Literary CriticismModernism – Postmodernism – Postcolonialism – Feminist

Critisism

Blueprint C pp 145-221

What is Modernism?

Naturalism, expressionism, cubism, surrealism, impressionism

Therese Raquin

Individualism

What is Post-modernism?

Dadaism,

Inspired by modernism, combined with modernism

After modernism

What is Postcolonialism?

After colonialism, colonialism should have affected it somehow

From the eightees and forward, dealing with problems after the colonialism, poverty, social status.

What is Feminist Criticism

A movement during the eightees called riot grrl

Guerilla Girls

About inequalities

Purpose goals Know and understand the four movements

Acquire close reading skills

Become independant critical thinkers

To communicate in spoken and written English

Book Choice

Why Be So CriticalREAD AND REACT pp 145-149

1. What is the difference between evaluating and interpreting a text?

2. How do critics work like scientists? How does their work differ from that of scientists?

3. Why does Auden find the Role of the Critic useful? Summarize his answers in your own words.

4. Why be so critical of a text? What can the act of criticizing do for you?

1. Evaluate: State wheter a text is good or bad. Interpret: Pry text open and look carefully inside to try and discover its meaning and analyse its content

2. They establish a method, focus on a specific question, pay careful attention to detail and base their answers on evidence in the text. Unlike scientists, critics never draw absolute conclusions. Instead their conclusions should open up even more possibilities and ask even more questions.

3. Critics can inform about unfamiliar works, disarm dislikeable works, depict connections between works of different ages or cultures, explain works, illustrate creative parts of works and show how art relates to life, science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.

4. Learning to be critical of a text can develop serious intellectual muscle. When you learn to read and critically evaluate a text, you can also apply that skill to understanding art, media, scientific reports, films, poetry etc.

Modernism Challenging old 19th-

century traditions

Doubt and mistrust of authority

World War I

New scientific discoveries

What is truth?

New narrative techniques

New Narrative Techniques

Stream of Consciousness

Multiple point of view

Twisting of chronology

Fragmentation

Gaps

Uncertainty about language

ModernismREAD AND REACT pp 156-161

1. Explain in your own words what the text tells us about why modernist writers rejected older, known formats.

2. What is the main shift in focus from late 17th century literature to the period of modernism?

3. Name some of the new techniques used by writers as they tried to demonstrate their new ways of thinking about art and the truth.

1. Communist revolutions meant that people questioned old power structures, colonial power was questioned and scientific advances in psychology, physics and lingustics showed that things were not as they have been tought to be. Also, the horrors of of WW! Undermined people’s faith in authoroties. All this led Modernist to cast aside old structures and to seek new ways of artistic expression.

2. From portraying what can be observed on the outside to portraying the invisible interior – seeking truth hidden beneath the surface

3. Time twisting, multiple point of view, stream of consciousness, use of gaps, fragmentation, uncertainty about language

UlyssesREFLECT AND SHARE pp 162-165

1. a, How did you experience the reading?b, What does Joyce want you to experience and understand about the workings of a person’s mind as you read this?

2. Identify a passage in the Joyce text that gives you the sense you are ”listening in” to the mind of a woman rather than a man. How and why did you make your selection?

3. Apply the ”Critics Checklist for Modernism” to this text. How many elements can you find at work here?

The Second ComingREFLECT AND SHARE pp 166-167

1. Look at the meaning of the word gyre. What shape does it have? The gyre is symbolic of Yeat’s view of history, or the way time passes. Does he think time is linear? What is the alternative?

2. Why do you think the falcon cannot hear the falconer?

3. How do you interpret the line ”The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity”? What does this mean to you? Have you ever seen people acting this way? Describe what you mean.

4. What is the Second Coming to Yeats? What form will it take?

5. What kind of relationship do you think Yeats has with Christianity?

1. Circular. No. Something that expands outward as it goes up toward chaos and instability.

2. Falcon flies too far away

3. Are they the ”good” and the ”bad”?

4. The rebirth of Christ. A beast?

Postmodernism Who cares what it means?

Meaninglessness

Texts are related in a web of ideas

Words words words! But what do they mean?

Blurry line between fiction and reality

PostmodernismREAD & REACT pp 171-175

What is the relationship between art and meaning, according to a postmodernist?

How can it be said that Postmodernism is playful?

What is the problem with language, according to a postmodernist?

What is the postmodernist’s problem with language? Explain in your own words.

What does metafiction mean? Explain in your own words.

What is intertextuality? What is its purpose?

New Narrative TechniquesPostmodernism

Playful disregard of meaning

Decentering a text

Breaking of genre

Intertextuality

Metafiction

Truth is relative

Re-uses many typical traits of Modernism

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

READ & REACT pp 177-182

1. Which lines indicate that Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are feeling confused? Choose three and explain.

2. What information are they sure about?

3. What strategy do they develop to deal with Hamlet?

4. Why won’t Guildenstern agree to go after Hamlet?

5. Who introduces the word game, and how?

6. What are the rules of the game? How is the game scored?

7. Who wins the game?

8. Refer to the postmodern checklist and identify as many elements as you can in this text.

Play at questions

Pair upThe goal of the game is only to ask questions. If you make a statement, repeat yourself, grunt, use synonyms, rhetoric or non-sequiturs, you foul and give your opponent a point. Every game goes up to three points. One needs to win two games in order to win the entire match.

Thoughts about the person from Porlock

READ & REACT pp 183-186

1. What problem does Smith think Coleridge was really having when the person from Porlock interrupted him?

2. Who is the person from Porlock, according to Smith? Describe him.

3. Make a chart where you identify which parts of the poem are regular and rhytmic, and which parts read as fragmentary thoughts in plain verse.

4. Why does Smith say she ”longs for the person from Porlock”? List some of the reasons she gives in the poem.

5. Smith refers to the ”One above” who is experimenting. Who is this? What is being experimented with? Why?

6. Look at the checklist for postmodernism. Which postmodern elements can you find at work in this poem?

Postcolonialism

Feminist Critisism

Harper Lee A novelist born 1926 in USA

Praised by critics everywhere for her one and only book, which also won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961

To Kill A Mockingbird contains autobiographical parallells, a method which is widely used by postmodern writers

Discussion Is To Kill a Mockingbird postmodern?

Why? Why not?

Is Adaptation postmodern?

Why? Why not?

James Joyce An Irish novelist and poet

born in 1882

Influenced modernistic literature greatly with his avant-garde style and his “stream of consciousness”

His most famous works includes: Ulysses, Dubliners and A Portray of the Artist as a Young Man

Virginia Woolf Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in

London in 1882

Joined the intellectual group of artists and writers known as the Bloomsbury

Unique for Woolf’s texts are the experimentation with psychological conflicts and emotional motives of her characters

Most famous works includes: To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves and Mrs Dalloway

Imagism

This is just to say

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast.

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

By William Carlos Williams

Principles of Imagist Poetry

To use the language of common speech, but to employ the exact word, not the nearly exact, nor the merely decorative word.

To create new rythms … We believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free verse than in conventional forms. In poetry, a new cadence means a new idea.

To allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject

To present an image. We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnicient and sonorous. It is for this reason that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real difficulties of this art.

To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.

Finally, most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry.

Imagist Poemspp 114-116

Choose one of the poems

Try to identify in what way the principles are evident

Find examples of metaphore and similie

Find examples where other senses than sight are used

Come up with questions and try to answer them

Discuss and try to analyse what emotions it stirs in you