Romanticism:
1. How is the Romantic construction of the Sublime reflected in the
ideological, conceptual and linguistic construction of the texts under
consideration in this Romanticism reader? Discuss one or two examples...
Post-/modernism
1. What are the key features of High Modernism and what was the ‘movements’ agenda with regards language use?
2. How can you identify Modernist texts?
3. Is post-modernism an extension or refutation of Modernism?
4. What is ‘Beat’ poetry ?
5. What is the link between Beat poetry and blues, Beat poetry and rap?
6. What is it about both Beat poetry and rap that has provoked censorship?
2. How can you identify Modernist texts?
ReplyDeletePerhaps the best way to identify a Modernist text is to examine its sense of consciousness, or lack thereof. This is because there is no unifying style or approach that distinguishes the Modernist orientation. In fact, this is a genre that is best characterized as resisting the familiar forms and functions of the works that preceded it. For its most prominent practitioners, the modernist identity would be conveyed in the themes and images of disquiet, guilt and inner-turmoil. Increasingly, with the modernity implicated by industrialization and ever-more horrific warfare, literature would come to reflect a sense of eroding humanity and growing emotional isolation.
These are the themes and sensibilities that seem most to inhabit the Modernist texts, and with an increasing air of resistance to old ways of using language. So argues our Reader on the subject of modernist poet T.S. Eliot’s iconic The Waste Land. Here, we are told, “if we attempt to make The Waste Land conform to Imagism or Impressionism, we miss its strategy and miss its accomplishment. Eliot wrenched his poetry from the self-sufficiency of the single image and the single narrating consciousness. The principle of order in The Waste Land depends on a plurality of consciousnesses, an ever-increasing series of points of view, which struggle towards an emergent unity and then continue to struggle past that unity.” (p. 18) In rather abstract critical terms, what we are told here is that Eliot’s work represents the modernist struggle of man to reconcile the various conflicting impulses that inform simultaneous survival in the industrial world and retention of the ever-more relegated human spirit.
3. Is post-modernism an extension or refutation of Modernism?
ReplyDeleteAt the risk of being overly pedantic on this subject, post-modernism is in many ways both an extension and a refutation of modernism. Indeed, to the latter point, post-modernism draws heavily on certain values of its immediate precursor. Particular among them, post-modern literature is concerned with even further deconstructing the laws of convention governing prose and poetry. Thus, many of the structural, grammatical and diction-based parameters defining that which could be classified as literature were pushed even further off their pedestal by such deviations as Beat Poetry and Absurdism.
However, where modernism still obeyed some of the conventions of storytelling such as linear continuity and advancement toward resolution, post-modernism had verily dispensed with the idea of comprising an edible package for its audience. In line with the perception that reconciliation of divergent impulses is impossible in a materialistic and post-modern society, the literature of this movement carries the distinct characteristics of often depriving the reader of literary reconciliation. Indeed, in the absurdist and surrealistic works representative of the genre, authors have instead sought to challenge audiences with distorted reflections of themselves, contextualizing these reflections in a world inhospitable to convenient endings and happy resolutions.
4. What is ‘Beat’ poetry ?
ReplyDeleteThe Beat Poetry movement is of particular importance in the post-modern literary tradition for blurring the lines between that which had historically been deemed high and low-brow cultures. While classical literary traditions rested on the mantle of well-heeled academic discourse, the Beat poetry sought to use this in convergence with the language of the streets. Here, in addition to the cultural resistant themes and suggestions that tended to permeate such work, the very form of expression itself served as a protest against both societal and literary hegemony. Leading figures such as Kerouac and Ginsburg would latch onto the deconstructionist impulses of the modernist movement and utilize them to invade the literary tradition with slang, obscenity and exceedingly edgy content.
For instance, in Ginsburg’s America, the author merges literature, colloquialism and stream-of-consciousness styling to register a highly controversial sentiment. Ginsburg addresses his subject head on, writing; “America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1935” (p. 221)
This approach is emblematic of the Beat movement, combining the sentiment for protest with an overtly casual use of references that would have been otherwise taboo in literature and in society in general. By placing the low-brow elements of his countercultural experiences in the high-brow milieu of poetry, Ginsburg and his fellow beats would engage something of a democratization of the form. Here, the experiences and impulses driving poetic expression were something set many worlds apart from those of the courtly writers of classical poetry.