Literary Movements

From monstrouspossibility

Literary Movements.

There is no definition for literary movement(s) in the Oxford English Dictionary that is so helpfully online. However the first entry for literary is:, 1. Pertaining to the letters of the alphabet. and Movement: A change of place or position; a progress, change, development. Perhaps it follows that there is a three and one half inch book in the Evergreen State Library's reference section detailing only the Literary Movements of the 20th century (Twentieth-Century Literary Movements Index, Ed. Harris, Laurie Lanzen). So from this fluid body,

I chose to arbitrarily focus on five for the time being:

Romanticism Realism Naturalist Modernism and (the...of postmodernism)

                The wikipedia site on the subject (literary movement) is as follows:     
                    [[1]]

My attempts at definition and links to corresponding wikipedia pages:

The romantics were preoccupied with nature and the flawlessness of natural beauty. They were interested in retelling and examining folklore and the lives of common people, preferably living in the country. They tend to describe surroundings in an idealistic way. Often looking at the past as idyllic, they were interested in medieval times and rejected scientific explanations of natural events. Romantics also gravitated towards depicting strong and extreme emotions, for example, the intense love, then hatred, then love. [[2]]

Realism concentrates on the way "real" or perhaps one would say modern people act and live. They tend to be more focused on urban life. Realists were influenced by ideas such as Social Darwinism, which explained why class exists, people are poor because they no not have the enough intelligence to be rich. Thus they could explain away some of the moral issues that come along with the existence of slavery in a supposedly liberal society. [[3]]

Naturalist writers tend to compares people to animals in both positive and negative ways. They aimed to describe life objectively and focused on lower classes and so could afford to be critical of humanity and make fun of it without offending their readers who where generally of the upper class. Naturalism embraced the scientific methods that Romantics rejected and looked at human behavior as being driven by primal instincts such as sex and greed (basically the need to have more subsistence than others). [[4]]

Modernism attempts disassociate writing and writers from traditions of their predecessors, an effort to make everything new. It attempts to create a 'modern' view, which tries to facilitate change from ways of thinking that allowed for the hundreds of deaths in WWl and other enormously violent encounters. For an example I will bring to the table on interpretation of Elizabeth Bishop's poem "Brazil, January 1, 1502" she talks about the beauty of nature, European's 'discovering' Brazil and the wisdom of the native people but she takes her subjects, native women of Brazil out of the contexts of Romanticism or Naturalism and lets them confront a modern reader without attributing moralistic behavior to them. This poem is breaking tradition in a number of ways. It is written in free verse, does not follow the strict rules of rhyme and meter and does not use extreme romantic imagery but simply describes nature as the author sees it. Bishop also actively begins to tear the tapestry of nature (or traditional thinking if you will): "they ripped away the into the hanging fabric, each out to catch an Indian for himself. (Questions of Travel, Bishop)" This act is an invitation for the reader to take apart old ways of thinking, about race, power structures, gender etcetera and take part in new ways of thinking about the world.[[5]]

Postmodernism, as the name perhaps suggests, is what happens when the new, better model of thinking does not work. Bringing to mind the idea post-apocalypse, postmodernism confuses and uses randomness as a tool to destabilize the reader, if one is off balance it is easier for them to be pushed into new ways of thinking and perhaps re-evaluate or reject old standards. If we choose to believe that power is something that is controlled by all of us and created by language, then we can use new ways of writing to form new ways of distributing and dealing with power. Postmodernism is fragment broken lives people words. poeple backwards, spelled downupside. It, like many/(all?) other literary movements in my opinion by taking aspects from its predecessors but brings new ways of thinking to light, tries to understand what is not working and rub it in readers faces, in an attempt to effect attempted change if this is at all possible.[[6]]

[edit] Questions

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