Literary Movement and Criticism Project

Literary GenresGenres being explored in project

Aestheticism

Beat Generation

Lost Generation

Modernism

Harlem Renaissance

Post Colonialism

High Modernism

Bildungsroman

Classicism

Elizabethan Drama

Gothic

Humanism

Naturalism

Enlightenment

Post Modernism

Surrealism

Neoclassicism

Victorian Era

Literature of the Absurd

Transcendentalism

Magical Realism

Science Fiction and Fantasy

Aestheticism:

The Aesthetic movement tended to hold that the Arts should provide refined sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages.  Main characteristics of the movement were: suggestion rather than statement, sensuality, and massive use of symbols.Examples are Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray

Beat Generation:

Literature in this genre culture included experimentation with drugs and alternative forms of sexuality, an interest in Eastern religion, a rejection of materialism, and the idealizing of exuberant, unexpurgated means of expression and being.

Examples include Robert Persig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and William S. Burrough’s Naked Lunch.

Lost Generation:

The post-World War I generation, but specifically a group of U.S. writers who came of age during the war and established their literary reputations in the 1920s. These writers tended to be expats.

Examples are Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Modernism: This type of literature normally revolved around the idea of individualism, mistrust of institutions (government, religion), and the disbelief of any absolute truths.

Examples are Virginia Wolff’s Mrs. Dalloway and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury

High Modernism:

Believes that there is a clear distinction between (capital-A) Art and mass culture, and it places itself firmly on the side of Art and in opposition to popular or mass culture; this style is a subgenre of Modernism.

Examples are James Joyce’s Dubliners and D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love

BildungsromanBildungsroman is the name affixed to those novels that concentrate on the development or education of a central character. German in origin, "bildungs" means formation, and "roman" means novel. Although The History of Agathon, written by Christoph Martin Wieland in 1766-1767, may be the first known example, it was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, written in 1795, that took the form from philosophical to personal development and gave celebrity to the genre.Examples include: The Bell Jar, Huck Finn and Jude the Obscure

Classicismstresses reason, balance, clarity, ideal beauty, and orderly form in imitation of the arts of ancient Greece and Rome. Classicism is often contrasted with Romanticism, which stresses imagination, emotion, and individualism. Classicism also differs from Realism, which stresses the actual rather than the ideal. Examples include: Aeneid, Medea, Faust and The Illiad

Elizabethan DramaElizabethan tragedy dealt with heroic themes, usually centering on a great personality who is destroyed by his own passion and ambition. The comedies often satirized the fops and gallants of society.Examples include: Hamlet, The Jew of Malta, Everyman in His Humor

Gothicfocused on ruin, decay, death, terror, and chaos, and privileged irrationality and passion over rationality and reason, grew in response to the historical, sociological, psychological, and political contexts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Examples include: “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Frankenstein, and The Monk

HumanismIn this movement the focus moves from God to man. This movement includes works where man is seen as capable of achieving redemption through his faith, independently, without the grace of God.Examples include: Utopia and Book of the Courtier

Harlem Renaissance:

Literary movement characterized by an overt racial pride that represented in the idea of the new Negro, who, through intellect, challenged the pervading racism and stereotypes.

Examples are Zora Neale Hurston’s

Their Eyes Were Watching God and

Langston Hughe’s Not Without Laughter

Post Colonial:

Involves writings that deal with issues of de-colonization or the political and cultural independence of people formerly subjugated to colonial rule.

Examples are Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude

Naturalism:

This style of literature suggested that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character.

Examples are Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage and John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row

Enlightenment:

This type of literature believed that human reason could be used to combat ignorance, superstition, and tyranny and to build a better world.

Examples are Voltaire’s Candide and Honore de Balzac’s Lost Illusions

Post Modernism: Literature in this movement is hard to define; it has become widely recognized as a movement that rejects Western values, sees the human experience as unstable and begs the reader to supply his or her own interpretation.

Examples are Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions and Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho

Surrealism: Literature in this movement features the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non- sequitur, attempts to express the workings of the subconscious and is characterized by fantastic imagery 

Examples are William S. Burrough’s Naked Lunch and Andre Breton’s Mad Love

Neoclassical:

This movement represented a reaction against the optimistic, exuberant, and enthusiastic Renaissance view of man as a being fundamentally good and possessed of an infinite potential for spiritual and intellectual growth and, by contrast, saw man as an imperfect being, inherently sinful, whose potential was limited.

Examples are Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe

Victorian:

This movement features idealized portraits of difficult lives in which hard work, perseverance, love and luck win out in the end; virtue would be rewarded and wrongdoers are suitably punished.

Examples are George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Literature of the Absurd:

This movement of literature deals with the modern sense of human purposelessness in a universe without meaning or value. 

Examples are Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

TranscedentalismAlthough transcendentalism was never a rigorously systematic philosophy, it had some basic tenets that were generally shared by its adherents. The beliefs that God is immanent in each person and in nature and that individual intuition is the highest source of knowledge led to an optimistic emphasis on individualism, self-reliance, and rejection of traditional authority.

Examples include: Leaves of Grass, Walden and Nature

Magical Realsimaims to seize the paradox of the union of opposites.  For instance, it challenges polar opposites like life and death and the pre-colonial past versus the post-industrial present.  Magical realism is characterized by two conflicting perspectives, one based on a rational view of reality and the other on the acceptance of the supernatural as prosaic reality.  Magical realism differs from pure fantasy primarily because it is set in a normal, modern world with authentic descriptions of humans and society.

Examples include: The House of the Spirits, 100 Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera

Science Fiction and FantasyUtilizes messages and social commentary to expose the foibles of man’s attempt to progress technologically using themes of time, science vs. the supernatural and salvation and destruction.Examples include:Brave New World, I, Robot and The Martian Chronicles

Literary Criticism

What is literary criticism?

Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature.

Critical lenses for this project:

Deconstructionism Reader ResponseExistentialism BiographicalFeminism HistoricalFreudianism JungianNew Humanism

Deconstructionism:

This critical lens asserts that any text, as a whole, has multiple meanings, not the one that is often taught, and that they are often contradictory.

Existentialism:

As a form of literary criticism, existentialism seeks to analyze literary works, with special emphasis on the struggle to define meaning and identity in the face of alienation and isolation. In this school of criticism, nothing is dismissed as accidental or incidental.

Feminism

This school concerns itself with stereotypical representations of genders. It closely examines the language of the text as well as the roles of men and women in its relationship to the language.

Freudian

In this psychoanalytic approach, at its most elementary, the novel may be analyzed simply in terms of phallic symbols: the assertive male organ or receptive female organ. This school also looks at how characters handle repression, their desires and conflicts.

New Humanism

This criticism embraces conservative literary and moral values and advocates a return to humanistic education, which focuses on secular ideology which espouses reason, ethics, and justice, rejecting the supernatural and religious as a basis for making decisions.

Reader Response

focuses on the reader (or "audience") and his or her experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the work.

BiographicalCentral Biographical Questions: What biographical facts has the author used in the text?What biographical facts has the author changed? Why?What insights do we acquire about the author’s life by reading the text?How do these facts and insights increase (or diminish) our understanding of the text?In what ways does the author seem to consider his or her own life as "typical" or significant?

HistoricalCentral Historical Questions: What specific historical events were happening when the work was being composed? (See timelines in history or literature texts.)What historical events does the work deal with?In what ways did history affect the writer's outlook?In what ways did history affect the style? language? content?In what ways and for what reasons did the writer alter historical events?

JungianNot all of Jungian literary criticism examines all individuation processes. Two major points of focus are the integration of the anima, and the larger integration of the shadow. Conversely a Jungian literary criticism may simply evaluate the effectiveness as a particular archetype in a novel. While reading literature in Jungian literary criticism, the central character is viewed as real, while most other characters are seen as symbolic representations of aspects of the hero’s unconscious self. A woman, for example, represents the anima, the feminine side of the hero’s personality. An antagonist represents shadow.