Theatre of the Absurd. Critic Martin Esslin coined the term in his 1960 essay "Theatre of the Absurd. " He related these plays based on a broad theme of the Absurd, similar to the way Albert Camus uses the term in his 1942 essay, "The Myth of Sisyphus".[2] The Absurd in these plays takes the form of man’s reaction to a world apparently without meaning, and/or man as a puppet controlled or menaced by invisible outside forces. Though the term is applied to a wide range of plays, some characteristics coincide in many of the plays: broad comedy, often similar to Vaudeville, mixed with horrific or tragic images; characters caught in hopeless situations forced to do repetitive or meaningless actions; dialogue full of clichés, wordplay, and nonsense; plots that are cyclical or absurdly expansive; either a parody or dismissal of realism and the concept of the "well-made play".
Origin[edit] Significant precursors[edit] Elizabethan - Tragicomedy[edit] Formal experimentation[edit] Pataphysics, Surrealism, and Dadaism[edit] Expressionism. Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas.[1][2] Expressionist artists sought to express meaning[3] or emotional experience rather than physical reality.[3][4] Origin of the term[edit] In 1905, a group of four German artists, led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, formed Die Brücke (the Bridge) in the city of Dresden.
This was arguably the founding organization for the German Expressionist movement, though they did not use the word itself. A few years later, in 1911, a like-minded group of young artists formed Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in Munich. "View of Toledo" by El Greco, 1595/1610 has been indicated to have a particularly striking resemblance to 20th-century expressionism. Expressionist-Visual artists[edit] In other arts[edit] Dance[edit]
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Literary Moderism. BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, The Avant Garde's Decline and Fall in the 20th Century. Introduction to Modernist Poetry. The English novelist Virginia Woolf declared that human nature underwent a fundamental change "on or about December 1910. " The statement testifies to the modern writer's fervent desire to break with the past, rejecting literary traditions that seemed outmoded and diction that seemed too genteel to suit an era of technological breakthroughs and global violence.” —from the EDSITEment-reviewed Academy of American Poets “The Modernist Revolution: Make It New” Modernist poetry often is difficult for students to analyze and understand.
A primary reason students feel a bit disoriented when reading a modernist poem is that the speaker himself is uncertain about his or her own ontological bearings. Indeed, the speaker of modernist poems characteristically wrestles with the fundamental question of “self,” often feeling fragmented and alienated from the world around him. Postmodernism. Philosophical and artistic movement Initially emerging from a mode of literary criticism, postmodernism developed in the mid-twentieth century as a rejection of modernism,[8][9][10] and has been observed across many disciplines. Postmodernism is associated with the theories of deconstruction and post-structuralism.[4] Various authors have criticized postmodernism as promoting obscurantism, as abandoning Enlightenment rationalism and scientific rigor, and as adding nothing to analytical or empirical knowledge.[13] Definition[edit] Origins of term[edit] In 1942 H.
In 1926, Bernard Iddings Bell, president of St. Author Peter Drucker suggested the transformation into a post-modern world that happened between 1937 and 1957 and described it as a "nameless era" characterized as a shift to a conceptual world based on pattern, purpose, and process rather than a mechanical cause. History[edit] Theories and derivatives[edit] Structuralism and post-structuralism[edit] Deconstruction[edit] Philosophy[edit] Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate. Modernism and Theory is a timely study which boldly asks what – if any – role Theory has to play in the new modernist studies and investigates the relationship between the two. Separated into three sections, each with a clear introduction, Modernism and Theory looks first at the links between specific modernist producers such as D.H. Lawrence, Bataille and Woolf in relation to theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Benjamin and Agamben. The second section addresses more general questions involving conflicting attitudes to Modernism, Modernism as a narrative category and the centrality of theory to Modernism.
In the final section six prominent scholars offer their thoughts on how Modernism relates to theory looking at topics such as ethics, ecocriticism and the avant-garde, concluding with an afterword from Fredric Jameson. Contributors include: Stephen Ross, Anneleen Masschelein, Ian Buchanan, Roger Rothman, Allan Stoekl, Thomas S. History of Modernism.