Modern Criticism | 20th Century

#literature #criticism #modern #modernism
#part3 #english #honours

Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of literature's goals and methods. Though the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.

Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of literature's goals and methods.



Site iconLiterary Theory and Criticism
Modernist Literary Theory and Criticism
NASRULLAH MAMBROL NASRULLAH MAMBROL
2 years ago


Advertisements

“Modernist” is a term most often used in literary studies to refer to an experimental, avant-garde style of writing prevalent between World War I and World War II, although it is sometimes applied more generally to the entire range of divergent tendencies within a longer period, from the 1890s to the present. Modernism is an international movement, erupting in different countries at different times; in fact, one characteristic of modernism is its transgression of national and generic boundaries. My main focus here, however, is on English-language modernism. As a historically descriptive term, then, “modernism” is misleading not only because of its varying applications (to the historical period or to a highly organized style characteristic of some but not all writers of the period) but also because it is typically more evaluative than descriptive. In its positive sense, “modernism” signals a revolutionary break from established orthodoxies, a celebration of the present, and an experimental investigation into the future. As a negative value, “modernism” has connoted an incoherent, even opportunistic heterodoxy, an avoidance of the discipline of tradition. This critical overtone has sounded periodically since the eighteenth century, from the time that Jonathan Swift, in A Tale of a Tub (1704), lampooned the “modernists” as those who would eschew the study of the ancients through the late-nineteenth-century reform movement in the Catholic church, which was labeled “modernist” and condemned as the “synthesis of all the heresies” in the papal encyclical Pascendi of Pope Pius X (1907). It is interesting to note that in the recent debates over modernism versus postmodernism, the characteristic unorthodoxy of modernism has been displaced onto the postmodern; in a motivated reversal, modernism is characterized as the corrupt, canonized orthodoxy (identified, misleadingly, with the new critcism attributed to T. S. Eliot, among others), with postmodernism as its experimental offshoot.

The project of identifying a modernist criticism and theory is vexed not only by the imprecision and contradictory overtones of the word “modernist” but also by the category “theory.” Certainly many modernist writers wrote criticism: Virginia Woolf published hundreds of essays and reviews; W. B. Yeats’s most important literary criticism has been collected in Essays and Introductions; Ezra Pound’s voluminous criticism is well known for its informality and directness; Eliot was as important a critic, especially in his later years, as he was a poet. But the most interesting theoretical dimension of modernist writing is not always explicitly presented as either criticism or theory but is instantiated in the writing itself; the theory can be deduced, however controversially, from the practice.

One axiom of modernist theory that was importantly articulated by T. E. Hulme in “Romanticism and Classicism” (1913-14, posthumously published in Speculations, 1924) is an acceptance of limits that are identified with classicism. Hulme argues: “The classical poet never forgets this finiteness, this limit of man. He remembers always that he is mixed up with earth. He may jump, but he always returns back; he never flies away into the circumambient gas” (120). The classical style, Hulme states, is carefully crafted, characterized by accurate description and a cheerful “dry hardness” (126). He asserts that “it is essential to prove that beauty may be in small, dry things” (131); Hulme’s preference is for the visual and the concrete over the general and abstract, for freshness of idiom, for the vital complexities that are “intensive” rather than extensive (139).

Hulme’s sounding of the note of classical style as one that is local, limited, intensive, and fresh resonates widely through the work of other modernist writers. Pound’s dictum “Make it New,” Eliot’s objective correlative (“Hamlet,” 1919, Selected Prose 48), James Joyce’s epiphanies, Woolf’s moments of being, and the explosive power of the concrete image celebrated in Imagism are all instances of a “classical”).