1. Modernism and Post Modernism in Literature _§_ Wednesday, 08 June 2016Wednesday, 08 June 2016Wednesday, 08 June 2016Wednesday, 08 June 2016

2. Modernism Modernist literature expression of the modern era (1901-45). tends to themes of individuality, the randomness of life, mistrust of government and religion and the disbelief in absolute truths. Influences – three intellectuals great impact on the Modern Era Charles Darwin (1809-1882), Karl Marx (1818-1883) Sigmund Freud. Modern authors not specifically evolutionists, or Marxists or accepted Freudian psychology; rather, they fuelled and framed the perspectives of Modern art and literature

3. Today, some of Freud's specific theories are thought to be rather unscientific in their methodological system of achievement. ideas had a profound influence on art and literature as much as on our common, daily perceptions/conceptions of existence and reality:

4. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) poet, chiefly wrote of his spiritual relations with god, his poetry only became recognized in 1918 The late publication effectively made the intimate though “hermetic” difficulties expressed in his work anticipate modern poetry, and so effected a major influence on later writers. James Joyce (1882-1941) was an Irish novelist, short story novelist, poet and playwright born in Dublin wrote several volumes +autobiographical novel Joyce subsequently wrote an unsuccessful play + a volume of verses. These were amid the beginnings of his two great works to come, Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. Both occupied a large part of his later years.

5. WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS - (1885- 1939) poet, one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. 1923 - awarded the Nobel Prize Interested Mainly In mysticism, spiritualism, occultism and astrology In 1916, Yeats suddenly changed style to write realistic poems: poems as urgent and as uncluttered as a newspaper article. Some characteristics of Modernism in Yeats include: Demotic language (not poetic language) Political subject matter Ugliness and violence, where these are appropriate to the subject matter (no attempt to make everything aesthetically pleasing in a poeticised vision of loveliness).

6. CONTRAST IN YEATS’ POETRY TRADITIONAL YEATS POEM: HE WISHES FOR THE CLOTHS OF HEAVEN HAD I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. MODERNIST Yeats POEM: THE SECOND COMING TURNING and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity

7. Modernism Virginia Woolf During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary circles member of the Bloomsbury Group. famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928) – precursor of metafiction ( a fantastic historical biography – spans almost 400 years in the lifetime of protagonist. The work conceived as a distinct reversal from more structured and demanding novels. Orlando, ages only thirty-six years and changes gender from man to woman - may have been intended to be a satire, however, it touches on important issues of gender, self-knowledge, and truth with Virginia Woolf's deeply poetic narrative style the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

8. POST MODERNISM Modern/Post Modern Period in Literature-1900-1980 Content Lonely individual fighting to find peace and comfort in a world that has lost its absolute values and traditions Man is nothing except what he makes of himself-belief in situational ethics, no absolute values. Decisions are based on the situation one is involved in at the moment Mixing of fantasy with nonfiction blurs lines of reality for reader - loss of the hero in literature, destruction made possible by technology Genres/Styles poetry free verse Epiphanies (peaks of psychic “Nirvana” – beyond rational thought and state of being) are a more commonly used technique in literature speeches memoir novels

9. Epiphany Epiphany - manifestation, and by Christian thinkers used to signify a manifestation of God’s presence in the created world. In the early draft of A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, entitled Stephen Hero (published posthumously in 1944), James Joyce adapted the term to secular experience, to signify a sense of a sudden radiance and revelation while observing a commonplace object. an epiphany – a sudden spiritual manifestation. Its soul, as opposed to its objective appearance, the deeper significance – soars upwards to us from the objectiveness of its “appearance”. The depth of the commonest object seems radiant. Thus the object achieves its epiphany. Joyce’s short stories and novels include a number of epiphanies.... Epiphany - the standard term for the description, (frequent in modern poetry and prose fiction), of the sudden flare into revelation of an ordinary object or scene. Joyce, invented the term as a substitute for what earlier authors had called The Moment.

10. POST MODERNISM Modern/Post Modern Period in Literature-1900-1980 stream of consciousness – interior monologue, detached, direct and apparently unemotional voice, humorless present tense - magic realism Magic realism Contains fantastical elements - may be intuitively logical but are never explained Characters accept rather than question the logic of the magical element Exhibits a richness of sensory details - Distorts time so that it is cyclical or so that it appears absent. Another technique is to collapse time in order to create a setting in which the present repeats or resembles the past Inverts cause and effect, ex. A character may suffer before a tragedy occurs

11. POST MODERNISM Modern/Post Modern Period in Literature-1900-1980 Incorporates legend or folklore - presents events from multiple perspectives, ie. belief and disbelief or the colonizers and the colonized - mirroring of either past and present, astral and physical planes, or of characters the reader is uncertain, whether to believe in the “unusual” interpretation or the realist interpretation of the events in the story Effect an approach to life as “Seize life for the moment” and get all you can out of it.

12. Post Modernism in Literature_§_ Wednesday, 08 June 2016Wednesday, 08 June 2016Wednesday, 08 June 2016Wednesday, 08 June 2016 Historical Context British Empire loses 1 million soldiers to World War I Winston Churchill leads Britain through WW II – Germans bomb England directly British colonies demand independence Key Authors James Joyce Joseph Conrad D.H. Lawrence Graham Greene Dylan Thomas Nadine Gordimer George Orwell William Butler Yeats George Bernard Shaw

13. Post Modernism in Literature _§_ Wednesday, 08 June 2016Wednesday, 08 June 2016Wednesday, 08 June 2016Wednesday, 08 June 2016 Post modernism – use of unusual techniques : fragmentation, paradox, and questionable narrators; – questioning the distinctions between high and low culture through the use of satire and burlesque or the combination of subjects and genres not previously deemed fit for literature (violent family life, deconstruction of the American dream, etc.) – notable external influence (explorative poetry – [T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas], drama – [Pirandello, Brecht], art – [Magritte, Dali], theoretical physics – [Einstein, Plank]) Contemporary Period – 1980/Present Content concern with connections between people by exploring interpretations of the past open-mindedness and courage that comes from being an outsider escaping those ways of living that blind and dull the human spirit

14. POST MODERNISM Genres/Styles - all genres represented Fictional-confessional/diaries – contemporary fiction written in the first person Narratives, both fictional and nonfictional, are emotion-provoking, witty comments(intrusive narrating voice) humorous elements, irony The process of the storytelling is emphasized - autobiographical essays mixing of fantasy with nonfiction – unfocused/confused time sequence - reality moves in a chaotic “order” (flow) for the reader who must interpret the sequence of events (metafiction) Effect – reader involvement becomes essential – staccato, “meta-physical” re-elaboration of language, interpretative metaphors. Physical and intellectual blur into one image (imagist art to writing)

15. Post Modernism _§_ Wednesday, 08 June 2016Wednesday, 08 June 2016Wednesday, 08 June 2016Wednesday, 08 June 2016 Historical Context – a world growing smaller with ease of communication between social groups/ethnicities The world launched into a new beginning - century and millennium media culture – [web, open source – alternative external “cyber-hyper-spaces”] – Interpret values and events for individuals Key Authors Seamus Heaney, Doris Lessing, Louis de Bernieres, Kazuo Ishiguro, Tom Stoppard, Salman Rushdie. John Le Carre, Ken Follett, Leonard Cohen (musical poetic narrative) – (Guccini, DeAndre) Tom Wolfe, Raymond Carver, Castaneda, Joseph Heller(Catch 22), Kurt Vonnegut (new science-what-if-fantasy-fiction) – from early narrative masters, Orwell, Huxley

16. Post-postmodernism – Umberto Eco explains postmodernism as a kind of double-coding, and as a trans-historical phenomenon: Freudian/R. D.Laing – an application to behavior – I know that you know that I know you know what I know… [P]ostmodernism... [is] not a trend to be chronologically defined, but, rather, an ideal category - or better still a Kunstwollen, a way of operating.... I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her "I love you madly", because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly". At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence. The sky is no longer the limit to human perception and interaction – whether on paper or in music, art – etc.

17. Post Modernism Kurt Vonnegut Post modernist author, first works after 1969. combines science fiction elements with an analysis of human condition. Slaughterhouse Five treats one of the most horrific massacres in European history, the firebombing of Dresden. Kurt Vonnegut has written extensively - plays, essays and short fiction. his novels became classics of the American counterculture, a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and ’70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States. Kurt Vonnegut uses humour to tackle the basic questions of human existence:

18. Post Modernism Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well? In 1998, Vonnegut returned to a former World War II air-raid shelter in Dresden, Germany, where he was a prisoner of war. His experience there was the basis for his novel, "Slaughterhouse-Five." Kurt Vonnegut not only wrote metaphysical themes. With a blend of SCIENCE FICTION, PHILOSOPHY and JOKES, he also wrote about the irresponsible consumer culture, ie, the destruction of the environment.

19. Post Modernism Ian McEwan Atonement by Ian McEwan employs several characteristics of postmodernism in its narrative techniques that foreground the conflict between differing perceptions of truth and the elusiveness of memory. Turning away will not produce any result. Adaption starring Keira Knightly.

20. Post Modernism Atonement and Postmodernist Characteristics Atonement questions not only authorial authority but also the consciousness of the mind, which distorts truth and history, and ardently illustrates "how easy it was to get everything wrong, completely wrong". The structure of the narrative foregrounds the conflict between the different perceptions of truth, facts and beliefs, and truth and illusion, and reflects on a smaller scale the similarly written, similarly constructed history of the Second World War.

21. Post Modernism Louis de Bernières, lives in Norfolk, published his first novel in 1990 and was selected by Granta magazine as one of the twenty Best of Young British Novelists in 1993. De Bernières' most famous book is his fourth, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, in which the hero is an Italian soldier who is part of the occupying force on a Greek island during the Second World War. In 2001, the book was turned into a film. De Bernières strongly disapproved of the film version, commenting, "It would be impossible for a parent to be happy about its baby's ears being put on backwards." He does however state that it has redeeming qualities, and particularly likes the soundtrack.

22. Kurt Vonnegut