The
Twentieth Century.
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I. MODERNISMO:
A term coined by Nicaraguan poet Rubén
Darío (1867-1916). It was his intention to modernize
the language and themes of poetry in the Spanish American culture.
Influenced by the French Parnassians.
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II. MODERNISM:
A movement or tendency of international scope from the 1890s to the 1940s
affecting all major urban centers and all the arts. It is also called
avant
garde (a military term meaning "advance guard" and denoting, when applied
to literature and art, exploration, path-finding, innovation, invention,
something new or advanced, ahead of its time, and revolutionary) [the "old"
avant
garde was French Symbolism; the "new" avant garde was the Absurd).
In literature, Modernism breaks away from established rules and experiments,
at times remarkably, with form and style. It is particularly concerned
with language and with writing itself. It looks at man's position
in the universe in new ways.
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A. Parnassianism:
French aesthetic movement of the second half of the 19th century
(ca. 1860) created as a reaction against the Romanticism of Victor
Hugo, subjectivism, and artistic socialism. The founder of the
movement is Théophile Gautier
(1811 72) or Leconte de Lisle (1818
94). Art is an end in itself, not a means to another end (i.e.,
social change). It is objective and the author eliminates himself
from his work (no subjectivism). Art is a religion to them, and their
motto: L'art pour l'art. (“art for art’s sake”).
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B. Symbolism:
A 19th C. French movement invented by Jean Moréas
in 1886 and which contends that Romanticism, Naturalism, and Parnassianism
were over (cf. also French poets Baudelaire, Mallarmé,
Verlaine,
Rimbaud).
Symbolism evokes objects to create a mood; it is suggestive and oblique,
not spelt out. Symbolism tends to be private and personal or transcendental,
in which case concrete images are used as symbols to represent a general
or universal ideal world of which the real world is a shadow. The "other
world" is reached through poetry and the poet is a seer or prophet who
sees through and beyond the real world to the world of ideal forms and
essences. Verse is musical. There is an emphasis on free or
blank verse or "prose poems."
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C. Dadaism:
From French dada ("hobby horse"). A nihilistic movement started
in Zurich ca. 1916 by a Rumanian, Tristan Tzara.
The term was meant to signify everything and nothing, or total freedom,
anti-rules, ideals, and traditions. The movement became popular in
Paris after World War I. Its basing word was: "nothing." It
was an aesthetic movement manifested in collage effects, the arrangement
of unrelated objects and words in a random fashion, etc. By 1921
dadaism was subsumed by surrealism.
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D. Surrealism:
A French movement from the 1920s which was a development of Dadaism.
Surrealist art expresses the workings of the unconscious mind and attempts
to synthesize these workings with the conscious mind. It is non-logical
but not illogical. The mind should be liberated from logic and reason.
It was influenced by Freudian analysis. There is an emphasis on automatic
writing (James Joyce), stream of consciousness
style, etc. (cf. Guillaume Apollinaire
and André Breton). The
surrealists re interested in the effects of dreams and hallucinations.
Beyond realism one attains a new knowledge. The main surrealist painters
are Chirico, Max
Ernst, Picasso, and Salvador
Dalí. Surrealism has affected all art forms, especially
the cinema. Other authors: Antonin Artaud
(creator of the Theater of Cruelty), Eugène
Ionesco (creator of the Absurd), Jean
Genet, Samuel Beckett (co-creator
of the Absurd), William Burroughs,
and Alain Robbe-Grillet.
Surrealism
(Dalí)
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E. Expressionism:
A German movement from the 1920s: painters sought to avoid the representation
of external reality to give a highly personal vision of the world.
In theater, expressionists react vs. realism. They try to express
psychological realities. Franz Kafka.
German expressionists look at 16th C. Spanish painter El Greco as
a precursor. Their motto was: „Die Welt is da; es wäre
sinnlos si zu wiederholen.“ ("The world is there; it’s unnecessary to repeat
it").
Edvard
Munch’s The Scream (1893) [now stolen]
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F. Absurd:
See (atheistic) existentialism, Ultraism, etc.
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G. Cubo-Futurism:
see Futurism. Pure poetry, etc. In art, geometric forms (i.e.,
"pure," i.e., non representational). Picasso.
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H. Decadence:
see Symbolism. A movement that emphasizes the autonomy of art, sensationalism,
melodrama, egocentricity, the bizarre, the artificial (vs. the natural),
art for art's sake, the superior outsider position of the artist vis à
vis society—particularly middle class or bourgeois society—personal experience,
self analysis, perversity, exotic sensations. There is a preoccupation
with decay and with ruins, sadness and despair, the morbid and the flamboyant.
Oscar
Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Lithographer
Aubrey
Beardsley (Victorian England: "The Yellow Nineties"), Bram
Stoker’s
Dracula (1897), etc.
Salomé (1893),
lithograph by Aubrey Beardsley for Oscar Wilde's play
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Dracula,
by Alex Horley
(a.k.a. Alessandro Orlandelli
[1970- ])
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The Picture of Dorian Gray,
by Oscar Wilde
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Decadentism
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I. Existentialism:
A term that derives from the thinking of Danish philosopher I. Søren
Kierkegaard (1813 55) and which later influences theistic
philosophers like a) Miguel de Unamuno,
b) Martin Buber, and c) Karl
Jaspers; and, through II. Friedrich
Nietzsche, atheistic philosophers like a) Martin
Heidegger, b) Albert Camus,
c) Simone de Beauvoir, and d) Jean-Paul
Sartre. For theistic existentialists, man finds comfort,
freedom from tension and discontent, peace of mind, and spiritual serenity
in a belief in God. For atheistic existentialists, existence precedes
essence (the reverse of many traditional forms of philosophy) and one fashions
one's existence and only exists by so doing, and, in the process, and by
the choice of what he does or does not do, gives essence to that existence.
For Sartre, one is obliged to make oneself what one is. One can escape
the absurdity of life by (social) action. Cf. Simone de Beauvoir's
Ethics
of Ambiguity.
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J. Futurism:
An Italian movement from the early 20th century. Its main exponent
was Filippo Marinetti (1876-1944).
He advocated a break with tradition and aimed at new forms and subjects
based on mechanics. Futurists extolled dynamism, the machine in general,
speed, the splendor of war, and patriotism. In the 1920s the Futurists
became politically Fascistic and also had an influence on Dadaism, expressionism,
and surrealism. In Russia, the Futurists were vs. symbolism, mysticism,
and the cult of pure beauty. They set out to shock people.
After the (Russian) October Revolution, Futurism lost momentum in the URSS
(not interested in avant garde aesthetics but in social realism instead
[during the Stalinist period]).
Futurism
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K. Ultraism: Something
like the Absurd (private languages; language is pushed beyond the limits
of comprehensibility in the public sense).
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L. Creacionismo:
An avant garde movement which began in 1916 and which was invented
by the Spanish-born Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro
(1893 1948). There is an emphasis on striking metaphors, bizarre
juxtaposition of images, and non mimetic art, which conveyed a magical
vision of creation. See Ultraism.
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M. Stream of Consciousness:
The flow of inner experience. A term invented by psychologist William
James in Principles of Psychology (1890). In prose
it tries to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through
the mind. Hence, in writing there is an emphasis on interior monologues
like those found in James Joyce's Ulysses
(1922) and William Faulkner's The
Sound and the Fury (1931).
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N. Tremendismo:
A characteristic of some Spanish fiction since the 1940s (the post-war
period [posguerra] {Spanish Civil War: 1936-39}). There is
a stress on violence and terror, the violent tendencies of modern society
and the damaging influences of social and religious upbringing on behavior.
Excellent examples of this style are Camilo José
Cela's La familia de Pascual Duarte (1942) and Carmen
Laforet's Nada (1944). Tremendismo is really an
extension of 19th C. Realism/Naturalism (Neo-Realism), with an added psychological
dimension. In film, Neo-Realism
depicts natural (usually urban) settings (no artificial sets) in black
and white, shot in a documentary style, at times with non-professional
actors; the masters of Neo-Realism are the Italians Vittorio
da Sicca (Bicycle Thief) and Pier
Paolo Pasolini (Accatone). Spaniard Luis
Buñuel has some neo-realistic films (Las Hurdes
[Land without Bread], Los olvidados, etc.). In Stalinist Russia,
Social
Realism was similar, but with a happy ending (the proletariats
win). In Latin America, Magical Realism
combines the modern period with the indigenous past, which is on the surface
of things (a mixture of realism and surrealism).
Tremendismo
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Neo-Realism
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Socialist
Realism
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Magical
Realism
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O. Avant garde.
See Modernism (esp. 1910-1925).
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III. POSTMODERNISM: A
general and controversial term used to refer to changes, developments,
and tendencies which have taken place and are taking place in literature,
art, music, architecture, and philosophy since the 1940s and 1950s.
It is amorphous. In literature, the tendency is towards the non-
traditional and against authority and signification. It consists
of gimmickry, parody, and experimentation. It is eclectic.
It uses parody, pastiche, magical realism, and horror stories. It
presentes a vision of complete relativism. To define this term, peruse
French philosopher Jean François Lyotard's
The
Postmodern Condition. In novels, one has a lack of an obvious
plot, diffused episodes, minimal development of character, detailed surface
analysis of objects, many repetitions, innumerable experiments with vocabulary,
punctuation, and syntax, variations of time sequences, alternative endings
or beginnings. There is also a lack of high seriousness; contempt
for the well made, unified work; addiction to popular culture. There
is an opposition to dominant discourses; complex relationships between
art and social context; and a proliferation of liberation movements (feminism,
gay and lesbian activism, post-civil rights racial politics, Marxist criticism,
etc.). Postmodernism is anarchistic, parodical, hyperbolic, and disruptive
in its narrative techniques. There is an exuberant valuing of heterogeneity
over unity; Difference, a lack of distinction between high and low culture
or art. It emphasizes rock music. It uses heterogeneous voices,
mixed genres, and other breaches of decorum. The philosophers (all
of them French) of this “movement” or “condition” are: Jaques
Derrida (deconstruction), Roland Barthes
(structuralism), Jacques Lacan (Neo-Freudianism),
Julia
Kristeva (French Feminism), Michel
Foucault (neo- Nietzschean: "it's all about power"), Jean
François Lyotard (The Postmodern Condition [1979]).
There is a hostility to eternal, metaphysical truths or realities or grand
narratives (theories that provide totalizing explanations). Decisions
should be based on the basis of local conditions and are applicable only
in that limited context. Practices are not transferable. There
is a multiplicity of language games. Oppositional thinkers are Jürgen
Habermas and Frederic Jameson
(Marxists) vs. Lyotard. French theory disrupts Western society by
advocating local, varied, heterogeneous differences vs. unifying practices
of the massive states that are typical of the West. For Edward
W. Said (postcolonial theory) and Terry
Eagleton (a Marxist) language, images, and other cultural phenomena
are central. Jean Baudrillard
is into oppositional politics. There are anarchistic linguistic plays.
Postmodernists (unlike modernists who created works out of pure imagination)
work with cultural givens, trying to manipulate them in various ways (parody,
pastiche, collage, juxtaposition) for various ends. The ultimate
end is to appropriate these materials in such a way as to avoid being utterly
dominated by them. Art reflects the material realities of the day.
Postmodernism stresses non-canonical works, other voices, other perspectives,
especially non-western. There is a given critique of the status
quo, which is always condemned for being “centric” (as in Eurocentric,
phallocentric, logocentric, etc.). What is valued is
the heterogeneous, a multiplicity of voices (heteroglossia), questions,
and conflicts. There is a lack and mistrust of unanimity, as well
as of anything that uses philosophical terms like essentialism or metaphysics.
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A. Pop.
Spontaneous art, "happenings" (1960s). Multiplication of the object
(Andy Warhol), usually an insignificant
object, one without a given cultural meaning (i.e., Campbell soup tomato
cans).
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B. Kitch.
Ger. kitschen (“to throw together”). A pejorative term for
a work which is of little merit to gratify popular taste.
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C. Punk.
Social underclass movement, aggressive vs. dominant culture in UK.
Page created by
A. Robert Lauer
<arlauer@ou.edu>
Last updated on 10 September 2006
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