Trends and Movements

Trends and Movements 

Literary modernism, or modernist literature, has its origins in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mainly in Europe and North America, and is characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional ways of writing, in both poetry and prose fiction.

The horrors of World War I (1914-19), with its accompanying atrocities and senselessness became the catalyst for the Modernist movement in literature and art.Modernist authors felt betrayed by the war, believing the institutions in which they were taught to believe had led the civilized world into a bloody conflict. They no longer considered these institutions as reliable means to access the meaning of life, and therefore turned within themselves to discover the answers.

Characteristics of the Movement

Modernist writers were influenced by such thinkers as Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, amongst others, who raised questions about the rationality of the human mind.

Marked by a strong and intentional break with tradition. This break includes a strong reaction against established religious, political, and social views.

A central preoccupation of Modernism is with the inner self and consciousness.

The Modernist cares little for Nature, Being, or the overarching structures of history.

The “unreliable” narrator supplanted the omniscient, trustworthy narrator of preceding centuries, and readers were forced to question even the most basic assumptions about how the novel should operate.

There is no such thing as absolute truth. All things are relative.

Stream of consciousness 

stream of consciousness, narrative technique in nondramatic fiction intended to render the flow of myriad impressions—visual, auditory, physical, associative, and subliminal—that impinge on the consciousness of an individual and form part of his awareness along with the trend of his rational thoughts. The term was first used by the psychologist William James in The Principles of Psychology (1890). As the psychological novel developed in the 20th century, some writers attempted to capture the total flow of their characters’ consciousness, rather than limit themselves to rational thoughts. To represent the full richness, speed, and subtlety of the mind at work, the writer incorporates snatches of incoherent thought, ungrammatical constructions, and free association of ideas, images, and words at the pre-speech level.

The stream-of-consciousness novel commonly uses the narrative techniques of interior monologue. Probably the most famous example is James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), a complex evocation of the inner states of the characters Leopold and Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. Other notable examples include Leutnant Gustl (1901) by Arthur Schnitzler, an early use of stream of consciousness to recreate the atmosphere of pre-World War I Vienna; William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929), which records the fragmentary and impressionistic responses in the minds of three members of the Compson family to events that are immediately being experienced or events that are being remembered; and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931), a complex novel in which six characters recount their lives from childhood to old age.

Avant-garde 

The avant-garde is a person or work that is experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society. It is frequently characterized by aesthetic innovation and initial unacceptability.

Surrealism 

Surrealism, movement in visual art and literature, flourishing in Europe between World Wars I and II. Surrealism grew principally out of the earlier Dada movement, which before World War I produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason; but Surrealism’s emphasis was not on negation but on positive expression. The movement represented a reaction against what its members saw as the destruction wrought by the “rationalism” that had guided European culture and politics in the past and that had culminated in the horrors of World War I. According to the major spokesman of the movement, the poet and critic André Breton, who published The Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in “an absolute reality, a surreality.” Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters alike.

Expressionism 

Expressionism, artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse within a person. The artist accomplishes this aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements. In a broader sense Expressionism is one of the main currents of art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and its qualities of highly subjective, personal, spontaneous self-expression are typical of a wide range of modern artists and art movements. Expressionism can also be seen as a permanent tendency in Germanic and Nordic art from at least the European Middle Ages, particularly in times of social change or spiritual crisis, and in this sense it forms the converse of the rationalist and classicizing tendencies of Italy and later of France.

More specifically, Expressionism as a distinct style or movement refers to a number of German artists, as well as Austrian, French, and Russian ones, who became active in the years before World War I and remained so throughout much of the interwar period.

Absurdism

Absurdism means the internal conflict between human tendency to find the inherent value and the meaning of life and his inability to find any.

In other words, absurdism refers to humans struggle to find the region in his life and his inability to find it due to humanly limited constraints.

Thus absurdism refers to something which is humanly impossible rather than logically impossible. In this sense, one who tries to find inherent values and meaning in life will ultimately fail because of impossible certain.

The absurdism rose during the period of world wars. These world wars had shaken the whole world. The mass killings of millions of people made the writers of the age believe that the world is meaningless.

Everybody has his own way of finding meanings. If we use the concept of Absurdism in terms of War it can be interpreted that nations indulged in the wars in order to achieve something for themselves through the war means, though the brutality is against humanity.

The two important writers Kierkegaard and Camus have tried to give solutions in their works with The Sickness unto Death and The myth of Sisyphus respectively.  According to Camus, there are 3 solutions to absurdism.

Adopting or creating a meaning Framework like religion the exists consider it as philosophical suicide because by submitting to an idea or being which is considered to be beyond the observed limits once freedom.

Suicide: it is a solution in which a person considers life meaningless boring or painful and that ends his life according to Camus, death is not observed but once attempt to kill himself is.

Acceptance of the Absurd: it is the solution in which a person accepts the absurdity of life he needed submits to any religious or moral constants know as his life and lives at his greatest extent of freedom.

The Rebel Poem Class 7 in English Explanation in Hindi

In other words, absurdism refers to humans struggle to find the region in his life and his inability to find it due to humanly limited constraints.

Thus absurdism refers to something which is humanly impossible rather than logically impossible. In this sense, one who tries to find inherent values and meaning in life will ultimately fail because of impossible certain.

The absurdism rose during the period of world wars. These world wars had shaken the whole world. The mass killings of millions of people made the writers of the age believe that the world is meaningless.

Everybody has his own way of finding meanings. If we use the concept of Absurdism in terms of War it can be interpreted that nations indulged in the wars in order to achieve something for themselves through the war means, though the brutality is against humanity.

The two important writers Kierkegaard and Camus have tried to give solutions in their works with The Sickness unto Death and The myth of Sisyphus respectively.  According to Camus, there are 3 solutions to absurdism

Adopting or creating a meaning Framework like religion the exists consider it as philosophical suicide because by submitting to an idea or being which is considered to be beyond the observed limits once freedom.

Suicide: it is a solution in which a person considers life meaningless boring or painful and that ends his life according to Camus, death is not observed but once attempt to kill himself is.

Acceptance of the Absurd: it is the solution in which a person accepts the absurdity of life he needed submits to any religious or moral constants know as his life and lives at his greatest extent of freedom.

Absurdism is different from existentialism and Nihilism as explained below:

“Nihilism holds that there is no meaning of life and creating a meaning is useless. Existentialism holds that do the world is observed one can create the meaning of his own to it. Absurdism, on the other hand, believes that world is meaningless and one should accept as well as Rebel against it”.

Characteristics 

Absurd dramas are lyrical, like music: they describe an atmosphere and an experience of archetypal human situations.

Life is essentially meaningless, hence sorrowful.

There is no hope because of the inevitable futility of man’s efforts.

Reality cannot be borne unless relieved by illusions and dreams.

The absurd play includes conventional speech, slogans, technical jargon and clichés in order to make people aware of the possibility of moving beyond common speech conventions and communicating more authentically.

Objects hold a more significant position than the language.

Man is fascinated by death which permanently replaces dream

s and illusions.

There is no action or plot. What happens is very little as nothing meaningful can happen.

The final situation is absurd or comic.

Absurd drama is not purposeful and specific as it solves no problem. It is like an abstract painting which does not convey a particular meaning.

It negates rationalism because it feels that rational thought, like language, only deals with the superficial aspects of things.

It considers language a failure to express the essence of human experience, not being able to penetrate beyond its surface.

There is no dramatic conflict in the absurd plays.

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Surrealism". Encyclopedia Britannica, 15 Dec. 2021, https://www.britannica.com/art/Surrealism. Accessed 10 May 2022.

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "stream of consciousness". Encyclopedia Britannica, 28 Feb. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/art/stream-of-consciousness. Accessed 10 May 2022.

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Expressionism". Encyclopedia Britannica, 5 Nov. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/art/Expressionism. Accessed 10 May 2022.

“Absurdism in Literature; Meaning & Characteristics • English Summary .” English Summary, 21 Nov. 2017, https://englishsummary.com/absurdism-literature/#:~:text=Absurdism%20means%20the%20internal%20conflict,due%20to%20humanly%20limited%20constraints.