1 Modernism

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Literary Theories and Movements in the XX- century English Literature

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Modern English Literature

Transcript of 1 Modernism

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Literary Theories and Movements in the XX-

century English Literature

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“Man has gained immensely in his grasp of facts, but … has become so immersed in their multiplicity as to lose that vision of the One by which his lower self was once overawed and restrained.”

Irving Babbitt – One and Many

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Symbolism and Imagism – the unity of the whole; the uniquness of experience

Neo - Romanticism: D. H. Lawrence Modernism – myth, time, form Sir James Frazer – Golden Bough (ritual,

romance and the novel), 1922 Jessie L. Weston. From Ritual to Romance

(1920) Joseph Campbell. The Hero with a Thousand

Faces (1949); Masks of Gods (1959-68)

Literary Tendencies & Movements of Modernity

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Claude Monet - Impression

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Arnold – scientific approach Literary criticism as science Matew Arnold: The Study of Poetry High truth & High seriousness:

Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Homer

Methodology - scientific

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Sir James Frazer – The Golden Bough, 1913 Pagan culture, ritual, myths Universal moments of human experience Themes: Birth, Growth, Death, Marriage Fertility myths & rituals Psychology: Freud, the unconscious Philosophy: Bergson, the new concept of

time

Anthropology, Psychology, Philosophy

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Simple lifers & New Pagans: Morris (socialism), Woolf, Brook

D.H.Lawrence: Bodily Irrational (against Logos) Instinctive Unconscious “Other” Individual Different Primitive

Rural Life – “primitivism”

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D. H. Lawrence Bernard Shaw V. Woolf T.S Eliot Clive Bell, etc. Promoters of the new worldview and

cultural criticism: Essays, Polemics, Journals, Lifestyle

Authors & Critics

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I am not a proper archæologist nor an anthropologist nor an ethnologist. I am no "scholar" of any sort. But I am very grateful to scholars for their sound work. I have found hints, suggestions for what I say here in all kinds of scholarly books, from the Yoga and Plato and St. John the Evangel and the early Greek philosophers like Heraclitus down to Fraser and his "Golden Bough,"…

I honestly think that the great pagan world of which Egypt and Greece were the last living terms, the great pagan world which preceded our own era once, had a vast and perhaps perfect science of its own, a science in terms of life.

D.H. Lawrence – science, anthropology

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[C]ave men, neolithic and paleolithic creatures… retained their marvelous

innate beauty and life-perfection, …refused to forget, but taught the old

wisdom, only in its half-forgotten, symbolic forms. More or less forgotten,

as knowledge: remembered as ritual, gesture, and myth-story…  

[A] sort of richness of the flesh. It goes, perhaps, with the complete

absence of what we call 'spirit.’

D.H. Lawrence

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Intellect is dependant Cannot be trusted in conceiving the truth

Unconsciousness is filled with a strong, dark, vague prescience of a powerful presence, a two-eyed, four-legged, long-manned presence looming imminent (Fantasia).

Paradox - Fantasia of the Unconscious

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And so it is that these myths now begin to hypnotize us again, our own impulse towards our own scientific way of understanding being almost spent. And so, besides myths, we find the same mathematic figures, cosmic graphs which remain among the aboriginal peoples in all continents, mystic figures and signs whose true cosmic or scientific significance is lost, yet which continue in use for purposes of conjuring or divining.  

Mystery of Knowledge-Intuitive Thinking

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I am tired of being told that I want mankind to go back to the condition of savages. As if modern city people weren't about the crudest, rawest, most crassly savage monkeys that ever existed...."

Lawrence - Philosophy & Ethics

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Literature can know the world.

“Never trust the teller, trust the tale.”

The metaphysic or philosophy may not be anywhere very accurately stated and may be quite unconscious, in the artist, yet it is a metaphysic that governs men

D.H. Lawrence-Literary Criticism (works)

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… [B]eing a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet, who are all great masters of different bits of man alive, but never get the whole hog. The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble. Which is more than poetry, philosophy, science, or any other book-tremulation can do.

“Why the Novel Matters “, 1925

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Proust, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Faulkner, Woolf, Pirandello, Lawrence, Kafka, etc.

Modernism - authors

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Poetry, prose, visual arts and architecture Philosopers: Henry Bergson, James Frazer,

Claude-Levi Stauss Psyhiatrists: Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung Linguists: Ferdinand De Saussure, Roman

Jakobson Literary Critics: Lawrence, Eliot, Woolf, Clive

Bell, Michail Bakhtin, etc. Scientists: Alberta Einstein, etc. Cosmopolitan centres

Modernism – all walks of life

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We are sharply cut off from our predecessors

There is a . . . .. force at work-a force which is sometimes called the Spirit of the Age or the Tendency of the age. This mysterious power is taking us by the hand, I think, and making us look much more closely into the reasons why people do and say and think things.

V. Woolf

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Language Time Myth Form

Modernism - Themes

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There is,' … `a final me which is stark and impersonal and beyond responsibility. So there is a final you. And it is there I would want to meet you -- not in the emotional, loving plane -- but there beyond, where there is no speech and no terms of agreement (Lawrence, Women in Love)

No trust in Language

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There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless. What is this quality? What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? What quality is common to Sta. Sophia and the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl , Chinese carpets, Giotto 's frescoes at Padua, and the masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and Cezanne? Only one answer seems possible - significant form. In each, lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These relations and combinations of lines and colours, these aesthetically moving forms, I call "Significant Form"; and "Significant form" is the one quality common to all works of visual art.

Clive Bell, Significant Form

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Henry Bergson: [Every new development] alters the nature,

the appearance and, as it were, the rhythm of the whole.

No historical time – the time of human experience as in the novels of Proust, Woolf and Joyce

Time – “Timless moments of time”

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Overlapping of different realities: “Pure Observation” (Eliot) “Priveledged moments” (Proust); “Epifany”

(Joyce) Circular time: Symbol – Myth;

Bergson: “Moment of the Rose”

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Based on the structural model of criticism Drawing on the findings of archeology and

psychology Intent on restoring spiritual content to an

alienated world Clive Bell: Myth is simply a way of controlling,

of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy that is contemporary history.

James Frazer; Jessie Weston

Myth

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Themes: Language, literature, change Bergson: [New experience] alters the nature, the

appearance and, as it were, the rhythm of the whole (Time and free Will, Matter and Memory)

A poet must live in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past (Tradition..)

Poetry: Images rather than words

T.S.Eliot

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I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant- Among other things-or one way of putting the same thing: That the future is a faded song

There is, it seems to us, At best, only a limited value In the knowledge derived from experience. The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies, For the pattern is new in every moment....

“[C]onscious, … of what is already living. Whoever has approved this idea of order ... will not

find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.

[Knowledge is] a native gift of intuition.

T.S. Eliot: doubt in the “already known” categories

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Based on Bergson’s philosophy of time and change. [An artist/critic must be]… conscious of… what is

already living The past should be altered by the present as much as

the present is directed by the past. Tradition is change: [A]n impression needs to be

constantly refreshed by new impressions in order that it may persist at all.

“Tradition and the Individual Talent”

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Richard Aldington: bitter and cynical attack on the world in order to …to disgust us with mankind.

Eliot: In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. … It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.

“Ulysses, Order, Myth” / mythical method

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Criteria for literature and art: high standards

Salvation from the wasteland and the faith in order

Collaborators: V. Woolf, E. Pound, S. Spender, W.H. Auden

Eliot, the critic: The Criterion(1922-1939)

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Myth criticism Formalist movements

Modernism influences

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Started in Modernism In vogue from the 40s to 60s Literature emerges from the core of myth Meaningful content for human existence Critiques: Northrop Fry, Claude Levi-Strauss,

Roland Barthes.

Myth Criticism

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Structuralism: “There is Nothing Prior to the Text” Formalism: marginalizes mimetic,

representational educational and cognitive function of art

Started with Emanuel Kant: Art: a mode of representation which is purposive

for itself, and which, although devoid of a purpose, has the effect of advancing the culture of the mental powers in the interests of social communication (The Critique of Judgment, 1790)

Formalism: autonomy of art

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Art: its own existence, order and self Art: Unique mode of expression rather

than subjected to philosophy, history and politics

Lawrence: Doubts in Language Joyce: Experiments with the language Woolf: ethical is what is esthetic Metalingual forms: image (Eliot, Pound)

Form: art object, text

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Literature is no longer viewed as aiming to represent reality or character, or to impart moral or intellectual lessons, but is considered to be an object in its own right – autonomous: possessing its own law and having its aims internal to itself.

Unique mode of expression Does not convey any clear message

Formalist Movements

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Pre-revolutionary Russia Focusing on artistic forms and techniques on

the basis of linguistic studies Allied somewhat with the Revolution – critique

of the traditional bourgeoisie art Criticized for their denial of social and cognitive

aspects of art Harmonized by Bakhtin Remained influential after it was suppressed by

Stalin through the practices of R. Jakobson, Tzvetan Todorov, R. Barthes and G. Genette

Russian Formalism

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Language itself – the supreme ideological phenomenon – the site of the ideological struggle

Novel: Heteroglossia; dialogism; carnival; [F]inds its object at which it was directed already

as it were overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in an obscuring mist... of words that have been alreadz spoken about it. It is entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgements and accents.. The word, directed towards its object, enters a dialogicaly agitated and tension filled environment.

Mikhail M. Bakhtin(1895-1975)

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Any language comprises of a multiplicity of languages, interacting with and ideologically competing with one another

We can break down any single national language into social dialects, characteristic group behavior, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups,… languages of authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions… (DI, 263).

Dialogism: No living word relates to its object in a singular way; no voice can be isolated from its ideological context

Bakhtinian Thought

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No unitary voice Dialogism negates the authority of the

authorial voice No moral to the story Carnival: Symbolical destruction and

subversion of authorities The will of the characters against the author

embedded in their discourse

Bakhtin: novel

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Moscow Linguistic Circle 1915 Prague, New York Prague Circle (1924), New York Linguistic

Circle (1943). Linguistics and Poetics; Language in

Literature

Roman Jakobson (1896-1982)

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Seminal Work: „Two Aspects of Languages and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances“

Metaphor and metonymy – similarity or substitution – parallel to literary movements

Languages have a bipolar structure oscillating between the poles of metaphor and metonymy

Primal significance to all verbal behavior (LL,112) Jakobson and Freud: displacement and

condensation (metonymy) Identification and symbolism (metaphor) Jakobson: Word and Language (1971)

Jakobson - work

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[Text is] an autonomous verbal structure which has its end in itself which has no purpose beyond its own existence as an aesthetic object.

Analytical method: Close Reading Main scholars: I.A. Richards:Principles of Literary Criticism,

1924; Science and Poetry, 1926; Practical Criticism, 1929

William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1930

New Criticism

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Anchored in modernist tendency to view the text as autonomous from the historical and social context.

Objective, scientific Careless about biography or history Ivor Armstrong Richards: Cambridge &

Harvard America, 40s: Robert Penn Warren, John

Crowe Ransom, Austin Warren, Murray Krieger.

Close Reading