AV2

You will NOT be tested on Post Modernism and Contemporary (Modern) Literature. What about that?

Dr. Silva

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.’

To read more about Doris Lessing works, go to www.dorislessing.org

Literature in the 21^st 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 21^st 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.