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ModernPost Modern Period of Literature
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Decisions are based on the situation one is involved in at the moment ... Distorts time so that it is cyclical or so that it appears absent. ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation
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Title: ModernPost Modern Period of Literature
1
Modern/Post Modern Period of Literature
- Years 1900-1980
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Content
- Lonely individual fighting to find peace and
comfort in a world that has lost its absolute
values and traditions - Man is nothing except what he makes of himself
- A belief in situational ethicsno absolute
values. - Decisions are based on the situation one is
involved in at the moment - Mixing of fantasy with nonfiction blurs lines of
reality for reader loss of the hero in
literature destruction made possible by
technology
3
Genres/Styles
- poetry free verse
- epiphanies begin to appear in literature
- speeches
- memoir
- novels
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Epiphany
- Epiphany means "a manifestation," and by
Christian thinkers was used to signify a
manifestation of God's presence in the created
world. In the early draft of A Portrait of an
Artist as a Young Man, entitled Stephen Hero
(published posthumously in 1944), James Joyce
adapted the term to secular experience, to
signify a sense of a sudden radiance and
revelation while observing a commonplace object.
"By an epiphany Stephen meant a sudden
spiritual manifestation." "Its soul, its
whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its
appearance. The soul of the commonest object...
seems to us radiant. The object achieves its
epiphany." Joyce's short stories and novels
include a number of epiphanies.... - "Epiphany" has become the standard term for the
description, frequent in modern poetry and prose
fiction, of the sudden flare into revelation of
an ordinary object or scene. Joyce, however,
merely substituted this word for what earlier
authors had called "the moment."
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- Ø stream of consciousness
- Ø detached, unemotional, humorless
- Ø present tense
- Ø magic realism
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Magic realism
- Contains fantastical elements
- The fantastic elements may be intuitively
"logical" but are never explained - Characters accept rather than question the logic
of the magical element - Exhibits a richness of sensory details
- Distorts time so that it is cyclical or so that
it appears absent. Another technique is to
collapse time in order to create a setting in
which the present repeats or resembles the past - Inverts cause and effect, for instance a
character may suffer before a tragedy occurs - Incorporates legend or folklore
- Presents events from multiple perspectives, such
as those of belief and disbelief or the
colonizers and the colonized - Uses a mirroring of either past and present,
astral and physical planes, or of characters - Ends leaving the reader uncertain, whether to
believe in the magical interpretation or the
realist interpretation of the events in the story
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Effect
- an approach to life Seize life for the
moment and get all you can out of it.
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Historical Context
- British Empire loses 1 million soldiers to
World War I - Winston Churchill leads Britain through WW
II, and the Germans bomb England directly - British colonies demand independence
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Key Literature/Authors
- James Joyce
- Joseph Conrad
- D.H. Lawrence
- Graham Greene
- Dylan Thomas
- Nadine Gordimer
- George Orwell
- William Butler Yeats
- Bernard Shaw
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Contemporary Period of Literature(Post Modern
Period Continued)
- 1980-Present
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Content
- concern with connections between people
exploring interpretations of the past
open-mindedness and courage that comes from
being an outsider escaping those ways of
living that blind and dull the human spirit
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Genres/Styles
- all genres represented fictional
confessional/diaries 50 of
contemporary fiction is written in the first
person narratives both fiction and
nonfiction emotion-provoking humorous
irony storytelling emphasized
autobiographical essays mixing of fantasy
with nonfiction blurs lines of reality for
reader
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Effect
- too soon to tell
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Historical Context
- a world growing smaller due to ease of
communications between societies - a world launching a new beginning of a
century and a millennium - media culture interprets values and events
for individuals
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Key Literature/Authors
- Seamus Heaney, Doris Lessing, Louis de Bernieres,
Kazuo Ishiguro, Tom Stoppard, Salman Rushdie.
John Le Carre, Ken Follett
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