Modernism and Postmodernism

La Pastiche

No doubt, before an idea of the postmodernism there was another supposed the Modernism. It came into existence to the fashionable period combined with manufacture, market-oriented capitalist economies, new social categories, democracy, and Enlightenment values- ”reason and progress”. This controversial philosophy, the philosophy of the Enlightenment, it's attainable that ”the institution of objective facts and universal values.”

Post modernism broadly refers to a socio cultural and literary theory and a shift in perspective in a a variety of disciplines like social science, art, architecture, literature, fashion, communication etc. It is believed to have began in some 1950s. Work were decentred which did not portray any goal in life but merely represented an age of civilisation. 

Similarities between Modernism and Post Modernism

Post modernism is at once a continuation of and a break away from the modernist stance. Both reject rigid boundaries between high and low art as well as reflect the insecurities, disorientation, and fragmentation of the 20th century. Both modernism and post modernism were greatly influenced by events like world wars, industrialization, and urbanization. Both employ pastiche, i.e., imitation of another's style. Pastiche and parody serve to remind the reader that the work is fictional and constructed.

Differences between Modernism and Post Modernism

Though the works are fragmented modernism laments for the loss of the past whereas, post modernism celebrates the same. Modernism is a development in writing that was dominating in the twentieth century, described by a solid and conscious break from the conventional styles of exposition and verse. Conversely, postmodernism was a reaction against modernism and was set apart by its dependence on story strategies like unreliable narrator, fragmentation, parody etc. So forth Samuel Beckett, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Sylvia Plath, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Butler Yeats, and Virginia Woolf are a few instances of modernist writers. Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, John Barth, Vladimir Nabokov, Umberto Eco, Richard Kalich, Giannina Braschi, John Hawkes, and Kurt Vonnegu are a few instances of postmodernist creators. 

Modernist writers purposely split away from customary styles of composing and focused  on internal identity and cognizance in their compositions. The stream of consciousness was the significant strategy presented during this development. Be that as it may, postmodernist writers intentionally utilized a combination of earlier styles. They additionally utilized methods like fragmentation, intertextuality, unreliable narrator, dark humor and paradox. This is the primary contrast between modernism and postmodernism in writing. Modernist writers believed in coherence and unity and emphasised the importance of rationality and order. In modernist view:

More rationality would bring more order which would further bring better society.

Post modernism criticised binary oppositions cynically and believed everything to be a disorder. In post modernism there are no depths but only surfaces. Post modernist writers deconstruct and question the orders which modernists believed would bring stability and unity.

Some Examples of Post Modern Novels

• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
• Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
• Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
• The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

Some common literary techniques in postmodernism are as follows:

Pastiche – taking various ideas from previous work and styles and pasting them together to create a new story

Temporal distortion – non-linear timeline and fragmented narrative

Metafiction – Making readers aware of the fictional nature of the text they are reading

Intertextuality – acknowledging previous literary works within a literary work

Magical Realism – incorporating magical or unrealistic events into a realistic story

Maximalism – highly detailed, disorganized and long writing

Minimalism – using common and non-exceptional characters and events

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Angry Young Men

  

 Angry Young Men, various British novelists and playwrights who emerged within the 1950s who expressed scorn and disaffection with the established sociopolitical order of their country. Their impatience and discontent were especially aroused by what they perceived as the hypocrisy and mediocrity of the upper and middle classes of their time.

    In July 1957 British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan told fellow Conservatives at a rally in Bedford, England, that “most of our people have never had it so good.” The generation of novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers who became known as the “Angry Young Men” couldn’t have disagreed more. From the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, they produced a community of arresting works that were grounded in the “kitchen sink” reality of working-class life which railed against the class-conscious British social order, and reflected the alienated, rebellious, and pessimistic mood of many in post-World War II Britain. 

Kitchen Sink Drama

    The Angry Young Men were a new breed of self emerging intellectuals who were mostly of working class, of lower middle-class origin or labourers. Some had been educated at the post-war Red-Brick universities at the state’s expense, though a few were from the Oxford. They shared an outspoken disrespect for the British system regarding the class, its traditional network of pedigreed families, and the elitist Oxford and Cambridge universities. They showed an equally uninhibited contempt for the colorless state of postwar welfare state, and their writings frequently expressed raw anger and frustration as the postwar reforms failed to meet exalted aspirations for genuine change to all the people irrespective of their class.

Liverpool-Red Brick University

Oxford University

    The pattern that was clear in John Wain's novel Hurry on Down (1953) and in Lucky Jim (1954) by Kingsley Amis was solidified in 1956 in the play "Look Back in Anger", which turned into the delegate work of the development. At the point when the Royal Court Theater's press specialist portrayed the play's creator John Osborne as an "angry young man," the name was stretched out to every one of his peers who communicated rage at the tirelessness of class differentiations, pride in their lower-class characteristics, and contempt for anything highbrow or "fake." When Sir Laurence Olivier assumed the main part in Osborne's subsequent play, The Entertainer (1957), the Angry Young Men were recognized as the prevailing abstract power of the decade.

    Their books and plays commonly highlight a rootless, lower-center or average male hero who sees society with disdain and scornful humour and may have clashes with power in authority yet who is by the by focused in the mission for upward versatility.

    Among different scholars embraced in the term are the writers John Braine (Room at the Top, 1957) and Alan Sillitoe (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1958) and the dramatists Bernard Kops (The Hamlet of Stepney Green, 1956) and Arnold Wesker (Chicken Soup with Barley, 1958). Like that of the Beat development in the United States, the force of the Angry Young Men was depleted in the mid 1960s.

John Osborne

John Osborne

The writer John Osborne was the model, and his particular play Look Back in Anger (1956) stood out to a style of dramatization standing out emphatically from the sophisticated and downplayed works of Terence Rattigan that had been in design. Osborne's The Entertainer (1957) got his standing, with Laurence Olivier playing the hero Archie Rice. Osborne turned into an effective business visionary, joining forces with Tony Richardson to frame the film creation organization Woodfall. Osborne was professed to be one of the main scholarly figures of the Angry Young Men "movement". This "movement" was recognized after the Second World War as some British scholarly people started to address standard mores. Osborne communicated his own interests through his plays and could be depended upon to give controversial "angry" declarations, conveyed with a youthfulness of immaturity contrasted with restless youth.

A few pundits scorned Osborne for an absence of development in his assertions, and fuelled a discussion about his legislative issues and those of the "movement". Osborne likewise had steady and regularly sarcastic analysis of the British Left. In 1961, he unveiled features with "Letter to my Fellow Countrymen" that addressed a "damn you, England" mentality; and challenged Britain's choice to join the arms race. Osborne firmly communicated outrage at what Britain had become around then, yet additionally at what he felt it had failed to become.

• Look Back in Anger
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    Osborne's play Look Back in Anger was the fantastic abstract work that affected the idea of the Angry Young Man. He composed the play to communicate what it felt like to live in England during the 1950s. The primary issues that the Angry Young Men had were "impatience with the status quo, refusal to be co-opted by a bankrupt society, an instinctive solidarity with the lower classes". Referred to as "kitchen sink realism", artistic works started to manage lower class themes. In a long time before Osborne and different writer, less consideration had been given to writing that enlightened the treatment and living conditions experienced by the lower classes. As the Angry Young Man Movement started to express these topics, the acknowledgment of related issues were more far reaching. Osborne portrayed these issues inside his play through the eyes of his hero, Jimmy. All through the play, Jimmy was seeing "the wrong people go hungry, the wrong people be loved, the wrong people dying".

    In Britain, following the Second World War, the personal satisfaction for lower-class residents was still poor; Osborne utilized this topic to show how the territory of Britain was liable of disregard towards those that required help the most. In the play there were comparisons of educated individuals with savages, enlightening the significant distinction between classes. Alison comments on this issue while she, Jimmy and Cliff are sharing an apartment, expressing how "she felt she had been placed into a jungle". Jimmy was addressed as an embodiment of the youthful, defiant post-war age that scrutinized the state and its actions. Look Back in Anger furnished a portion of its crowd with the expectation that Osborne's work would rejuvenate the British theatre and empower it to go about as a "harbinger of the New Left".

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THE ELIZABETHAN AGE (1558-1603)

 

  

    The Elizabethan Age belonged to the Tudor Dynasty (England). It is considered as an extension of Renaissance. The Elizabethan Age is often referred to as The Golden Age in English and also The Nest of Singing Birds.

The Tudor Dynasty

    This "golden age" represented the peak of the English Renaissance and saw the flowering of poetry, music, art and literature. The era is most famous for its theatre, as renowned writer William Shakespeare and many others composed plays that broke free of England's past style of theatre. It was an age of both exploration and expansion abroad, while back at home, the Protestant Reformation became more acceptable to the people, most certainly after the Spanish Armada was repelled. It was also the end of the period when England was a separate realm before its royal union with Scotland.

Spanish Armada

    There was the Elizabethan content and zest for life. Foreign influence, especially of France and Italy, did much to stimulate the growth of the Elizabethan lyric. Also, there was a renaissance of music. The Elizabethan carved for music. The richer sect had their own musicians to while away their leisure hours. Countless books of music were published of which Thomas Campion's Books of Airs the most popular. It was an age of poetry and romance. New wonders were being discovered almost every day. The atmosphere was surcharged with romance, and song is the very breath of romance. Elizabethan Age was considered as The Nest of Singing Birds for these very reasons.

    It was during this age when the thoughts were liberated as the period was romantic in many ways. As thoughts got liberated and people rebelled against religion, mainly against Roman Catholic Churches which resulted in their reformation.  During this period no restraint human imagination was let loose.

    It was the period of inventions and discoveries. Many theories and concepts related to astronomy changed including both Heaven and the Earth. The concept of the Earth being the centre of the universe upturned man’s ego and this was reflected in literature.

    Another prominent characteristic of this age includes veneration for classical works. Writers of this age were sandwiched between previous age which marked a shift from an old system to a new one and the present age of discoveries.

    Though many great writers of the age were highly educated and had great admiration for classical works, this age witnessed the emergence of what is known as National Literature. Till now in the reign of the Roman Empire, Latin language had a superiority in comparison to other languages. But with the decline of Roman Empire which was resulted by the fall of Constantinople (1453), Christians lost all the territories to the Ottoman Empire. As a result, Christian monks fled to west and spread learning which resulted in Renaissance. Also, as Latin lost its supremacy; regional languages gained prominence. Eminent writers like Shakespeare, Bacon, Sidney wrote in regional languages. Now that the writings were more available in regional languages, the masses began to take interest in literature. The common people which knew only regional language, got access to the works. Moreover, the invention of printing press (1439) also helped people get access to more books. Spenser introduced the ‘Spenserian Stanza’ and from his works, we got the impression of inventiveness & intrepidity. On the whole, the outlook of the writers during the age was broad & independent.  English Patriotism developed and the rise of regional language symbolised how people were proud of their nation. This began the romantic quest for the remote, the wonderful and the beautiful.  All these desires were abundantly fed during the Elizabethan age, which is the first & the greatest romantic epoch (period).

    English Novel made its first proper appearance during this age.

    UNIVERSITY WITS

    In the Pre-Shakespearian Drama, there existed Shakespeare’s immediate predecessors known as University Wits. They were prominent in the 1580s. They are so called because they were associated with the university of Cambridge (Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, Christopher Marlow) or Oxford (John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Lodge). Thomas Kyd attended neither of these universities, but is still included because he wrote in the style of the wits. They had a fondness for heroic themes, and thus their works had heroic treatment with heroic style. Their themes too were usually tragic in nature like Shakespeare.

 

IMPORTANT AUTHORS AND WORKS

·         Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)

 

The Fairie Queene (1590)

Astrophel (1595)

Amoretti (1595)

Epithalamion (1595)

Prothalamion (1596)

 

·        Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)

 

Arcadia (1580)

Astrophel and Stella (1591)

Apologie for Poetrie (1595)

 

·         Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

 

Essays (1597)

Novum Organam (1620)

The Advancement of Learning (1605)

The New Atlantis (1629)

 

 

·         John Lyly (1554-1606)

Eupheus: The Anatomy of Wit (1578)

Endymion (1588)

The Woman in the Moon (1595)

John Lyly

 

·         George Peele (1556-1596)

The Famous Chronicle of King Edward I (1593)

The Old Wives’ Tale (1595)

A Farewell to Arms (1590)

 

·         William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

 

Four major tragedies:

            Hamlet (1601)

            Othello (1604)

            Macbeth (1605)

            King Lear (1605)

 

Long narrative poems:

            Venus and Adonais (1593)

            The Rape of Lucrese (1594)

 

Comedies:      

            The Comedy of Errors (1593)

            The Merchant of Venice (1596)

            As You Like It (1600)

            Much Ado about Nothing (1598)

 

·         Ben Jonson (1572-1637)

The Alchemist (1610)

Volpone or the Fox (1605)

Every Man in his Humour (1598)

Every Man Out of his Humour (1599)

-Ayesha Sana PNP

 

  

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