You will NOT be tested on Post Modernism and Contemporary (Modern) Literature. What about that?
Dr. Silva
Dr. Silva_Estacio_English Literature II
Wednesday, November 19, 2014
Modern trends of British Literature: Poetry, Theatre and Fiction
POETRY
Since 1945 British poetry has moved from what
many regarded as a shift from the parochial to the international. In little
more than fifty years the insular, clear verse of mainland English Britain
has changed from being a centralist and predominantly male, seemingly academic
practice to become a post-modern, cultural entertainment, available to
everyone.
During the late forties the dominance of the
pre-war modernists was overthrown. Poets such as F.S.Flint (1885-1960) and the
Georgians Walter de La Mare (1873-1956), and W.H.Davies (1871-1940) used their
verse to depict a vanishing rural and domestic scene. When the war ended the
new poetry which emerged still bore traces of the measured and uneventful
thirties verse that had gone before it. Poets of what became known as the
neo-Romantic movement wrote as if the British world had not changed. Among
them, Vernon Watkins (1906-1967), W.S.Graham (1918-1986), Patricia Beer
(1919-1999), George Barker (1913-1991), John Heath-Stubbs (1918-2006) and
others.
The reaction came in the early fifties, soon
after Dylan Thomas's death in 1953, The Movement as the new tendency was called
had become coherent. Movement poets opposed modernism and had little
international influences. They regarded themselves as a direct continuation of
mainstream English tradition. Other poets were also steadily making their mark:
two of Britain's greatest twentieth-century poets, Geoffrey Hill (1932 - ) and
Ted Hughes (1930 - 1998), all appeared during the formal English fifties.
Hughes, the gritty Yorkshire Poet Laureate engaged the primordial struggle and
won. Hill's dense, formidable poetry became, for some, the highest achievement
of late twentieth-century English verse.
The safe fifties moved into the revolutionary
sixties. Michael Hamburger (1924-2007), Christopher Middleton (1926-), Charles
Tomlinson (1927-), Ted Walker (1934-2004), Iain Crichton Smith (1928-1998),
Norman MacCaig (1910-1996) were some of the names that came up at the time. Ted
Hughes, R.S.Thomas and others were joined in a spirit of urgency and the poet's
ability and willingness to face the full range of his experience with his full
intelligence.
But explosion was around the corner. After a
brief dalliance with jazz and stage performances, inspired largely by the
Americans, British poetry took its vital left turn. A poetry built on wild
times, popular readings and independent distribution systems exploded across
the UK. Led by the Liverpool poets (Adrian Henri (1932- 2001), Roger McGough
(1937-) and Brian Patten (1946-) on the back of the Beatles, and aided by
Adrian Mitchell (1932-2008), Jeff Nuttall (1933-2004), Tom Pickard (1946-) and
others, Underground poetry had a popular face. Poetry was removing itself from
its male-dominated and often academic metropolitan centres.
In reaction, in 1982 mainstream neo-Georgian
Andrew Motion (1952-) and Blake Morrison (1950-) produced the Penguin Book
of Contemporary British Poetry, an anthology which makes its point more by
who it left out than who went in. Pop poetry may have been doing well in the
clubs while neo-modernists filled the small presses.
The steady immigration to the UK over a long
period did not go unnoticed in its literature. Immigrants like Linton Kwesi
Johnson (1952-) drove in new, anti-authoritarian values, made non-standard
orthography acceptable and, by allying himself with black music, produced a
poetry that, in Britain, was pretty much like nothing else. British culture now
valued its parts more strongly than its whole. For good post-Modernists the
concerns of minorities, linguistic and sexual orientation, origin and gender
have all become significant. Much of the early nineties mainstream stance is
evident in the output of presses like Carcanet and Bloodaxe and is gathered in
the controversial anthology The New Poetry (1993) edited by Michael
Hulse (1955-), David Kennedy (1959-) and David Morley (1964-). It was a
controversial piece, perhaps, because of its diversity. The anthology has no
central thrust other than its multiplicity.
The new poetry does not, however, contain many examples of Britain's performance
poetry. During the past fifteen years verse has found an increasingly welcome
home on the stage of clubs, pubs and bars. Poetry delivered as entertainment,
loud, in your face and, like much of the rest of our media, instantly
appreciable has turned verse from an arcane art into a truly popular one. John
Hegley (1953-), and others have increased public consumption of poetry on a
geometric scale. Their work is dynamic, politically apposite and often
delivered with considerable humour. Read
the following poem by Hegley and observe its features and humour.
Poem de Terre
I'm not a normal person
whatever that may be
there is something very
very vegetable
about me,
this human skin I'm
skulking in
it's only there for show,
I'm a potato.
When I told my father
it
was something of a blow,
he was hurt
and he called me a dirty
so-and-so.
He kicked up a racket
and he grabbed me by the
jacket;
I said, 'Daddy will you
pack it in
I need you for my father
not my foe
Daddy, will you try and
help me grow,
won't you love me for my
blemishes
and look me in the eye
before one of us is
underground
and the other says
goodbye?'
And he said 'No'.
When I was a schoolboy
I never knew why
I was so crap at
cross-country running
but now I know
why I was so slow.
I'm a potato.
(Poem
from Beyond our Kennel)
By the turn of the millennium poetry in Britain
had reached a multi-faceted stand-off. Despite the work of editors like Simon
Armitage and Robert Crawford (1959-) who have made brave attempts at uniting
post-modern, post-Christian, post-war, post-Hiroshima, post-structuralist,
post-devolution poetries under one pluralistic banner the many gleaming and
disparate parts of British poetry do not like making a coherent whole. The
argument between form and content remains as strong as ever. It has been raging
for a hundred years and there are no winners yet. Twenty-first century British
poetry is no longer precisely English. Like the world literature with which it
is now firmly allied it has as many facets as the eye of a fly, saying exactly
what remains as the problem of the moment.
Late Modernism 1946 – 2000
Though some critics have considered
Modernism ending by around 1939, with regard to English literature, when and if
Modernism disappeared and Post-Modernism began has been contested almost as
hotly as when the transition from Victorianism to Modernism occurred". In
fact a number of Modernists were still living and publishing during the 1950s
and the 1960s, including T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Richardson and John Cowper Powys.
Furthermore the Irishman Samuel Beckett, born in 1906, continued to produce
significant works until the 1980s. While Modernist Samuel Beckett was not a
British writer he had a major influence on British writers in the second half
of the 20th century, in works like Waiting for Godot (1955), as we have
already discussed in our previous lesson. However, some view him as a Post-Modernist. Perhaps the most
significant event relating to the novel in English in the second half of the
twentieth-century was the publication, originally in French, of Samuel
Beckett's trilogy: Molloy (1951); Malone Meurt (1951) (Malone
Dies, translated by Beckett, 1958); and L'Innomable (1953) (The
Unnamable, 1960).
George Orwell's satire of totalitarianism, Nineteen
Eighty-Four, studied in Lesson 8, was published in 1949. As we have already
seen, Orwell's works are important social and political commentaries of the
20th century. One of the most influential novels of the immediate post-war
period was William Cooper's naturalistic Scenes from Provincial Life, a
conscious rejection of the modernist tradition.
Graham Greene's (1904 – 1991) was a novelist
whose works span from the 1930s to the 1980s. He was a convert to Catholicism
and his novels explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern
world. He combined serious literary acclaim with broad popularity in novels
such as Brighton Rock (1938), A Burnt-Out Case (1961) and The
Human Factor (1978), which was made into a film in 1979.
Other novelists writing in the 1950s and
later were: Anthony Powell (1905-2000) whose twelve-volume cycle of novels A
Dance to the Music of Time, is a comic examination of movements and
manners, power and passivity in English political, cultural and military life
in the mid-20th century; Nobel Prize winner, William Golding (1911 – 1993),
whose allegorical novel Lord of the Flies (1954), shows how culture
created by man fails, using, as an example, a group of British schoolboys
marooned on a deserted island who try to govern themselves with disastrous
results; philosopher Iris Murdoch (1919 – 1999) who was a prolific writer of
novels dealing with sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the
unconscious, including Under the Net (1954). Anthony Burgess (1917 –
1993) is especially remembered for his dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange
1962, set in the not-too-distant future, which was made into a film (1971) by
Stanley Kubrick.
Other names include, Angela Carter
(1940-1992), a novelist and journalist, known for her feminist, magical
realism, and picaresque works. Writing from the 1960s until the 1980s, her
novels include, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman 1972, and
Nights at the Circus 1984. Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary
1996, and its sequel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason 1999, chronicle
the life of Bridget Jones, a thirty-something
single woman in London.
Salman Rushdie is among a number of post
Second World War writers from former British colonies who permanently settled
in Britain. Rushdie achieved fame with Midnight's Children (1981), which
was awarded both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and Booker Prize later
that year, and was named Booker of Bookers in 1993. His most controversial
novel The Satanic Verses (1989) was inspired in part by the life of
Muhammad.
Doris Lessing from Southern Rhodesia (now
Zimbabwe), published her first novel The Grass is Singing in 1950, after
immigrating to England. She initially wrote about her African experiences.
Lessing soon became a dominant presence in the English literary scene,
publishing frequently, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. Below
you can read the initial lines of The
Golden Notebook, published in 1962. The book tells the story of a modern woman, Anna, who tries to live with
the freedom of a man. She is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who
now keeps four notebooks. In one with a black cover she reviews the African
experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her political life,
her disillusionment with Communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which
her heroine relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a
personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer, threatened with
insanity, Anna tries to bring the threads of all four books together in a
golden notebook.
With these various thread of her story - her
life - Anna weaves a vivid tapestry of contemporary concerns. Never for a
moment can the reader doubt the validity of her testament. Documentary
precision combines with deep narrative art to reveal the truth of being an
intelligent woman. Her conclusions are likely to be debated for generations.
Lessing won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007.
Anna meets her friend
Molly in the summer of 1957 after a separation…
The two women were alone
in the London flat.
‘The point is,’ said
Anna, as her friend came back from the telephone on the landing, ‘the point is,
that as far as I can see, everything’s cracking up.’
Molly was a woman much on
the telephone. When it rang she had just enquired: ‘Well, what’s the gossip?’
Now she said, ‘That’s Richard, and he’s coming over. It seems today’s his only
free moment for the next month. Or so he insists.’
‘Well I’m not leaving,’
said Anna.
‘No, you stay just where
you are.’
Molly considered her own
appearance — she was wearing trousers and a sweater, both the worse for wear.
‘He’ll have to take me as I come,’ she concluded, and sat down by the window.
‘He wouldn’t say what it’s about — another crisis with Marion, I suppose.’
‘Didn’t he write to you?’
asked Anna, cautious.
‘Both he and Marion wrote
— ever such bonhomous letters. Odd, isn’t it?’
This odd, isn’t if?
was the characteristic note of the intimate conversations they designated
gossip. But having struck the note, Molly swerved off with: ‘It’s no use
talking now, because he’s coming right over, he says.’
‘He’ll probably go when
he sees me here,’ said Anna, cheerfully, but slightly aggressive. Molly glanced
at her, keenly, and said: ‘Oh, but why?’
It had always been understood that Anna and Richard
disliked each other; and before, Anna had always left when Richard was
expected. Now Molly said: ‘Actually I think he rather likes you, in his heart
of hearts. The point is, he’s committed to liking me, on principle — he’s such
a fool he’s always got to either like or dislike someone, so all the dislike he
won’t admit he has for me gets pushed off on to you.’
Literature in the 21st Century
Thus far, literature of the 21st century
carries on many of the themes that concerned the modernist and postmodernist
movements. The genesis of modernism and postmodernism can be traced to the
Industrial Revolution and the vastly different thinking inspired by the world
wars, and the themes that concerned those movements of the past century are
still applicable to the contemporary world. It is still too soon to examine the
literature produced by the 21st century authors due to its closeness
to the present moment. It is possible, however, to spot themes such as technological
revolution and ecology to be present in some of the most recent works of our
time.
Post-modern Literature: An Overview
Post-modernism
Post-modernism is the name given
to the literary movement following Modernism. It was set in the post-1950s, a
time marked by the Cold War and the excesses of consumption. It differs from
Modernism by blurring the conventional boundary between "high" and
"low" culture, by a completely loosened structure in both time and
space, and by multiple openings rather than a closure in itself. It rejects to
conform to popular taste and proposes a combination of heterogeneous elements,
making it cater to a more sophisticated reader.
Post-modernism was 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.
Having started in the second
half of the twentieth century, it was largely influenced by a number of events
that marked this 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 Post-modernism 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.
Common features and techniques of Post-modernism:
Although Post-modernism is said
to be dependent on the time, place, race, class and other features which affect
its expression, some features seem to be common to most of the fiction written
during the last years.
·
Irony, playfulness, black humor: It has been claimed that Post-modern fiction as a
whole could be characterized by the ironic quote marks and that much of it can
be taken as jokes. This irony, along with black humor are among the most
recognizable aspects of Post-modernism. Though the idea of employing these in
literature did not start with the Post-modernists (the Modernists were often
playful and ironic), they became central features in many Post-modern works.
It's also common for Post-modernists to treat serious subjects in a playful and
humorous way.
·
Intertextuality: Post-modernism represents a
decentralized concept of the universe in which individual works are not
isolated creations, much of the focus in the study of Post-modern literature is
on intertextuality: the relationship between one text (a novel for example) and
another or one text within the interwoven fabric of literary history. Critics
point to this as an indication of Post-modernism’s lack of originality and
reliance on clichés. Intertextuality in Post-modern literature can be a
reference or parallel to another literary work, an extended discussion of a
work, or the adoption of a style. An example of this feature is Tom Stoppard’s Rozencrantz and Guildestern are dead
(1964), a play in which Two minor characters from Shakespeare’s
"Hamlet" stumble around unaware of their scripted lives and unable to
deviate from them. (For the free PDF of this title, please refer to http://ebookbrowse.com/rosencrantz-and-guildenstern-are-dead-pdf-d220470383 )
·
Metafiction: It is essentially writing about
writing, as it's typical of deconstructionist approaches, making the
artificiality of art or the fictionality of fiction apparent to the reader and
generally disregarding the necessity for "willing” suspension of
disbelief. For example, Post-modern sensibility and metafiction dictate that works of parody should parody the idea of parody
itself.
Metafiction is often employed to undermine the authority of the author,
for unexpected narrative shifts, to advance a story in a unique way, for
emotional distance, or to comment on the act of storytelling. For example, Italo
Calvino's 1979 novel If on a winter's night a traveler is about a reader
attempting to read a novel of the same name. (For the free PDF of this title, please refer to
http://ebookbrowse.com/if/if-on-a-winter-s-night-a-traveller )
·
Temporal distortion: This is a common technique in modernist fiction. Fragmentation
and non-linear narratives are central features in both Modern and Post-modern
literature. Temporal distortion in Post-modern fiction is used in a variety of
ways, often for the sake of irony. Time may also overlap, repeat, or bifurcate
into multiple possibilities. For example, in Robert Coover's "The
Babysitter" from Pricksongs & Descants, the author presents
multiple possible events occurring simultaneously—in one section the babysitter
is murdered while in another section nothing happens and so on—yet no version
of the story is favored as the correct version. (For the free PDF of this title, please refer to http://pdfdownload.me/pricksongs-descants-fictions ).
·
Magic realism: It is the literary work marked by the use of still, sharply
defined, smoothly painted images of figures and objects depicted in a
surrealistic manner. The themes and subjects are often imaginary, somewhat
fantastic and with a certain dream-like quality. Some of the characteristic
features of this kind of fiction are the mingling and juxtaposition of the
realistic and the fantastic or bizarre, skillful time shifts, labyrinthine
narratives and plots, miscellaneous use of dreams, myths and fairy stories,
expressionistic and even surrealistic description, the element of surprise or
abrupt shock, the horrific and the inexplicable. It has been applied, for
instance, to the work of Colombian novelist Gabriel García Marquez, One
Hundred Years of Solitude. Post-modernists such as the British Indian
novelist Salman Rushdie commonly use magic realism in his works. Rushdie’s Midnight's
Children (1981) is set on the Indian subcontinent, it combines magical
realism with historical fiction; this work is concerned with the many
connections, disruptions and migrations between East and West. (For the free PDF of this title, please
refer to http://ebookbrowse.com/midnight-s-children-pdf-d286300634 )
·
Technoculture and
hyperreality: Post-modernism has been called the
"cultural logic of late capitalism". "Late capitalism"
implies that society has moved past the industrial age and into the information
age. Likewise, Post-modernity has been claimed to be defined by a shift into
hyperreality in which simulations have replaced the real. In Post-modernity,
people are inundated with information, technology has become a central focus in
many lives, and our understanding of the real is mediated by simulations of the
real. Many works of fiction have dealt with this aspect of Post-modernity with
characteristic irony and pastiche. For example, steampunk is a subgenre of
science fiction popularized in novels and comics by writers such as Alan Moore,
who demonstrates Post-modern pastiche, temporal distortion, and a focus on
technoculture with its mix of futuristic technology and Victorian culture. A
good example of this genre is Moore’s V for Vendeta, a novel set in a dystopian
future United Kingdom imagined from the 1980s to about the 1990s. (For the free
PDF of this title, please refer to http://freepdfdb.org/pdf/v-for-vendetta )
·
Paranoia: This is another recurring Post-modern theme. This feature is most famously demonstrated and effectively dealt with
in Joseph Heller's Catch-22, the sense of paranoia, the belief that
there's an ordering system behind the chaos of the world. For the Post-modernist,
no ordering is extremely dependent upon the subject, so paranoia often straddles
the line between delusion and brilliant insight. (For the free PDF of this title,
please refer to http://ebookbrowse.com/catch-22-pdf-d12602881 )
·
Maximalism: Dubbed maximalism by some critics, the sprawling
canvas and fragmented narrative has generated controversy on the
"purpose" of a novel as narrative and the standards by which it
should be judged. The Post-modern position is that the style of a novel must be
appropriate to what it depicts and represents. Many modernist critics attack
the maximalist novel as being disorganized, sterile and filled with language
play for its own sake, empty of emotional commitment—and therefore empty of
value as a novel.
·
Minimalism: Literary minimalism can be characterized as a focus on a surface description where readers
are expected to take an active role in the creation of a story. The characters
in minimalist stories and novels tend to be unexceptional. Generally, the short
stories are "slice of life" stories. Minimalism, the opposite of
maximalism, is a representation of only the most basic and necessary pieces,
specific by economy with words. Minimalist authors hesitate to use adjectives,
adverbs, or meaningless details. Instead of providing every minute detail, the
author provides a general context and then allows the reader's imagination to
shape the story.
Top 10 Works of Post-modern
Literature
Molloy, Malone Dies, The
Unnamable, Samuel Beckett
A triple-whammy
from the master abstract minimalist, whose technique of viewing objectively the
subjective world was taken to its zenith in this trilogy of meta-fictional
neurosis, in which characters lives and situations seem to splice together
until it becomes apparent they were the fictions of one person all along.
House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
A labyrinth of ergonomic
structure, Danielewski’s novel has become a recent cult classic and by simply
opening its pages its conspicuous that there’s no other book like it: encoded
typography, color-word associations and the meticulous inclusion of
mythological and metaphysical references turn this roaring institution of a
novel into a Rorschach test on a mini scale.
Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut
Though Slaughterhouse Five may be his
best-known work, this is the one that should be included in the pantheon of
solipsistic narration. Often overlooked as self-indulgent and uneven, Breakfast is a personalized account of
the phrase “perfect paranoia is perfect awareness.” Pontiac salesman Dwayne
Hoover becomes obsessed with the work of sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout,
eventually spiraling into acute eruptions of anxiety when he believes that he is
the sole human combating a world of humanoids. Black satire at the peak of its
powers.
Labyrinths, Jorges Luis Borges
The works of
Borges are impossible to describe without a depth of analysis, since he has the
power to include in five pages a universe of infinite captivation. Even today,
many of the short stories in this collection are open to interpretation.
Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas, Hunter S.
Thompson
The Gonzo
journalist epic is included here for its superior attempts to splice fact and
fiction through surrealist imagery to construct the greatest drug and political
satire of its epoch.
American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
No other book of
its kind is as gruesome, funny, polemical or disturbing as the story of Wall
Street yuppie Patrick Bateman as he calmly iterates the details of his
homicidal life, all in an apathetic tone that combines magical realism with
minimalism in a way no other book can. Its swift change from comedy to horror
happens in such breakneck speed that its stream of consciousness takes on a new
level of apprehension.
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
The most paradoxical
war novel ever written, Heller’s novel is widely recognized as one of the
greatest novels ever written, its structure centering on irony and repetition
that would grow irritating in lesser hands. Cemented Heller’s mastery in the
literary world.
Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
To faithfully
describe this novel is to end in failure: a pastiche of paranoia, pop culture,
sex and politics that turns narration on its head with subtle metaphorical
discipline, as the lives of several people center around the parabolic venture
of the rocket “0000.” Comparisons of the novel and its symbols to Ulysses and
Moby-Dick do not do justice to its singularity.
Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
So much has
already been written about this book’s impact that to go further would seem
superfluous. Arguably the novel that put Post-modernism on its contemporary
path, filtering paranoia, drugs and influences from erotica to detective
fiction to science fiction comprises one of the most influential and
unforgettable works in modern literature.
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
This is the most intriguing, in-depth,
comedic, sorrowful, apprehensive and overall sagaciously maximalist read in the
Post-modern canon. The parallelism between the Enfield Tennis Academy and the
Ennet Drug and Alcohol Recovery House using alternating esoteric and colloquial
words (and his trademark endnotes) creates the most epic and exhausting novel
of modern times.
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