Puritans
American
Puritans subscribed to Calvin’s insistence that the omnipotent God had created
the first man, Adam, in his own perfect image, that Adam in his willfulness had
broken God’s covenant and that.
Calvin
and the Puritans put a special emphasis on the doctrine of original depravity.
Still,
nothing in man’s personal power could mitigate the original sinfulness of his
nature. Hence, redemption must be a
free gift from god’s saving grace, made to those predestined to receive it.
Romantics
Romanticism
is not on organized system, but rather a particular attitude toward the
realities of man, nature, and society.
The
romantic preferred freedom to formalism and emphasized individualism instead of
authority. He exalted the
imagination above either rationalism. He rejected the validity of material
reality in favor of innate or intuitive perception by the heart of man:
“intimations of immortality.”
The
romantic gave faith and credence to ideally and elevation.
Romantic
reliance upon the importance of the subconscious inner life was illustrated in
Emerson’s intuitionalism and also produced a profound interest in abnormal
psychology, shown, for instance, by Poe and Hawthorne.
Transcendentalism
Even
so, Unitarianism and transcendentalism became a concern of our major literature
only because of the great stature of Emerson and Thoreau.
It
was the expression for one age of an intuitional idealism.
Intuition
surpassed reason as a guide to the truth. Thus
they evolved a theological monism, in which the divine immanence of God
co-existed with the universe and the individual.
Derived
and enlarged conception of the sanctity of the individual and his freedom to
follow his intuitional knowledge.
Realism
American
writers and thinkers, attempting to express the shifting tensions and
complexities of these strenuous decades, moved steadily from romanticism toward
increasingly realistic objectives and literary forms.
Naturalistic
interpretation of man and his destiny.
Literature
became a genuine instrument of evaluation and expression in American life; it
found for the first time a vast and general audience representing the people as
a whole; ir ultimately produced a highly critical realistic movement whose
characteristic works were quite clearly the product of a different world from
that which, Emerson, Hawthorne and Longfellow.
Naturalism
The
typical American naturalists were generally concerned with concrete factors in
character and environment.
Stephen
Crane found vent for his naturalism in studies of the eastern slums of the
meanness of small-town life, and of the natural depravity of man.
But
younger authors continued the social dissent, the most important novelists among
them being Upton Sinclair and Jack London, who both wrote with tempered
naturalism
Modernism
The
temporary absorption of the country in the World War from 1917 to 1919.
Themes
are focused even more sharply the spiritual problems and disillusionment of this
critical generation of writers.
Desire
for social experiment, and tempered hope of the post-war generation.
Intensity
and the almost scientific candor of its explorations into the spiritual nature
of man and the value of his society and institutions.
To
the authors of the 1920’s, the stupendous totality and horror of a world war
was an inescapable demonstration of this mechanistic theory of history and human
life.
Prevalence
of corruption and responsibility both in government and in private enterprise.
The term modernism refers to the radical shift in aesthetic and cultural sensibilities evident in the art and literature of the post-World War One period. The ordered, stable and inherently meaningful world view of the nineteenth century could not, wrote T.S. Eliot, accord with "the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." Modernism thus marks a distinctive break with Victorian bourgeois morality; rejecting nineteenth-century optimism, they presented a profoundly pessimistic picture of a culture in disarray. This despair often results in an apparent apathy and moral relativism.
In literature, the movement is associated with the works of (among others) Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Franz Kafka and Knut Hamsun. In their attempt to throw off the aesthetic burden of the realist novel, these writers introduced a variety of literary tactics and devices:
the radical disruption of linear flow of narrative; the frustration of conventional expectations concerning unity and coherence of plot and character and the cause and effect development thereof; the deployment of ironic and ambiguous juxtapositions to call into question the moral and philosophical meaning of literary action; the adoption of a tone of epistemological self-mockery aimed at naive pretensions of bourgeois rationality; the opposition of inward consciousness to rational, public, objective discourse; and an inclination to subjective distortion to point up the evanescence of the social world of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. (Barth, "The Literature of Replenishment" 68)
Modernism is often derided for abandoning the social world in favour of its narcissistic interest in language and its processes. Recognizing the failure of language to ever fully communicate meaning ("That's not it at all, that's not what I meant at all" laments Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock), the modernists generally downplayed content in favour of an investigation of form. The fragmented, non-chronological, poetic forms utilized by Eliot and Pound revolutionized poetic language.
Modernist formalism, however, was not without its political cost. Many of the chief Modernists either flirted with fascism or openly espoused it (Eliot, Yeats, Hamsun and Pound). This should not be surprising: modernism is markedly non-egalitarian; its disregard for the shared conventions of meaning make many of its supreme accomplishments (eg. Eliot's "The Wasteland," Pound's "Cantos," Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Woolf's The Waves) largely inaccessible to the common reader. For Eliot, such obscurantism was necessary to halt the erosion of art in the age of commodity circulation and a literature adjusted to the lowest common denominator.
INTRODUCTION: The modernist movement in literature around the
turn of the century created an incredible change in the way writers viewed their
art. This new group of writers were affected by the new perception
held of the world and our place in it, and they tried to communicate their fears
and opinions through unique new writing styles. Ezra Pound, one of the
foremost figures of this period, told his contemporaries to-- "Make it
new." In order to create new literary forms, the old ones had to be
destroyed. Many of the writers chose to radically change their writing to
fit a new era. These writers were influenced by World War I, rampant
materialism, and depression. As Virginia Woolf said: "On or about
December 1910 human character changed. All human relations shifted--those
between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children.
And when human relations shift there is at the same time a change in religion,
conduct, politics, and literature."
-----------------------------------------IMAGISTS------------------------------------------
The imagists were a group of writers and poets during the early twentieth century in the United States and England. They rebelled against the superficiality and sentimentality of earlier poetry. Popular among this group was free verse filled with sharp, clear images. This movement was led by Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolitte, Amy Lowell, and D.H. Lawrence, but it also influenced many other literary figures of the time, including James Joyce.
EZRA POUND: Ezra Pound was born in 1885. During his long life, he became a major 20th century US poet, critic and translator. He changed the verse tradition in poetry that had been held sacred for hundreds of years. Not only did he invent Imagism, but he later formed Vorticism which, like Futurism, was representative of the energy and flux of creation. After supporting Mussolini during World War II, he was indicted for treason by the Americans. In order to save his life, he was declared mentally insane and confined to a mental institution until 1958. His most important works are Homage to Sextus Propertius (1918), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and Cantos (1925-60).
D.H. LAWRENCE:
D.H. Lawrence stressed the power of emotions and instinct over reason in human
relationships. As a British author, his honesty about sexuality was often
shocking which caused some of his other themes to be overlooked. He is
most famous for Lady Chatterley's Lover (1885-1930), but he also wrote The
Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920) before he died of pleurisy in
1930.
------------------------------------Stream of Consciousness-----------------------------------
Stream of Consciousness was a literary technique in which a character's thoughts are presented in the confusing, jumbled, and inconsequential manner of real life without any clarification by the author. It's best known writers are Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce.
VIRGINIA WOOLF: Virginia Woolf was part of
the Bloomsbury Group, a group of philosophers, writers, and artists who met in
the Bloomsbury section of London. This group included many different types
of people such as John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Stachey, and E.M. Forster.
Virginia Woolf experimented with Stream of Consciousness in her book such as Mrs.
Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves
(1931), all of which concern the feelings brought on by common experiences.
She was a brilliant critic, some of which was published in The Common Reader
(1925). She was mentally unstable, and in 1942, she drowned herself.
Post
Modernism
Increasingly
fractured story-line due to the pressures and influences of modern day life.
Often absurd, post modernism deals with small moments of time or bizarre
themes and ideas.
Fantasy,
Science Fiction and Comic Books often combine elements of Post-modern
literature.
Often
times there is no ending or conceivable end to a work of fiction or cinema.
Postmodernists, likewise, are much concerned with the fragmentariness of contemporary experience, the artificiality of identity and meaning, and with the ultimately subjective nature of all experience. Unlike modernist writers, however, they tend to celebrate this rather than regarding it as evidence of some sort of crisis. The tortured, isolated anti-heroes of, say, Knut Hamson or Samuel Beckett, and the nightmare world of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, make way in postmodernist writing for the playfully deconstructed and self-reflexive narrators of novels by John Fowles, John Barth, or Julian Barnes. Meanwhile, authors such as Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon in the novel Gravity's Rainbow, satirise paranoid system-building of the kind associated, by postmodernists, with Enlightenment modernity. --http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism#Postmodernism_in_literature
Few terms have been subject to such intense debates as "postmodernism." Though its indiscriminate use has all but exhausted the word of any kind of precise meaning, one can distinguish three major usages: (i) to refer to the non-realist and non-traditional literature and art of the post-World War Two period; (ii) to refer to literature and art which takes certain modernist characteristics to an extreme stage, a view propounded in John Barth's "The Literature of Exhaustion"; and (iii) to refer to a more general human condition in the "late-capitalist" world of the post 1950s, a period marked by the end of what Jean-François Lyotard calls the grand "meta-narratives" of western culture. The myths by which we once legitimized knowledge and practice--Christianity, Science, Democracy, Communism, Progress, no longer have the unquestioning support necessary to sustain the projects which were undertaken in their name, resulting in a radical decentring of our cultural sphere. It is not simply that the postmodernism does not believe in "truth" so much that it understands truth and meaning as historically constructed and thus seeks to expose the mechanisms by which this production is hidden and "naturalized."
Among the modernist devices which postmodernism pushes to a new extreme are: the rejection of mimetic representation in favour of a self-referential "playing" with the forms, conventions and icons of "high art" and literature; the rejection of the cult of originality in recognition of the inevitable loss of origin in the age of mass production; the rejection of plot and character as meaningful artistic conventions; and the rejection of meaning itself as delusory.
However, where modernism thought of itself as a last ditch attempt to shore up, like Eliot's Fisher King, the ruins of western culture, postmodernists often gleefully accept its demise and plunder its remains for their artistic materials. Andy Warhol's multiple images of Marilyn Monroe and Kathy Acker's re-writing of Cervantes' Don Quixote are representative of the postmodernist trend toward to bricolage, the use of the bits and pieces of older artifacts to produce a new, if not "original," work of art, a work which blurs the traditional distinctions between the old and the new even as it blurs those between high and low art.
Postmodernism in literature is usually associated with (among others) Acker, Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Donald Bartheleme, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino and John Ashberry. Their literary strategies widely differ, but each shows a self-reflexive interest in the processes of narrative itself and the means by which it constructs both text and reader. In Barth's short story, "Lost in the Funhouse," for example, the narrator constantly breaks the illusion of realism to make reference to the conventional codes of literature which he is currently employing:.