Survey 2 Flashcards
How can postmodern Literature be characterized?
by the use of
- metafiction,
- unreliable narration,
- self-reflexivity,
- intertextuality, and which often thematizes both historical and political issues.
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Metafiction = writing about writing or “foregrounding the apparatus”, as it’s typical of deconstructionist approaches, making the artificiality of art or the fictionality of fiction apparent to the reader and generally disregards the necessity for “willing suspension of disbelief.” For example, postmodern sensibility and metafiction dictate that works of parody should parody the idea of parody itself.
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This style of experimental literature emerged strongly in the United States in the 1960s through the writings of authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and John Barth.
Precursors to postmodern literature: include
Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760-1767)
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957)
- but postmodern literature was particularly prominent in the 1960s and 1970s.
In the 21st century, American literature still features a strong current of postmodern writing, like the postironic Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011). These works, however, also further develop the postmodern form.
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Sometimes the term “postmodernism” is used to discuss many different things ranging from architecture, to historical theory, to philosophy and film.
- -> several people distinguish between several forms of postmodernism and thus suggest that there are three forms of postmodernism:
(1) Postmodernity is understood as a historical period from the mid-1960s to the present
(2) theoretical postmodernism, which encompasses the theories developed by thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and others.
(3) “cultural postmodernism,” which includes film, literature, visual arts, etc. that feature postmodern elements. Postmodern literature is, in this sense, part of cultural postmodernism.
Romanticism - Poetry
What is Romanticism, what is its historical context?
SUM UP
- Romantic poets affirm the creative powers of the imagination in contrast to preceding neo-classical traditions
Romantic poets introduce us to a new way of looking at Nature, which becomes the main subject of their work.
Romantic poets tend to explain human society and its development with an “organic” model (an organism, interdependency)
Value of individual experience
The artist as sage / philosopher / prophet
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Survey Primary Texts:
William Blake: “Visions of the Daughters of Albion” (1793)
William Wordsworth: “Tintern Abbey” (1798)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “Kubla Khan” (1816)
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What came before?
- Early to mid- 18th century:
– Neo-Classicism
– Enlightenment
–> Some tenets of Romanticism can be seen as a continuation of certain aspects of the Enlightenment, some are a clear reaction against it –> “anti-rational”
–> Certainly against neo-classicist style, including an aversion against fixed forms and genres
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Romanticism
- Revolution
- Reaction
- Emotion / “Sensibility”
- Myth and the Supernatural / “Gothic”
- Nature
- Art
- differences in style, subject matter, and expression
- Discovery of “the inside”: the individual interiority, psychology
- Metaphor and symbol: search for new connections, found primarily in nature
- Use of simple, “natural” language
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HISTORY:
- Political and emotional Romanticism influenced by three major aspects:
- American and French Revolutions (1776, 1779): seen as dawning of a new age, met first with enthusiasm, then, in the case of France with increasing despair
- Beginning Industrialisation which deeply alters both social bonds and the British landscape
- Colonialism changes from sth adventurous into a fact of the lives of the middle classes, becomes part of British identity
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WRITERS:
▪ Dryden
▪ Pope
- ->Pope: Forms like the “mock-epic”, often satirical and ironic
- Obsession with formal features of genres / sub-genres…
- -> Dryden: elevating English poetry by searching examples in classic poetry
- Heavy reliance on making connections with (and showing off) classic knowledge
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Why do we call it “Romanticism”?
▪ Interest in and fascination with the medieval ballads, romances
▪ Poets try to revive the “grand narratives”: the heroic, the magic, the supernatural
–> “manifesto” of Romantic Poetry: Coleridge / Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads (1789), striving to express “persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic”.
-> Schlegel (1815): opposition of “classic” and “modern” art (again), “modern” here firstly connected with “Judeo-Christian” culture
A new Understanding of Art: There is no hierarchy among the genres and forms
- -> “incidents and situations from common life”
- -> “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”
Romanticism - Novel
Survey example reading:
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
SUM UP
▪ Romanticism was an encompassing artistic movement, also spreading to the novel form
▪ Novel of Ideas –> philosophy
▪ Gothic Novel –> terror and horror –> sci-fi
▪ Historical Novel –> re-imagining the medieval past to create an image of the nation
▪ Novel of class and realism –> Jane Austen
▪ Epistolary novel, novel in free indirect discourse with 3rd person narrator
▪ Novel of sensibility and realist novel
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▪ Romanticism as an aesthetic category ▪ The Gothic Novel ▪ Mary Shelley. Frankenstein ▪ The Historical Novel: Sir Walter Scott ▪ Jane Austen: from the novel of ideas towards realism
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Recap Romantic Poetry:
- Romantic poets affirm the creative powers of the imagination - in contrast to preceding neo-classical traditions
- Romantic poets introduce us to a new way of looking at Nature, which becomes the main subject of their work.
- Romantic poets tend to explain human society and its development with an “organic” model (an organism, interdependency)
- Value of individual experience
- The artist as sage / philosopher / prophet
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The Romantic Novel:
▪ Novel is developing into serious artform
▪ 18th century debate between romance and realism continues
▪ Novel of social questions also develops
▪ Great popularity of the Gothic Romance
–> aestheticized, imaginary “medieval” quality in buildings, artworks, stories and settings: connotation of a ‘before’, in literature evokes “disordered” feelings by effects of terror
–> Example: “Castle of Otranto” by Walpole in 1764
The Gothic novel:
…has been identified as a British, Protestant, middle class form which
located its ‘others’ among tyrannical and
gloomy Catholic artistocrats and violent, unruly plebeians.
- superstition, tyranny, violence, incest,
disordered family relations
–> Scare stories for the bourgeois middle class
–> Extremely popular
“Female Gothic”:
- female writers in the genre
Ann Radcliffe (Formula)
• All multi-volume novels
• Similar plot: “the persecuted motherless
female, subject to threats and imprisonment by older tyrannical males, amid a picturesque Italiante landscape” (P 310), supernatural occurences are explained away
- generally seen as the “master” of
the gothic form
Later: Austen wrote satire on the Radcliffe Formula
Victorian Age - Poetry
Reading:
- Tennyson ‘In Memoriam’
- Rossetti ‘A Birthday’
- Browning ‘My Last Duchess’
What is special about Victorian Poetry?
“Whether on the way from Romantic poetry, or on the way to modernism, it is situated between two kinds of excitement, of which it seems not
to participate.” Armstrong, p.1
- Paradoxical interest and tastes
- Emotional and intellectual ambiguity
- Poetry was seen as a realm to experiment with the expressions of subjectivity
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THEMES and TOPICS
▪ Subjectivity and Individuality
▪ Emotion
▪ Finding subjective language and metaphors
▪ Building a link to the past – medievalism, as part of nationalism
▪ Incorporating new knowledge in a rapidly modernising society full of scientific advances
▪ Faith and Doubt
▪ Death, grief and memory
▪ Public and Private Selves
\_\_\_\_\_\_ STYLES ▪ Transformation and development ▪ “Male” forms appear anew with “female” speakers and lyrical persona (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese; Christina Rossetti, Monna Innominata) ▪ Rise of the long narrative poem (Tennyson, Idylls of the King) ▪ Dramatic Monologue (Browning, My Last Duchess)
Victorian Age - Novel
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cultural work and literature
To deal “only with literature” isn’t enough:
- Literature (and other cultural products) is never created in an artsy space away from all influences of society, economy, history.
- And even if it was, that would say something about its time and place, too.
- Especially in older texts, “only the literature” will not make you able to understand even only the literature.
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Cultural Work:
circulation of topics, ideas, themes, or actual artworks through different realms of societies, groups and times
- closely linked to ideas of cultural memory as a dynamic exchange with the past
- Literature itself performs this work, but so does the history of literature
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Literary History, Canonization and Power
What is remembered?
–> What counts as literature? Who defines what is ‘literary’ and what is not?
Who remembers?
–> Who has power over the cultural past, who has access / resources?
Why is it remembered?
–> Who are the stakeholders in remembering whose literary history?
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Stuart Hall, Circuit of Culture (Representation, 1997)
- consumption
- regulation
- representation
- production
- identity
Romanticism
Bullet points
(late 18th – early 19th century)
- Revolution
- Reaction
- Emotion / “Sensibility”
- Myth and the Supernatural / “Gothic”
- Nature / “the sublime”
- Art / “all good poetry results from the overflow of spontaneous emotion”
Victorian Era
Bullet points
(~ 1840-1901)
- Empire: Largest extension of British Empire in its history
- Science: Darwin
- Industrialisation
- Technology: Photography
- Modernity: Social Questions - Dickens
- Pre-Raphaelitism
- Medievalism / Neo-Gothic
Fin de Siecle/Aestheticism
Bullet Points
(around 1900)
- Fabianism / Socialism / Women’s Movement
- Popular Culture
- Diversification of social attitudes / interests
- Dandyism
- “Jugendstil”: Beginning of movements for “organic” life-styles
- Empire: Questions of national identity
Modernism (around WW1)
Bullet points
- What is truly modern literary form?
- Shedding Victorian values
- Experiment in form
- Changing relations between sexes, classes
- Experiences of trauma: war
- The end of old certainties
- multiperspectivity
Post-45
bullet points
- Angry Young Men
- Kitchen Sink
- Theatre of the Absurd
- Rise of political and social equality
- Realistic techniques
- Social criticism
- Loss of Empire
- Beginning of Multi-Ethnic Britain
- Rise of Popular Culture
Postmodernism
bullet points
(1968-)
No stable meaning
No stable form
Meta-literary forms
Non-linearity
Unrealiable narration
Questioning of “grand narratives” of history and science
Stress on the constructedness of abstract notions deemed fundamental in previous periods
Multi-Ethnic British Literature (around 1950 -)
bullet points
- Reflecting the multi-ethnic reality of Britain after WWII
. Envisioning ways of a multi-cultural identity - Expressions of experiences of
– Migration
– Racism
– Classism
– Belonging and Alienation - Post-ethnic identity constructions vs. search for ethnic / religious / cultural “roots”
Contemporary British Literature (around 2000-)
bullet points
- Singular trends cannot be made out
- Postmodern, realist, genre-converging styles
- Novels and short stories
- Continuing diversification of authors’ ethnic/ gender/ class backgrounds
- Continuing topics of migration and identity
- Impact of old and new wars / ‘war on terror’
- Memory
- Devolution, nature and landscape
- Again: Questions of National Identity
