Faculty of Humanities and Social Science > English
Important Literary Theories
Md. Nuruzzaman Moral:
Postmodernism
Postmodernism literally means 'after the modern'. It is used in critical theory to refer to a point of departure for works of literature, drama, architecture, and design, as well as in marketing and business and the interpretation of history, law and culture in the late 20th century.
Postmodernism was originally a reaction to modernism. Largely influenced by the Western European disillusionment induced by World War II, postmodernism tends to refer to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, interconnectedness or interreferentiality,[1] in a way that is often indistinguishable from a parody of itself. It has given rise to charges of fraudulence.[2]
Postmodernity is a derivative referring to non-art aspects of history that were influenced by the new movement, namely developments in society, economy and culture since the 1960s.[3] When the idea of a reaction or rejection of modernism was borrowed by other fields, it became synonymous in some contexts with postmodernity. The term is closely linked with poststructuralism (cf. Jacques Derrida) and with modernism, in terms of a rejection of its bourgeois, elitist culture.[4]
Md. Nuruzzaman Moral:
Philosophical Movements and contributors
Influencer Year Influence
Karl Barth
1925 fideist approach to theology brought a rise in subjectivity
Martin Heidegger
1927 rejected the philosophical grounding of the concepts of "subjectivity" and "objectivity"
W.V.O. Quine
1951 developed the theses of indeterminacy of translation and ontological relativity, and argued against the possibility of a priori knowledge. Argued that we can never satisfactorily know what a word "means."
Ludwig Wittgenstein
1953 anti-foundationalism, on certainty, a philosophy of language
Thomas Samuel Kuhn
1962 posited the rapid change of the basis of scientific knowledge to a provisional consensus of scientists, popularized the term "paradigm shift"
Jacques Derrida
1967 re-examined the fundamentals of writing and its consequences on philosophy in general; sought to undermine the language of western metaphysics (deconstruction)
Michel Foucault
1975 examined discursive power in Discipline and Punish, with Bentham's panopticon as his model, and also known for saying "language is oppression" (Meaning that language was developed to allow only those who spoke the language not to be oppressed. All other people that don't speak the language would then be oppressed.)
Jean-François Lyotard
1979 opposed universality, meta-narratives, and generality
Richard Rorty
1979 argues philosophy mistakenly imitates scientific methods; advocates dissolving traditional philosophical problems; anti-foundationalism and anti-essentialism
Jean Baudrillard
1981 Simulacra and Simulation - reality disappears underneath the interchangeability of signs
Md. Nuruzzaman Moral:
Deconstruct
Deconstruction is a term which is used to denote the application of postmodern ideas of criticism, or theory, to a "text" or "artifact", based on architectural deconstructivism. A deconstruction is meant to undermine the frame of reference and assumptions that underpin the text or the artifact.
The term "deconstruction" comes from Martin Heidegger, who calls for the destruction or deconstruction (the German "Destruktion" connotates both English words) of the history of ontology. The point, for Heidegger, was to describe Being prior to its being covered over by Plato and subsequent philosophy. Thus, Heidegger himself engaged in "deconstruction" through a critique of post-Socratic thought (which had forgotten the question of Being) and the study of the pre-Socratics (where Being was still an open question).
In later usage, a "deconstruction" is an important textual "occurrence" described and analyzed by many postmodern authors and philosophers. They argue that aspects in the text itself would undermine its own authority or assumptions and that internal contradictions would erase boundaries or categories which the work relied on or asserted. Poststructuralists beginning with Jacques Derrida, who coined the term, argued that the existence of deconstructions implied that there was no intrinsic essence to a text, merely the contrast of difference. This is analogous to the idea that the difference in perception between black and white is the context. A deconstruction is created when the "deeper" substance of text opposes the text's more "superficial" form. This idea is not isolated to poststructuralists but is related to the idea of hermeneutics in literature; intellectuals as early as Plato asserted it and so did modern thinkers such as Leo Strauss. Derrida's argument is that deconstruction proves that texts have multiple meanings and the "violence" between the different meanings of text may be elucidated by close textual analysis.
Popularly, close textual analyses describing deconstruction within a text are often themselves called deconstructions. Derrida argued, however, that deconstruction is not a method or a tool but an occurrence within the text itself. Writings about deconstruction are therefore referred to in academic circles as deconstructive readings.
Deconstruction is far more important to postmodernism than its seemingly narrow focus on text might imply. According to Derrida, one consequence of deconstruction is that the text may be defined so broadly as to encompass not just written words but the entire spectrum of symbols and phenomena within Western thought. To Derrida, a result of deconstruction is that no Western philosopher has been able to escape successfully from this large web of text and reach that which is "signified", which they imagined to exist "just beyond" the text.
The more common use of the term is the more general process of pointing to contradictions between the intent and surface of a work and the assumptions about it. A work then "deconstructs" assumptions when it places them in context. For example, someone who can pass as the opposite sex may be said to "deconstruct" gender identity, because there is a conflict between the superficial appearance and the reality of the person's gender.
Md. Nuruzzaman Moral:
Realism
Realism, Realist or Realistic may refer to:
The arts
• Realism (arts), the depiction of subjects as they appear in everyday life
• Realism (dramatic arts), a movement towards greater fidelity to real life
• Realism (visual arts), a style of painting that depicts what the eye can see
• Classical Realism, an artistic movement in late 20th Century that valued beauty and artistic skill
• Hyperrealism (painting), a genre of painting that resembles high resolution photography
• Kitchen sink realism, an English cultural movement in the 1950s and 1960s that concentrated on contemporary social realism
• Literary realism, a 19th century literary movement
• Magic realism, an artistic genre in which magical elements appear in an otherwise realistic setting
• Nazi heroic realism or the art of the third Reich, a style of propaganda art associated with Nazi Germany
• New Realism, an artistic movement founded in 1960 by Pierre Restany and Yves Klein
Md. Nuruzzaman Moral:
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists exhibiting their art publicly in the 1860s. The name of the movement is derived from the title of a Claude Monet work, Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant), which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satiric review published in Le Charivari.
Characteristics of Impressionist painting include visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles.
The emergence of Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogous movements in other media which became known as Impressionist music and Impressionist literature.
Impressionism also describes art created in this style, but outside of the late 19th century time period.
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