ASSIGNMENT

NAME: SARAH OMAR

M.PHIL: ENGLISH. LITERATURE

SEMESTER: 2

INSTRUCTOR: MS. UZMA IMRAN

COURSE: POST MODERNISMAND FEMINIST LITERATURE

MODERNISM: Modernism is a cultural movement that generally includes the progressive art and architecture, music, literature and design which emerged in the decades before 1914. It was a movement of artists and designers who rebelled against late 19th century academic and historicist traditions, and embraced the new economic, social and political aspects of the emerging modern world. In a vast canvas, the period was marked by sudden and unexpected breaks with traditional ways of viewing and interacting with the world. Experimentation and individualism became virtues, where in the past they were often discouraged. Modernism was set in motion, in one sense, through a series of cultural shocks. The first of these great shocks was the Great War, which ravaged Europe from 1914 through 1918, known now as World War One. At the time, this War to End All Wars was looked upon with such ghastly horror that many people simply could not imagine what the world seemed to be plunging towards. The first hints of that particular way of thinking called Modernism stretch back into the nineteenth century. In American Literature, the group of writers and thinkers known as the Lost Generation has become synonymous with Modernism. In the wake of the First World War, several American artists chose to live abroad as they pursued their creative impulses. These included the intellectual Gertrude Stein, the novelists Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the painter Waldo Pierce, among others. The term itself refers to the spiritual and existential hangover left by four years of unimaginably destructive warfare. The artists of the Lost Generation struggled to find some meaning in the world in the wake of chaos. As with much of Modernist literature, this was achieved by turning the minds eye inward and attempting to record the workings of consciousness. Like for Hemingway, this meant the abandonment of all ornamental language. One of his famous novels, The Sun Also Rises is famous, for their extremely spare, blunt, simple sentences and emotions that play out right on the surface of things. There is an irony to this bluntness, however, as his characters often have hidden agendas, hidden sometimes even from themselves, which serve to guide their actions. The Lost Generation, like other High Modernists, gave up on the idea that anything was truly knowable. All truth became relative, conditional, and in flux respectively. This is the period that saw such revolutionary political movements as fascism, Nazism, communism, anarchism, and so on. Indeed, "isms" abound as various groups establish bold manifestos outlining their visions for an improved future. Manifestos about artistic form are just as widespread and, like the political manifestos, often radically different one from the next (e.g. surrealism, Dadaism, cubism, futurism, expressionism, existentialism, primitivism, minimalism, etc.). In general, this radicalism is driven by a sense that Enlightenment values may be suspect. Modernists therefore participate in a general questioning of all the values held dear by the Victorian period (narrative, preferentiality, religion, progress, bourgeois domesticity, capitalism, utilitarianism, decorum, empire, industry, etc.). Many modernists also tend to take the Romantic exploration of the irrational, the primitive, and the unconscious to darker extremes. In general, there is a fear that things have gone off track after the World War I . Hence, some of the features of modernist aesthetic work include: 1. self-reflexivity

2. An exploration of psychological and subjective states, combined sometimes with a rejection of realism or objective representation. 3. Alternative ways of thinking about representation (e.g. cubism, which attempts to see the same event or object from multiple perspectives at the same time). 4. Radical experimentation in form, including a breakdown in generic distinction. 5. Fragmentation in form and representation (e.g. T. S. Eliot's "Wasteland"). 6. Extreme ambiguity and simultaneity in structure. 7. Some experimentation in the breakdown between high and low 8. The use of parody and irony in artistic creation, though again in a way that tends to be difficult for the mass consumer to understand. POST MODERNISM LITERATURE: Coming to Postmodernism, it is a broad range of responses to modernism, especially refusals of some of its totalizing premises and effects, and of its implicit or explicit distinction between high culture and commonly lived life, as well as responds to such things as a world lived under nuclear threat, to a world of faster communication, mass mediated reality, greater diversity of cultures and mores and a consequent pluralism. Moreover, its acknowledgments of and in some senses struggles against a world in which, under a spreading technological capitalism, all things are commodified and fetishized , and in which genuine experience has been replaced by simulation and spectacle. Hence, it results in senses of fragmentation, of discontinuity, of reality as a pastiche rather than as a weave, and the re-conceptualizations of society, history and the self as cultural constructs, hence as rhetorical constructs. There are postmodernisms even more than there were modernisms, and not all postmodernism partakes of all of the following attributes such as a reaction to, refusal and diffusion of, the elements of modernist thought which are totalizing: which suggest a master narrative or master code, i.e. an explanatory cohesion of experience; the result may be. A sense of discontinuity Parodies of all sorts of meta-narrative and master-code elements, including genre and literary form, the challenging of borders and limits the exploration of the marginalized aspects of life and marginalized elements of society. A sense of life is lived in a temporal world with no guarantee. The writing of reflexive or meta-fiction: fiction which is in the first instance aware of itself as fiction and which may dramatize the false or constructed nature of fiction, on the one hand, or the inevitable fictionality of all experience, on the other. A reaction to the refusal of the totalizing of modernist form -- of the dominance in modernism of form and of the idea of the aesthetic, which concept created a special world for art, an attempt to integrate art and life by the inclusion of popular forms, popular culture, and everyday reality. The use of paradox, of undercutting, of radical shifts, in order to undercut any legitimization of reality, subject, ontological ground. Then, the refusal of seriousness or problematizing of seriousness. A sense that the world is a world made up of rhetoric -- of language and cultural constructs and

images and symbols, none of which have any necessary validity. A distance from perspectives, from the located, unified subject. A fragmentation of the self (the unified, located subject), or a disappearance or flatness -- the self, or subject, is no longer a psychological reality but henceforth a cultural construction, located rhetorically (in terms of the kinds of language used, the subject matter, the situation), differently configured in different situations. The dramatization of a world in which there are no depths. A greater emphasis on the human as incarnate as physical beings in a physical world. This is tied to postmodernism's distrust of rationalism and of the ideology of the Enlightenment. FEMINIST LITERATURE: Feminist literature grew out of the women's movement following WW II, this approach analyzes the representation of women in literature. Though the projects of individual critics differ, there is general agreement that interpretation of literature involves critique of patriarchy. Patriarchy is known as an ideology that privileges masculine ways of thinking/points of view and marginalizes women politically, economically and psychologically. The project of feminist literature is the interpretation to expose patriarchal nature of language itself. This involves usage that denigrates or ignores women. It also includes the deeper view that a masculine style of language has suppressed a feminine one. Women need to assert a feminine language. Some have argued that it would be more fluid, less straightforward and logical, more perceptual, open to ongoing semiosis .Some authors explore texts in detail, demonstrating patriarchal patterns, or the complex response of women writers to their own authorial status. Some explore challenges to a literary canon that is so dominated by men. It also entails the study of a literary tradition of women writers. In the sense that this criticism often explores less what the text overtly says but what it hides (e.g. unquestioning attitude toward ideologically entrenched ideas about women) this criticism counts as an example of a "hermeneutics of suspicion." Moreover, the feminist ideology is based on the dominant values, beliefs, ways of thinking through which a culture understands reality. Similar to the phrase "cultural mythology," it usually represents in tacit fashion the prevailing views of a particular class. Examples of ideology relevant to American culture: gender roles, value of capitalism, constitutional rights protecting individual liberties, Protestant work ethic. While, gynocriticism is concerned with the works done by women. Simultaneously, hermeneutics of suspicion involves a resistance to author's intentions or textual design to unearth hidden ideologies or anomalies. Less what the text says; more what the text hides. Hence, the female writers such as A S Byatt, Margaret Atwood, and Iris Murdoch have been influenced by the movements of modernism, postmodernism fiction as well as feminist literature. Thus, as an author, Byatt herself is constantly mediating works of the past, both by creating pastiches and through including discussions concerning historical works in her own narratives. But unlike the authors of most postmodern metafiction, whose self-conscious use of intertexts is meant to break through the illusion of realism, Byatts own work takes a very different approach to the metafictional and intertextual developments in the postmodern novel

itself. The structure of Possession utilizes postmodern techniques, but, as a critic has pointed out, it does so in order to hoist postmodernism with its own petard that is, in order to show that the self-conscious use of familiar styles can enrich, rather than explode, realist story-telling. Thus the crucial difference between this novel and most other postmodern intertextual games, or historiographic metafictions, as Linda Hutcheon, a critic has called them , lies in Byatts attempt to emphasize the honest resurrection of the Victorian voices. Byatts novel and her critical writings suggest that granting the work the power to speak for itself is a method which allows readers to connect with past minds. Byatts focus in Possession is on the relationship between a reader and a long-dead author, with the Victorians pondering upon the validity of the historical method and the reliability of Biblical narratives, and the twentieth-century. While, Margaret Atwoods novel is considered as a postmodern feminist novel, The Handmaids Tale that also concentrates on the evils of political system which aggravates the Women who have anguished plight and despicable exploitation. Instead of playing a crucial role in the emancipation of women, the state Fundamentalist Christian coup in mid 1980s near Boston in Massachusetts, reverted to the brutal aspects of ill-treating women, disenfranchised them, denied their rights of education, confiscated their credit cards, destroyed homosexuals, religious sects, and abortionists. The government took extreme steps in the process of reform. In an innovative method of redress, old women, Jews, and non-whites were resettled in radioactive colonies. A critic, Linda W. Wagner Martin views the novel as the prediction of the horrors of cultures so frightened by normal sexuality that it codified and prescribed all such procreation, and created hierarchies of life and death around it. It is a brutal horrifying culture. Simultaneously, from the mid-twentieth century on Murdoch argued that modern philosophy, both in its analytic and French existentialist guises, is overly concerned with action and choice, operating with a nave conception of the will and the idea of a liberal freely choosing agent, producing a picture of morality which is narrow and biased and ultimately unhelpful in relation to the complexities of our moral lives. She wants to replace this thin understanding of the moral agent with a richer idea of a moral person with an inner life and morally significant movements of consciousness. In the past decades, Murdoch's work has been appropriated by woman philosophers who have found her emphases concerning moral philosophy and personhood more illuminating than those of her action-centered contemporaries. But the particular interest in the inner life seems, for Murdoch herself, to have little to do with gendered sensitivities. She is certainly not a philosopher of womanliness, or a specifically feminist philosopher. In Lovibond's view she wants, essentially, to be above such things. In an interview, cited by Lovibond, she states that, I think I want to write about things on the whole where it doesn't matter whether you're male or female, in which case you'd better be male, because a male represents ordinary human beings, unfortunately, as things stand at the moment, whereas a woman is always a woman! Murdoch's appeal here to a gender neutral (male) outlook may be found deeply disturbing for contemporary feminist sensibilities. Yet, there are plenty of passages in writings and interviews where she takes a thoroughly uncompromised and sharp posture in favor of gender equality. She has, furthermore, made way for a perspective on ethics which many woman philosophers have found deeply needed in twentieth-century ethics, including love, attention and self-forgetfulness

in the ethical repertoire. Thus, these writers are influenced by the following movements which is visible in their works that is portrayed in between the lines of the novels that needs to be sifted thoroughly by the readers respectively.