Paper no.: 7 LiteraryTheory & Criticism

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Name: Aarti H. Vadher

Course: M.A (English)

Topic: New criticism, Modernism, Postmodernism

Semester: 2

Unit: 5

Roll.no: 5

Paper no.: 7

Email Id:artivadher10@gmail.com

Submitted to: Dr. Dilip Barad,

Smt: S.B.Gardi

New Criticism, Modernism, Postmodernism

New Criticism:

          New Criticism came by the publication of John Crowe Ransom’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 opposed 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 Penn Warren ‘Understanding poetry’ (1938) and ‘Understanding Fiction’ (1943) did much to make the New Criticism the predominant 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 on 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 20^th 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 often cited by the new critics was an important precursor of the new critical emphasis combination of the intellectual and the emotional.

          New Criticism has been considered a conservative practice, whose origins demonstrate the covert and sub his aestheticization of the political. It is worth remembering this, as it helps explain the extreme hostility felt toward new critics 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 ‘Tension’, ‘irony’ and ‘paradox’ occur 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 approaches to literature, and with its emphasis on rigor 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 20^th century culture. Modernism is the name given to the movement which dominated the arts and culture of the first half of the 20^thcentury. The movement of modernism in arts brought down much of the structure of early 20^th century practice in music painting literature and architecture. Modernism (1890 – 1910) poses Vienna as center 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 favor 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, and 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. Thickness such as friedrich. Nietzsche (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, and 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 guard), that is a small, self-conscious group of artists and authors who deliberately 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. Peter Burger’s ‘Theory of the Anent – Grade’ (1984) is a neo – Marxist analysis both of Modernism and of its distinctive cultural formation, went grade.

Modernism was an aesthetic movement brought about by both a radical shift in consciousness and a violent transformation of social conditions in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The change in society was abrupt and violent. The capitalists became powerful. Political and economic 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 an artistic attempt to capture this sense of fragmentation and alienation.

The new ‘realism’ was one of experiment and immolation, genre distinctions were collapsed and challenged 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 fragmentary 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 undaunted, 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 Hawthorne 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 favor 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 its 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 fractured 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 experience of modernity, so post modernism is the art form that cultural 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 quietism 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 Leotard 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 center 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.