LITERARY MOVEMENTS.
Introduction:
Literature of the 20th-century refers to world literature produced during the 20th century. In the terms of Euro- American tradition, the main periods are captured in the division of modernist and post-modernist literature. In the 20th-century experimentation became a prominent force, and various European and American writers began to experiment with various given forms. Tendencies that formed during this period later became parts of the modernist movement. The Cantos of Ezra Pound, the post-World War I work of T.S. Eliot, prose, and plays by Gertrude Stein, were some of the most influential works of the time, though James Joyce’s Ulysses is generally considered the most essential work of the period.
This idea of new experimentation in the literature gave rise to the various genres or styles of writing, and various -isms came into existence like absurdism, surrealism, expressionism, impressionism, dadaism, etc. These all are the result of experimentation writing which broke all the conventional rules of writing and with the idea of modernism to do something new there came various isms in literature.
The definition of 'experimental writing' is highly subjective, but for me, it includes writing that plays with form and pushes the possibilities of language further than usual. Some experimental writing can be difficult, asking for careful and active reading, such as Russell Hoban's novel Riddley Walker (1980)
We will discuss some -isms:
Expressionism:
Expressionism, according to R. G. Hagger, “is a form of romantic art in which emotion or emotive element expressed through violent distortions and exaggeration, are taken to the point of excess. It is a characteristic of art that emerges and becomes dominant in times of social and spiritual stress.” This movement became dominant, especially in Germany, during the decade following World War 1. An expressionist paints life not as it is visible to him on the surface, but life as he or his character passionately feels it to be. The external appearance of the object is consciously distorted in order to represent the object as it is felt. For example, the scenery is an expressionist drama that will not be photographically accurate but will be so distorted that it may reflect the defendant's state of mind. the word which, though it can be defined with some exactness in painting, has been so variously applied in Literature as to be devoid of any precise or single meaning. Kurt Hiller was the first to apply the term “expressionism” to German literature in 1911. It flourished in Germany as an anti-realistic Mod of artistic expression.
The expressionists rejected the limitation of external reality in order to express either a private, inner vision or a wider political one of a world often depicted as bizarre and violent. Expressionism can be used to describe virtually any of the deliberate distortion of or departures from reality that pervade modern literature and art.
Signor Benedetto Goce, The Italian critic expounded the definition of expressionism. His philosophy of art is nothing but the intuition or the expression (within the mind) of impressions. The intuition assumes the form of art when the spirit persists in it, intent only upon the activity of perfect, expression by which impressions are elaborated to receive to die of imagination. “The artist is the man,” writes Scott James, “who vividly sees, the vividness of his seeings nothing else than vividness of expression. It does not matter what kind of life it may be. There is no superior excellence in this block of subject matter. The excellence lies in the vision of it- in giving formal expression to impressions to the full activity of imaginative power.”
What counts most with Goose is the athletic or creative process in which everything takes place within the artist’s mind aesthetic expression is wholly inward, the Impressions objectified are objectified only for him, and not in any physical form by which a critic can become aware of them. The artist is only an artist during the moments of free inspiration in which he finds himself big with his themes, he knows not how. This inward expression becomes “beautiful” when it unfolds itself successfully. Beauty, according to Gce is “successful expression, or better expression and nothing more, for expression, when it is not successful, nor epsilon”. Thus art, according to Gocce is “intuition expression”. It implies that “art is essentially free from practical interest”. For “so long as ugliness and turpitude exist in nature and impose themselves on the artist, it is not possible to prevent the expression of these things also.” What counts is the expression. J. E. Spingarn in America and Lascelles Abercrombie in England are the self-confessed followers of Goce.
In American literature, the plays of Eugene O’ Neill, particularly Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, and The Great God Brown were influenced by expressionism. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Virginia Woolf’s novels, and the works by William Faulkner and Wyndham Lewis are influenced by expressionism. To some extent, W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood are influenced by it.
Surrealism:
The founder of the movement, known as surrealism, was Andre Breton, who in 1924 issued the first surrealist manifesto, which explained that a higher reality could be captured by freeing the mind from logic and rational control. To Breton surrealism was a changed manifestation of romanticism. He saw it as the “Prehensile bail” of romanticism. Certainly, it employed some of the methods of romanticism- a concern with dreams, madness, hypnosis, and hallucination. It was influenced by Coleridge, Nerves, and Baudelaire. This movement laid emphasis on the expression of the imagination as realized in dreams and presented without conscious control. In this respect, it was influenced by Freudian psychology. Herbert Read, the famous English critic, has placed surrealism in the tradition of romanticism. It is mainly concerned with the exploration of the mind. Thoslaviis, holey aimed at synthesizing the working of the unconscious mind with those of the conscious mind. Surrealist is non-logical and not illogical. He is Anti- rational and Nati- realist. The surrealists were particularly interested in the study and effects of dreams and hallucinations and also in the interpretations of sleeping and waking conditions on the threshold of the conscious mind, that kind of limbo where strange shapes materialize in the gulfs of the mind. In his second manifesto, which appear in 1929 Breton explained how the surrealist idea was to revitalize the psychic forces by a “vertiginous descent” into the self in quest of that secret and hidden territory where all that is apparently contradictory to your every- day lives and consciousness will be plain. There was a point in the min, he thought, where, beyond realism, is attained a new knowledge. It proposes the release of the imagination and stood as an implicit criticism of restrictive rationalism in society and realism in literature
Surrealism spread all over the world. It became popular in Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Holland, Scandinavia, Britain, Jap, and the whole continent of South Africa. Apart from poetry, it has influenced the novel, the theatre, the cinema, the painting, and the sculpture. Among the poets who have worked in a surrealist manner are Aragon and Elnard and among painters are Picasso, Tanguy, and Salvador Dali. James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, Alan Burns, B. S. Johnson, and many others too came under the influence of surrealism.
Dadaism:
Dadaism was a movement of young artists and writers in Paris during and after world war I. It aimed at suppressing the relationship between ideas and statements and absolute freedom, held meetings at bars and in theatres; and delivered itself numerous nonsensical and semi nonsensical “manifestos”. It was meant to signify everything and nothing. it became popular in Paris immediately after the first world war. “Nothing” was the basic word in the vocabulary of Dadaism. in art and literature manifestos of this aesthetics were mostly collage effects: the arrangement of unrelated objects and words in a random fashion. The purpose of dadaism was a nihilistic revolt against all bourgeois ideas of rationality. It was opposed to form and order. the artists and poets who follow Dadaism used collages to arrange objects and words into meaningless and illogical patterns. It wished to destroy us along with bourgeois society
Dadaism was founded in Zurich in 1916 by Tristan Tzara with the avowed object of perverting and demolishing the tenets of art, philosophy, and logic and substituting them with the conscious madness of war. Its exponents were Joan Miro, Marcel Duchamp, and Max Ernst, it Mod between fantasy and destruction and its influence spread from London to New York.
it was influenced by futurism. Its chief objective- Manifesto, phonetic poetry, Simultaneous poem, noise, music, and provocative public spectacle- were all borrowed from futurists and stood as an image of dissolution which seemed the central fact of modern existence. Dadaism stood for Masculinity in art and literature, Dada as opposed to mama. Robert Motherwell bought out the Dada painter and poet in 1951 in New York.
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