Literary Movement
and Criticism Project
Literary Genres
Genres 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
Bildungsroman
Bildungsroman 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
Classicism
stresses 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 Drama
Elizabethan 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
Gothic
focused 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
Humanism
In 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 decolonization 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
Transcedentalism
Although 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 Realsim
aims 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 Fantasy
Utilizes 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
Existentialism
Feminism
Freudianism
New Humanism
Reader Response
Biographical
Historical
Jungian
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.
Biographical
Central 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?
Historical
Central 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?
Jungian
Not 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.