if criticism that restricts itself to describing the critic’s own subjective response to a literary work, rather than ascribing intrinsic qualities to it in the light of general principles. The most common kind of impressionistic criticism is found in theater and book reviews: I laughed all night; I could not it put it down.
Note: To simply understand with help of pictures visit www.ducksters.com- Art history and Artists- Impressionism
13- P0STMODERNISM
Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from modernist approaches that had previously been dominant. Developed in the second half of the twentieth century, it is largely influenced by a number of events that marked the period. Genocide that occurred during the Second World War, Soviet gulags, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, mass destruction caused by atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, insecurity of Cold War Era, post colonialism issue, as well as the supremacy of multinational corporations and post-industrialism with new technologies, violence, counter culture and consumer culture shaped the perception of new authors.
While postmodernism had a little relevance to poetry and only a limited influence on modern drama (applied only to the Absurd Theatre), it had a huge impact on fiction, especially to the novel. Characterized by an attempt to establish transhistorical or transcultural validity, it claims that search for reality is pointless, as the "real" is conditioned by time, place, race, class, gender, and sexuality. There is no knowledge or experience that is superior or inferior to another.
Literary postmodernism is generally characterized by features such as: a mixing of styles ("high" and "low," for example) in the same text; discontinuity of tone, point of view, register, and logical sequence and literary technique, especially concerning the use of metaphor and symbol. Even though the writers most often associated with postmodernism may deal with serious themes, their work often has absurd, playful, or comic aspects, and sometimes makes special use of parody and pastiche and of references to other texts and artifacts.
Writers:
Thomas Pynchon
Kurt Vonnegut
Italo Calvino
Vladmir Nabokov
William S. Burroughs
Angela Carter
Salman Rushdie
Peter Ackroyd
Julia Barnes
Jeanette Winterson
Very useful sir,,,
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