Modernism, Post-Modernism & New-Historicism

Name: Riddhi Jani

Roll no: 25

Paper: 7, Literary Theory & Criticism

Semester: 2nd

Submitted to: Department of English

M.K.Bhavnagar University

Modernism

• From late 90th century to early 20th century.• Set of cultural tendencies and arrangement of

associated cultural movement.• Victorian conventions were broken away.• Chris Baldick says:

“Modernist literature is characterized chiefly by a rejection of 19th-century traditions and of their consensus between author and reader.”

• Ezra Pound- famous modernist

• Many innovations in the fields of music, painting and literature.

• Modernists were self-conscious.

An Object

This thing, that hath a code and not a core,Hath set acquaintance where might be affections,And nothing nowDisturbeth his reflections. 

-Ezra Pound

‘The Chess Players’ by ‘Fall of Icarus’ by Marcel Duchamp Pieter Bruegel

Post-Modernism

• Started in late 20th century.• It opposites the assumptions.• Rejects the difference between ‘high’ and

‘low’.• Challenges the idea of universality. • It extols plurality.• Doesn’t believe in neat end.• Kurt Vonnegut, John Barth, Thomas

Pynchon

“The difference between the right word and the nearly right word is the difference between lightning and

lightning bug.”

New-Historicism

• Developed in 1980s.• Stephen Greenblatt.• Basic idea: history

with literary text.• Parallel reading of

literary text and history.

Literary Text

Non Literary Text

“Text is historical and history is textual.”

-Michael Wallner

“(New Historicism) is combined interest in the textuality of history, the historicity of text.”

-Louis Montrose

New Historicism involves “an intensified willingness to read all of the textual traces of the past with the attention traditionally conferred only on literary text”

-Stephen Greenblatt• Foucault and idea of ‘episteme’.

Looked in the Past (New Historicism).mp4