Literary Terms #8 Literary Movements

1. Literary Terms #8Literary Movements AP English Literature and Composition Hilltop High School Mrs. Demangos

2. Renaissance • 14th-17th Century, rebirth of humanism. • French word meaning rebirth • used to designate the period in European history beginning in Italy in the 14th century.

3. Renaissance • The term originally described a period of cultural, technological, and artistic vitality during the economic expansion in Britain in the late 1500s and early 1600s.

4. Renaissance • Thinkers at this time and later saw themselves as rediscovering and redistributing the legacy of classical Greco-Roman culture by renewing forgotten studies and artistic practices, hence the name "renaissance" or "rebirth." • They believed they were breaking with the days of "ignorance" and "superstition" represented by medieval thinking, and returning to a golden age akin to that of the ancient Greeks and Romans from centuries earlier--a cultural idea that will eventually culminate in the Enlightenment of the late 1600s up until about 1799 or so.

5. Renaissance • The Renaissance saw the rise of new poetic forms in the sonnet and a flowering of drama in the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Marlowe. • The English Renaissance is often divided into the Elizabethan period--the years that "Good Queen Bess" (Queen Elizabeth I) ruled--and the Jacobean period, in which King James I ruled. (The Latin form of James is Jacobus, hence the name Jacobean).

6. Neoclassicism • Restoration—18th Century, order & reason • Enlightenment: the philosophical and artistic movement growing out of the Renaissance and continuing until the nineteenth century. The Enlightenment was an optimistic belief that humanity could improve itself by applying logic and reason to all things.

7. Neoclassicism • It rejected untested beliefs, superstition, and the "barbarism" of the earlier medieval period, and embraced the literary, architectural, and artistic forms of the Greco-Roman world. Enlightenment thinkers were enchanted by the perfection of geometry and mathematics, and by all things harmonious and balanced.

8. Neoclassicism • The period's poetry, as typified by Alexander Pope, John Dryden, and others, attempted to create perfect, clockwork regularity in meter. Typically, these Enlightenment writers would use satire to ridicule what they felt were illogical errors in government, social custom, and religious belief.

9. Romanticism • 18th—19th century • Imagination over reason

10. Romanticism • the artistic philosophy prevalent during the first third of the nineteenth century (about 1800-1830). Romanticism rejected the earlier philosophy of the Enlightenment, which stressed that logic and reason were the best response humans had in the face of cruelty, stupidity, superstition, and barbarism. Instead, the Romantics asserted that reliance upon emotion and natural passions provided a valid and powerful means of knowing and a reliable guide to ethics and living.

11. Romanticism • The Romantic movement typically asserts the unique nature of the individual, the privileged status of imagination and fancy, the value of spontaneity over "artifice" and "convention," the human need for emotional outlets, the rejection of civilized corruption, and a desire to return to natural primitivism and escape the spiritual destruction of urban life. Their writings often are set in rural, pastoral or Gothic settings and they show an obsessive concern with "innocent" characters--children, young lovers, and animals.

12. Romanticism • The major Romantic poets include: • William Blake, • William Wordsworth, • John Keats, • Percy Bysshe Shelley, and • Lord Gordon Byron.

13. Realism • Verisimilitude • An elastic and ambiguous term with two meanings. • (1) First, it refers generally to any artistic or literary portrayal of life in a faithful, accurate manner, unclouded by false ideals, literary conventions, or misplaced aesthetic glorification and beautification of the world.

14. Realism • It is a theory or tendency in writing to depict events in human life in a matter-of-fact, straightforward manner. It is an attempt to reflect life "as it actually is"--a concept in some ways similar to what the Greeks would call mimesis.

15. Realism • Typically, "realism" involves careful description of everyday life, "warts and all," often the lives of middle and lower class characters in the case of socialist realism. • In general, realism seeks to avoid supernatural, transcendental, or surreal events. It tends to focus as much on the everyday, the mundane, and the normal as events that are extraordinary, exceptional, or extreme.

16. Realism Henry James • (2) Secondly and more specifically, realism refers to a literary movement in America, Europe, and England that developed out of naturalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mark Twain

17. Realism • Although realism and the concern for aspects of verisimilitude have been components of literary art to one degree or another in nearly all centuries, the term realism also applies more specifically to the tendency to create detailed, probing analyses of the way "things really are," usually involving an emphasis on nearly photographic details, the author's inclusion of in-depth psychological traits for his or her characters, and an attempt to create a literary facsimile of human existence unclouded by convention, cliché, formulaic traits of genre, sentiment, or the earlier extremes of naturalism.

18. Naturalism • Extreme realism • A literary movement seeking to depict life as accurately as possible, without artificial distortions of emotion, idealism, and literary convention. The school of thought is a product of post-Darwinian biology in the nineteenth century. It asserts that human beings exist entirely in the order of nature.

19. Naturalism • Human beings do not have souls or any mode of participating in a religious or spiritual world beyond the biological realm of nature, and any such attempts to engage in a religious or spiritual world are acts of self-delusion and wish-fulfillment. Humanity is thus a higher order animal whose character and behavior are entirely determined by two kinds of forces, hereditary and environment. The individual's compulsive instincts toward sexuality, hunger, and accumulation of goods are inherited via genetic compulsion and the social and economic forces surrounding his or her upbringing.

20. Naturalism • Naturalistic writers--including Zola, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser--try to present their subjects with scientific objectivity. Theodore Dreiser Stephen Crane Emile Zola

21. Naturalism • They often choose characters based on strong animal drives. Typically, naturalist writers avoid explicit emotional commentary in favor of medical frankness about bodily functions and biological activities that would be almost unmentionable during earlier literary movements like transcendentalism, Romanticism, and mainstream Victorian literature.

22. Naturalism • The end of the naturalistic novel is usually unpleasant or unhappy, perhaps even "tragic," though not in the cathartic sense Aristotle, Sophocles, or Elizabethan writers would have understood by the term tragedy. Naturalists emphasize the smallness of humanity in the universe; they remind readers of the immensity, power, and cruelty of the natural world, which does not care whether humanity lives or dies.

23. Naturalism • Examples of naturalism include Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat," which pits a crew of shipwrecked survivors in a raft against starvation, dehydration, and sharks in the middle of the ocean, and Jack London's "To Build a Fire," which reveals the inability of a Californian transplant to survive outside of his "natural" environment as he freezes to death in the Alaskan wilderness.

24. Existentialism • Human inadequate to explain the complex world • A twentieth-century philosophy arguing that ethical human beings are in a sense cursed with absolute free will in a purposeless universe. Therefore, individuals must fashion their own sense of meaning in life instead of relying thoughtlessly on religious, political, and social conventions. These merely provide a façade of meaning according to existential philosophy. Those who rely on such conventions without thinking through them deny their own ethical responsibilities.

25. Existentialism • The basic principles of existentialism are (1) a concern with man's essential being and nature, (2) an idea that existential "angst" or "anguish" is the common lot of all thinking humans who see the essential meaninglessness of transitory human life, (3) the belief that thought and logic are insufficient to cope with existence, and (4) the conviction that a true sense of morality can only come from honestly facing the dilemma of existential freedom and participating in life actively and positively.

26. Existentialism • The ethical idea is that, if the universe is essentially meaningless, and human existence does not matter in the long run, then the only thing that can provide a moral backdrop is humanity itself, and neglecting to build and encourage such morality is neglecting our duty to ourselves and to each other. • The major existential literary figures include Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, and Franz Kafka.

27. Magical Realism • Begins real, gets weird • In 1925, Franz Roh first applied the term "magic realism" (magischerRealismus in German) to a group of neueSaqchlichkeit painters in Munich (Cuddon 531). These painters blended realistic, smoothly painted, sharply defined figures and objects--but in a surrealistic setting or backdrop, giving them an outlandish, odd, or even dream-like qualilty.

28. Magical Realism • In the 1940s and 1950s, the term migrated to the prose fiction of various writers including Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina, Gabriel Garcia Márquez in Colombia, and AlejoCarpentier in Cuba. These postmodern writers mingle and juxtapose realistic events with fantastic ones, or they experiment with shifts in time and setting, "labyrinthine narratives and plots" and "arcane erudition" ,and often they combine myths and fairy stories with gritty Hemingway-esque detail. This mixture create truly dreamlike and bizarre effects in their prose.

29. An example of magic realism would be Gabriel Garcia Márquez's short story, "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings," a narrative in which a fisherman discovers a filthy, lice-ridden old man trapped face-down in the muddy shore of the beach, weighed down by enormous buzzard wings attached to his back. A neighbor identifies the old man as an angel who had come down to claim the fisherman's sick and feverish child but who had been knocked out the sky by storm winds during the previous night. Not having the heart to club the sickly angel to death, the protagonist decides instead to keep the supernatural being captive in a chicken coop. The very premise of the story reveals much of the flavor of magic realism.

30. Expressionism • Objectify inner experience • In literature, expressionism is often considered a revolt against realism and naturalism, seeking to achieve a psychological or spiritual reality rather than record external events in logical sequence. In the novel, the term is closely allied to the writing of Franz Kafka and James Joyce (see stream of consciousness).Read more: expressionism: In Literature | Infoplease.comhttp://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/entertainment/expressionism-in-literature.html#ixzz2REXvapBm