NEW
CRITICISM, MODERNISM, POSTMODERNISM
Name : Bhumi
Vajani
M.A.
– English Part – I
Sem. : 2
Roll
No. : 04
Paper : 7- Literacy Theory & Criticism
Topic : New Criticism
Modernism
Postmodernism
Submitted
to : Dr. Dilip Barad
Dept. of
English
M.K.
Bhavnagar University
New
Criticism, Modernism, Postmodernism
New Criticism :
New
Criticism came by the publication of John Crowe Ranson’s ‘The Criticism’ in
1941. It came to be applied to a theory and practice that remained prominent in
American Literacy Criticism up to late 1960s. This movement has the influence
I.A. Richards ‘Principles of Literary Criticism’ (1924) and ‘Practical Criticism’
(1929) and from critical essay of T.S. Eliot. It apposed a prevailing interest
of scholars, critics and teachers of that ear in the biographies of authors, in
the social context of literature and in literacy history by insisting that the
proper concern of literacy criticism is not with the external circumstances of
effects or historical position of a
work, but with a detailed consideration of the work itself as an independent entity.
Cleaner Brooks and Robert Prnn Warren ‘Understanding poetry’ (1938) and
‘Understanding Fiction’ (1943) did much to make the New Criticism the
predominat method of teaching literature in American colleges. An influential
English critic, F.R. Leavis, in turning his attention from background, sources
and biography to the detailed analysis of “literacy texts themselves”, shared
some of the concepts of the New criticism and their analytic focus an what he
called ‘the words on the page.’
The
New criticism was extraordinarily inclination from the end of the 1930s on into
the 1950. It is widely considered to have revolutionized the teaching of
literature to have helped in the definition of English studies in the second
half of the 20th century. New criticism may be better described as
an empirical methodology that was, at its most basic and most influential a
reading practice.
Although it remains
true that there was no typical new critic, there are key figures whose critical
approaches were closely aligned with New criticism’s development and
characteristics. As well as Ransom, Richards Brooks and Warren, other important
figures are Allen Tate, Kenneth Burke, R.P. Blackman, William Empson, Yvor Winters
and W.K. Wimsatt.
In
‘Biographia Literaria’ Coleridge claimed
that poetry ‘brings the whole soul of man into activity’. This phase offen
cited by the New critics was an important precursor of the New critical
emuphasis combination of the intellectual and the emotional.
New
Criticism has been considered a conservative practice, whose origins
demonstrate the covert and sub he aestheticization of the political. It is
warth remembering this, as it helps explain the extreme hostility felt toward
New critism by Frank Lentricchia and Terry Eagleten. ‘International fallacy’
and the ‘affective fallacy’ are two major textual approaches associated with
New Criticism.
New
Criticism sets out to illuminate the organic unity of the overall structure and
verbal meaning of a text. The words ‘Tention’, ‘irony’ and ‘paradox’ occure
often in New Criticism. The degree to which a work of art achieve a
“reconciliation of diverge impulses” or “an equilibrium of opposed farces” is a
measure of its literacy value.
When contrasted with other critical
theoretical positions, New Criticism may be considered ideologically
problematic, theoretically unformulated, and unsystematic. But it none the less
occupies a significant place in the development of modern literacy theory and
English studies. The New Criticism mounted the first serious challenge to
reductionist and impressionistic opproaches to literature, and with its
emphasis on rigour and objectivity, it initiated the professionalization and
formalization of literary criticism as a discipline. The New Criticism valued
the texture of languages and paid scrupulous alternation to the structures
within that languages functioned.
v Modernism:
Modernism is the term that should be
thoroughly understood in order to understand the 20th century
culture. Modernism is the name given to the movement which dominated the arts
and culture of the first half of the 20th century. The movement of
modernism in arts brought down much of the structure of early 20th
century practice in music painting literature and architecture. Modernism (1890
– 1910) poses Vienna as centre but it spread in France, Germany, Italy and
Britain too. This movement in art Cultism, Dadaism, Surrealism and Futurism.
This movement is still felt today. Without understanding modernism how can the culture be understood ?
Traditional realism was rejected in favour of experimental farms of different
kinds. High Modernism existed from 1910 to 1930. Some of the Modernisms are
T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, Wallace
Stevens, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka. The ‘Modernism as a term
is widely used to identity new and distinctive features in the subjects, forms,
concepts and styles of literature and the other arts in the early decades of
the twentieth century bus especially after words war I (1914-1918). The
characteristics of Modernism differs from one user to another user but most of
the critics agree that Modernism
includes a deliberate and radical break with some of the traditional bases not
only of Western art, but of western culture in general some thinks procured
Modernism. They questioned the certainties that had supported traditional moods
of social organization religion and morality and also traditional ways of
conceiving the human self. Thinkness such as friedrich. Nietzsech (1844-1900)
Karl Marx, Freud, J.G. Graze, whose twelve – volume. ‘The Golden bough
(1890-1915) stressed the correspondence between central Christian and Pagan,
often barbaric maths and rituals.
Some literary figures locate Modernism
revolt to 1890s but high Modernism, marked with rapidity of change, came after
the first would war. After the first world, around Igzz James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’,
Eliot’s ‘The Wade Land’ and Woolf’s
‘Jacob’s Room’ are experimented wares that came out.
A prominent feature of Modernism is the
phenomenon called avant-garde (advanced gurd), that is a small, self conscious
group of artists and authors who dellberately undertake in Ezra Pound’s phrase,
to “make it new”.
Those writers broke all rules and
regulation and peep into forbidden subject matters. They shocked the
sensibilities of the conventional readers and to challenge the norms and
pieties of the bourgeois culture. Peater Burger’s ‘Theory of the Anant – Grade’
(1984) is a neo – marxist analysis both of Modernism and of its distinctive
cultural formation, the went garde.
Modernism was an aesthetic movement
brought about by both a radical shift in consciousness and a violent transformation
of social conditions in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. The change in society was abrupt and violent. The capitalists became
powerful. Political and economical power went in the hands of capitalists and
land owners were devoid of the power which they owed previously, religion had
control over people of the society and authorities. This was displaced by
enlightenment humanism. People become fully conscious and rational. The
immediate effects of the industrial revolution had been a process of
urbanization whereby cottage industries and rural areas were swallowed up by
the new, encroaching cities and the sense of belonging to a community of
sharing a common social bond, was strained as individuals were shocked into
anonymity, swallowed by the masses swarming though the cities. The Modern
condition is represented by the term ‘alienation’. There is a hazard of noise.
It’s the age of Informative Study. The sense of purpose and continuity that had
previously held was ruined and fragmented. Modernism was a an artistic attempt
to capture this sense of fragmentation and alienation.
The new ‘realism’ was one of experiment
and immovation, genre distinctions were collapsed and challaged as poetry
started becoming prosaic, and prose become poetic. Novelists such as Virginia
Woolf, James Joyce and poets like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot revealed that the
franmentary nature of modernity is always painful.
Modernism is a literature of mourning,
forever, lamenting the tragic loss of the golden age of unity and belonging.
One optimist thing is that truth and beauty are still visible in the art of
Modernism, but only through the shifting surfaces of the shattered fragments
shored against our rain.
Modernism was the art form which
captured the experience of Modernity, During the twentieth century, however,
the expressive theory of authorship came under sustained attach in the
Modernist insistence on the so called impersonality of the poet, Pound
undaaneted, he went on to become the unofficial ringleader of literacy
modernism in London in the years 1908 – 1920 and eventually achieved a huge
influence over modern poetic taste.
The phase of modern literature that we
call ‘Modernism’ was marked not only with radical creative experiment but also
by economics tic critical declaration and proscriptions issued by poets and
novelist : that Milton was a wrathless poet (Pound) that Hamlet was an incoherent
play (Eliot), that Arnold Bennet was not interested in people (Woolf) and that
Hawtherone and Tolstoy were leans who evaded the aimer truths of their own
works (D.H. Lawrence). The initial delight of Modernism lay party in its
impatient demand for critical discrimination between the culturally living and
the culturally, dead and so in its determination to cast aside cautions
academic literary, history in favour of rewriting ‘tradition’ on its own terms.
New liking developed for fragmented forms, discontinuous narrative and random – seeming collages of disparate
material. This shift leads to produce a literature which seems dedicated to
experimentation and innovation. Modernism never regained it momentum when it
returned in the 1960s.
v Postmodernism:
Postmodernism become famous since 1980s.
J.A.
Cuddon – describes postmodernism as characterized by an electric approach,
parody and pastiche.’
One
way of establishing the distinction between modernism and postmodernism is to
dissolve the sequential link between them, by retrospectively redefining
certain aspects of modernism as postmodernist. This means they are not two
successive stages in the history of the arts, but two apposed moods or
attitudes differ.
The
tern ‘postmodernism’ is often applied to the literature and art after world war
II (1939-1945). Postmodernism involves counter traditional experiments of
modernism post modernism in literature and the arts has parallels with the
movement known as post structuralism in linguistic and literary theory’s post
structuralisms tries to find
meaningfulness.
For postmodernism, the loss of unity is
not something to be mourned but something to be celebrated. It is an
announcement of freedom. The tragic becomes farcical, as the search for truth
has been discarded with illusions. Thus post modernism’s aesthetic is not only
fraclured and fragmented, it is flat. Opposing the surface model of modernism,
post modernism’s art denies the possibility of depth, post modernism art seeks
to deconstruct the previously held dichotomy between art and pop culture. Post modernism
thrives on surplus and promiscus excess. It has no controlling, linear
narrative, no predetermined goal or point of clause (tools) and its refusal of
internal structural meaning legitimate all possible and potential meanings.
Post modernism is anti art, it as a direct challenge to the authority of the
expert, and claims to liberate creativity from the predetermined, central discourses
of society. Just as modernism was the art form which captured the expeience of
modernity, so post modernism is the art form that captural epoch which reflects
the triumph of capitalism. Post modernism provided the best references Dick
Hebidge, Jurgen Habermas, Terry Eagle ton and Christopher Norris have rallied
and railed against the turn towards post modernism. It is a positive light. For
Eagleton, post modernism is a state of
post radicalism.
For
French intellectuals 1968 is a crucial year and it is impossible to understand
the pessimism, defeatism, and quiestism inherent in post modernism without at
least some understanding of this historical moment. Post modernism is in many
ways, part of the harvest sown in the 1960s. The signs of betrayal and stings
of disillusionment have never really headed. But it, in the eyes of Lyotard and
his contemporaries, 68 revealed itself as a failure of the revolutionary aims,
it was also a triumph for cultural leftism. It the big picture is unchangeable,
if the centre is unassailable, then localized strategies of resistance become the
only pragmatic option.
Bauman
asserts that the move from modernism is post modernism occurred when
modernism’s doubt that the evidence is as yet incomplete, that ignorance has
not yet been toppled, gave way to the second, always present, always repressed
doubt that opened the way to post modernism.
The
problem with post modernism no matter how you approach it, is that both its
radical potential and its structural in ability to achieve that potential are
undeniable. As a philosophy, it leads to title more than a sterile skepticism.
Post modernism offers space for the unlimited potentialities and marginal
position to be explored. To achieve anything from the post modernism
experience, however the cycle should be broken to act. Post modernism plays an
importance role in building up the contradictions in the master narratives and
power discourses. It offers a moment of tension a temporary, provisional and
always precarious middle ground that is used to see things in a different way.
In the world of instant transmission and information overload, in a world where
the speed of life has been accelerated, and the attention span compressed post modernism
provides a welcome brake example an opportunity to decelerate and to freeze the
time to fulfill the imitative and find the critical moment.
No comments:
Post a Comment