Unit 3  art of writing poetry

Romanticism

 Difficult to establish the exact periodization of the movement (mid 18 th

century)
 Response to the disillusionment with the Enlightenment values (French
Revolution)
 New set of values and ideas, about a mindset and a way of feeling of
different poets, artists and philosophers
 Historical moment with many changes: industrialization, urbanization,
secularization, etc.

Characteristics

 A child as an original rebel, natural, pure, innocent, outside the adult

discipline, 1770 17-year-old poet commits suicide poisoning himself –
romantic cult (Christ-like figure)
 A sensitive, doomed person, rejected by the society and the vulgar world,
a loser who is noble in the eyes of the few who understand.
 1774 Goethe writes his The Sorrows of Young Werther
 Emphasis on Imagination, Individualism, Emotion, Idealism
 Wordsworth praises Nature, against all technological progress and
Industrialization
 A poet remains lost and insignificant in comparison to the Nature
 Strong national feeling, admiration of the past (cult of the Middle Ages)
 Symbolism and Myth (folklore)
 Spiritualism, Libertarianism, Orientalism (Paul Gaugin in Tahiti)
 Civilization makes us sick = a core romantic belief
 The Romantic movement has permanently changed our sensibilities: cult
of the irrational, the untrained, the exotic, the childlike and the naïve.
 Expression of powerful, intense feelings but also conscious use of meter.
 Interested in nature as a moral guide, the individual, the wonderful and
supernatural, creativity.
  Going back to the classics in search of inspiration and guide.

Unit 4

Modernism

Beauty, tradition and aesthetic are not permanent

What is our concern?

A major cultural shift from time-honored aesthetics of permanence, based on
a belief in an unchanging and transcendent ideal of beauty, to an aesthetics
of transitoriness and immanence, whose central values are change and
novelty.

What does it mean?

 Sharp sense of historical relativism

 A form of criticism of tradition

 Conscious/unconscious cut off from the normative past

 Tradition as a starting point for creativity and inspiration

 17th & 18th century: Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes

 Jonathan Swift The Battle of Books (1704)

 19th century: Romanticism as a reaction against Classicism

Searching for new aesthetics  “Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the
contingent, the half of art, of which the other half is the eternal and the
immutable” Charles Baudelaire

The origins

 Christian Middle Ages (late 5th century)

  The word modernus: the adverb modo (“recently”)

 Modern vs ancient

 Poetry in Latin, poets divided on issues of aesthetics

 After 1170: humanistically minded disciples of antique poetry vs. the

moderni

 The metaphor of a Dwarf standing on the shoulders of a Giant

RENAISSANCE / BARROQUE

 The self-confidence of Renaissance replaced by consciousness of

universal illusion and mutability

 The metaphor of dwarf and giants eliminated

 The idea of succeeding generations was kept and developed

 Moderns are more advanced than the ancients

 Progress is a consequence of natural law rather than of personal merit

(Michel de Montaigne)

Middle ages  the problem of time

17th century

 Descartes: “C’est nous qui sommes les anciens”

 Spatial-visual view of Chartres vs. Generation view of Bacon

 A sense of progressive development: the inexperience of boyhood & the

wisdom of the old age

Arguments of the Moderns (led by Perrault):

 1) Reason: criticism of Homer’s the Odyssey (Ulysses and his dog)

2) Taste: criticism of Achilles insulting Agamemmon (wine-bag, dog-face)

3) Religion: Modernists superiority (truth of Christ being revealed)

From modern to gothic to romantic to modern

 Classic/modern, classic/gothic, classic/romantic...classic/modern

 From the 18th century, the beauty lost its aspect of transcendence

 Romantics: beauty as relative and historically immanent

 No longer the utopian, universal and timeless concept

 Ex: the architecture

Literary modernism

 Not a school, but a synthesis of different schools

 In France: Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal (1857), Les Paradis

Artificiels (1860) + parnasse, the symbolists (Symbolist Manifesto (1886)
by Jean Moréas)

 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-27)

 In South America: Rubén Darío, Azul...(1888), Prosas profanas (1896),

up to Vicente Huidobro, Altazor (1919)

 In Spain: Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Luces de Bohemia (1924)  In

Germany: Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain (1927)

 “make it new”

 A radical shift in aesthetics and cultural sensibilities evident in the art and
literature (post World War I).
  Distinctive break with Victorian morality.

USA & UK

 After Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855–91)

 Much of this modernist literature is actually anti-modern

 A pessimistic picture of a culture in disarray  (this despair often results

in apathy and moral relativism)

 It interprets modernity as an experience of loss

Poetry:

 T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land” (modern world as a scene of ruin)

 William Butler Yeats

What led to modernism?

 The development of modern industrial societies

 The rapid growth of cities

 The horrors of the wars

 Gender, class and race struggles

 This period marked a loss of faith in God, government and human

goodness

 Great focus on the individualism

Characteristics

 The radical disruption of linear flows of narrative

 Modernists explored individual consciousness

  The focus was introspective

 Modernists made language central to artistic exploration

 There was a focus on the individual and his alienation and confusion

 Interest in rhythm and fragments of “everyday” language

 Heavy use of symbolism and setting

 Stream of consciousness: (mix everything  go with the flow)

o Device equivalent to a character’s thought process

o Jumble of thoughts, emotions and memories

o No beginning, no end, random flow

 Interior monologue

o Often used interchangeably with stream of consciousness

o There are subtle differences:

o Restriction to an organised presentation of a character’s rational

thoughts

o It does not necessarily mingle these thoughts with impressions

and perceptions

o It does not necessarily violate the norms of grammar or logic

Difference between modernism and romantics?

AVANT-GARDE

Positivism  great belief in science

THE ORIGINS OF THE TERM

 Modernism = radical criticism of the past + commitment to change values

of the future

 Avant-garde (“advance” or “fore” guard) – military implications (self-

consciously advanced position in politics, literature and art)

 Sharp sense of militancy, praise of nonconformism

 Confidence in the final victory of time and immanence over traditions

 Struggle for futurity

 Modernism as a cornerstone for a revolutionary ethos

 Avant-garde much more radical, less flexible and less tolerant of

nuances

 More dogmatic in terms of self-assertion and self-destruction

 Its elements come from modern tradition, but it blows them up,
exaggerates them and places them in unexpected contexts

Artists…

 Part of an elite, but is committed to the anti-elitist program

 Final utopian aim is the equal sharing by all people of all benefits of life

 “Poetry should be made not by one but by all” (Lautréamont)

  The myth of the poet as a prophet had been revived and developed since
romanticism

 The modern poet is “on strike against society”

 L’Art pour l’Art (art for art’s sake)

Movements

 Cubism (1906)

 Futurism (1909)

 Expressionism (1910)

 Imaginism (1914)

 Dadaism (1916)

 Formalism (1916)

 Ultraism (1919)

 Surrealism (1924)

 Personalism (1932)

CUBISM

Stages:

Analytic Cubism (1908–11)

 Objects are shown from many viewpoints at once so that solid forms are
shattered

 They become fractured, geometric shapes compressed and flattened

against the canvas
  Space is treated as if it were a solid, tangible mass.

 Confusion is enhanced because colour is removed and everything is

painted in browns and greys with a few fragmented black outlines

 E.g. Pablo Picasso, George Braque

Synthetic Cubism (1912–24)

 Colour was re-introduced with two technical innovations called papier

collé and collage

 Painting is a flat object and blurred the line between painting and
sculpture

 Followers such as Juan Gris, Marcel Duchamp, Metzinger

 The literary tradition goes hand in hand with the one of plastic arts

 Visualization, verbalization, music and dance are tool to express a

concept and to master new conditions in and around us

 Visualisation is the task of visual artist; verbalisation of the writer and the
poet

 Calligrams by Guillaume Apollinaire

 Lost Generation in the USA included cubist techniques into their writings

 (Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, F. S.

Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein)

 Almost cinematographic scenery, Julio Cortázar, Rayuela (1963)

 A poem understood as an object

 Perceptions, memories, casual conversations, intuitions

  Literary collage: association of thoughts rather than formation of
sentences

 Poems as a kind of game, happy and funny

 Graphic form of the words, break the rules of punctuation and rhyme

 Music: Erik Satie

 Death after Dadaism and above all when surrealism comes in 1924

FUTURISM

 Futurists applied cubist techniques to the very non-Cubist theme of

motion, time, and technology

 They depicted objects in motion, the reality in movement

 They also “opened up” bodies, abolishing the distinction between figure
and its environment

 Balla’s speeding automobile: several exposures, as surrounded by so-

called “lines of force”

 The life of today cannot be conveyed by the traditional syntax that

combines words into phrases and sentences

 The modern writer should place words side-by-side in their most noun-
like grammatical form

 Onomatopoeia and typography

 Futurism in gendered terms:

o Good—active, aggressive, modern, enthusiastic—things are

masculine.
 o Bad—passive, slow, ancient, emotionally nuanced—things are
feminine.

EXPRESSIONISM

 From 1910 to 1933 (Nazism)

 The peak of this movement is the fall of the Ancient

o German government (1918)

 It reflects an image of deformed reality made by the artist  Continue

medieval and baroque tradition

 Based on Nietzsche and Kirkegaard

o In drama: Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg

o In novel: F.M. Dostoievsky

 Against order, ancient German culture

 Reconstruction of the reality through the artistic perception

 The expressionist art is not a reality, but a creation and a reality itself

 It aims to capture the essence of the reality, through the anxiety

 The Dadaists will mock the tragic sentiment of the expressionists

 Franz Werfel, Gottfried Benn, Max Brod, Heinrich Mann

 Georg Trakl, Georg Heym, August Stramm, Rainer M. Rilke

 Bertolt Brecht, Dreigroschenoper (1926)

 Bauhaus and ballet by Oskar Schlemmer

DADAISM

 Born in 1916, in Cabaret Voltaire

 Not a literary or artistic school, but a way of living

 It breaks with the past, with the academicism of cubism and futurism

 Influenced by futurism, influence for surrealism

 Not related to the future, but to the present, NOW

 It pretended being international

 Vitalism coming from the nihilism, from the systematic doubt (everything
is dada, distrust dada), the madness, mockery, bloody humour nonsense

 Dada doesn’t mean anything

 It consists in playing, antimilitaristic, revolutionary tendency

 Search for the fantasy elements (predecessor of surrealism)

Artists

 They were refugees from the Middle European countries

 They wanted nothing but revenge

 To slap the face of the bourgeoisie responsible for the massacre

 “I wanted to make literature with a revolver in my pocket” (Hueslenbeck)

 Young men conditioned by the violent language of Marinetti

 However, Dadaism mocked the WWI, while futurism praised it

 Dadaists were most inventive in annoying their public

  They tried to destroy the traditional beliefs

 To make farce of everything which was considered worthy

 Demystification of art

In literature

 Happenings” & Cabarets

 Mask that remind us Greek or Japanese theatre representing passions,

not characters

 Pamphlets

 Scandalous parties which ended in real battles, in throwing bottles and

rotten eggs

 Recitals on a horseback

 It didn’t amuse, it irritated

 Choirs with noisy cacophonies

 When it is made “literature”, it dies

 Not all the nonsense is dada

 Dadaist exposition in Berlin 1927/28

 Multimodal poems

SURREALSM

 André Breton, Manifest of Surrealism (1924)

 Formerly a psychiatrist
  Sigmund Freud & his Theory of Repression:

o Sexual nature

o Determine feelings

o Individual action

 Man Ray, Starfish (1928)

 Luis Buñuel, Un chien Andalou (1929)

In literature

 Mispronunciations, misspellings, omissions, lapses, doodlings

 The true function of thought

 Outside moral or aesthetic preoccupations

 “Automatic writing” – Stream of consciousness, a new TNT for the soul

“Invocation to inspiration. Magic art. Write immediately!” (Baudelaire)

 All types of psychotic, children or primitive writings

 Omnipotence of a dream, consciousness and subconsciousness

 No logical control – more vivid, more vital

 The Dadaist “don’t care” was transformed into a new kind of therapy for
society


Compare examples of manifestos and say de differences  manifestos
theoretical texts (the mechanisms that are behind)  altres poems els
exemples

Exam 4 question 2 cada tema 5 punts cada maybe 1 more in each module to
choose