ASSIGNMENT New criticism, modernism and Post modernism

 
Literary Theory  and Criticism -2

Assignment Topic -  New criticism, modernism and Post modernism

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      Name : Parmar Darshna V.
    Roll No :  5
        Year  : 2017-2019
       M. A.  :Sem  - 2
Paper No  :  7  Literary Theory and
                      criticism and  Indian Poetics 2     Email ID :                                         Parmardarshana1997@gmail.com
      Enrollment No  :  2069108420180039
  Topic  :  New criticism,  Modernism ,
                       Post modernism
                 Submitted by  : Any. S. B. Gardi
                        Department of English
                              M. K. Bhavnagar
                                  University

   New criticism
          

     What  is new  criticism  ?     

Ans....       The new criticism is a type of formalist literary criticism that reached its height during the 1940s and 1950 and that received its name from John Crowe Rans Son’s 1941 book The New Criticism. New critics treat a work of literature as if it were a self-contained, self-referential object. Rather than basing their interpretations of a text on the reader’s response, the author’s stated intensions or parallels between the text and historical contexts (such as author’s life). New critics perform a close reading concentrating on the relationship within the text that gives it its own distinctive character or form. New critics emphasize that the structure of a work should not be divorced from meaning viewing the two as constituting a quasi-organic unity. Special attention is paid to repetition, particularly of image or symbols but also of sound affects and rhythms in poetry. New critics especially appreciated the use of literary devices, such a irony to achieve a balance or reconciliation between dissimilar, even confliction elements in a text.

             Because it stressed close textual analysis and viewing the text as a carefully crafted, orderly object containing formal observable patterns, the new criticism has sometimes been called an “objective” approach to literature. New critics are more likely than certain other critics to believe and say that the meaning of a text can be known objectively. For instance, reader response either of each reader’s experience or of the norms of that governs or particular interpretive community and deconstructors argue that texts mean opposite things at the same time.

       We can divide New criticism’s theory in three parts according to the three theories on it by three critics, the criticism of T. S. Eliot, Theories of I. A. Richards and Practice of William Empson. These are first critics of seminal. Critics of Second seminal are Cleanth Brooks, R. P. Blackmun, Robert, Penn Warren and W. K. Wimsat.

·  Richards’s Practical Criticism: a study of Literary Judgment (1929)

·   William Empson – seven types of Ambiguity

·  T. S. Eliot – “Traditional and the Individual Talent” and “Hamlet and His Problems”


·   Cleanth Brooks’ the Well-Wrought Um. (1947)

·   Michael Schmidt and Grevel Lindop’s British poetry since 1960 (1972)

·  Calvin Bendient’s Eight Contemporary Poets (1974)

·   P. R. King’s Nine Contemporary Poets : a Critical Introduction (1979)

·   Christopher Rick’s The force of poetry (1987)

         How a new criticism sees a text – A) as a complete work of art B) its example to validate our interpretation and C) source to analyze and get true meaning. The only way to know if a given author’s intention or a given reader’s interpretation which actually represent the true meaning is by carefully examine and close reading. T. S. Eliot wants his readers to have a wide reading for any text. For new criticism the complexity of a text is created by the multiple and often conflicting meaning in it. These meanings are a product primarily of four kinds of linguistic devices:



1.   Parasox

2.    Ambiguity

3.    Irony

4.    Tension

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

   Modernism :

             What is modernism ? 
         
   

 Modernism is an artistic and cultural movement that flourished in the first decades of the 20 century. About the time of WWI.

               Modernism was very important in Europe because " founded " postmodernism movement. Which developed in the second half of the 20  century.

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.

   Post modernism 

       Introduction 

        “Postmodernism” is a term usually applied to the period in literature  and  literary theory since the 1960s, though some regard postmodernism as the prevailing intellectual mood since World War-2 ended in 1945. Numerous Philosophers, critics, and belletristic writers can be seen as precursors or early representatives of the cultural and aesthetic approach that would come to be called postmodernism, among them Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Bretch, Jorge Luis Borges, and Roland Barthes. Postmodernism is characterized by a strikingly radical skepticism toward all aspects of western culture, the impetus for which many practitioners of postmodern theory they trace back to the writings of the nineteenth century, philosopher Frederic Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s spiritual descendants seek, in so many words, a new kind of meaning independent of the prevailing cultural “myth” of objective truth.

Defining Terms:


                                 What exactly is meant by the label “Modernism” and how does Postmodernism differ from it? In the English speaking world, modernism has a very specific meaning among most literature scholars, referring not to the “Modern Age” since the Enlightenment, or to “Modern” in the sense of contemporary, but to the period after World War-1, When T.S.Eliot, James Joyes, W.B.Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein were in their heyday. Postmodernism offers no suggestion of anything like a comprehensive substitute world- view. Postmodernism means to make a clean break with the past in the sense that the past and its way of looking at the world become the subject of satirical, often sarcastic “play” with historical figures texts, and ideologies. Postmodernism represents a final disillusion with western cultural preconceptions and indulges in a merciless “rethinking of history, pedagogy, and aesthetics in literature, the visual arts, and architecture”. By the same token, postmodernism in the days after the end of the cold war (1945-1989), is no closer to offering direction but asserts only its prerogative to question infinitely and to subvert. 

          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.