Contemporary English literature

Postmodernism

• what is contemporary?

  • strict sense of the word: author is alive

  • in education: 1960s - present

• after-modernism

• no need to establish a demarcation line between modernism and post-

  modernism

• the term refers generally to the phase of 20th century Western culture that succeeded the reign of high-modernism

• it is most often applied to a cultural condition prevailing in the advanced capitalist societies since the 1960s

• characteristics:

  • suberabundance of disconnected images and styles

  • a culture of fragmentary sensations, electric nostalgia, disposable simulacra (=copies or representations of things that are no longer connected to any original or have become disconnected from their source), and promiscuous superficiality

  • traditionally valued qualities of depth and coherence and meaning, originality, and authenticity are dissolved

• when applied to literature: ambiguity → implies that either modernism has ben replaced or that it has continued into a new phase

• may be seen as the continuation of modernism’s alienated mood and disorienting techniques and at the same time the abandonment of its determined quest for artistic coherence in a fragmented world

• seems to have little relevance to poetry + limited application to drama outside the absurdist tradition

  • widely used in reference to fiction

    • Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Jeanette Winterson

• production of art is often seen as a product

Features of postmodern literature

• total/ cruel literature

• self-reflexivity

• the meaning of the text is unstable

• literary allusions

• intertextuality

• metaficiton

• historical novels

• narrative techniques

• magic realism

• social criticism

• use of objective correlatives

total/ cruel literature

• Theater of the Absurd

• Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead

self-reflexivity

• literary works that are openly reflecting upon their own process of artful compositions

• these works repeatedly refer to their own ficitonal status

• the narrator of such work is often called self-conscious narrator

• can be also found in poetry

• e.g.: John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman

unstable meaning of the text

• plural meaning → readers’ response is imortant

• the meaning of the text is created in the act of reading it

• cooperation of the reader and the text

• reading = process

• freedom of interpretations

• e.g.: John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman offer alternative ending choices

• Julian Barne's’s Flaubert’s Parrot - the novel can be taken as a biography of the French author, but even in this sense, the meaning is plural, since biographies also depend on the prejudices of the writers: one biography concentrates on the successes, the other on the failures of Flaubert’s life

literary allusions

• gives an intellectual frame or reference → the reader is provided with certain expectation

• also means in a sense the death of the author → if the whole work is completely an allusion to an earlier work

• e.g.: Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead: the intellectual frame of reference is given by Shakespeare, the readers are familiar with the story, they just have to adjust their version to the new one

intertextuality

• refers to the relationship between texts, where one text (literary, visual, cultural) references, echoes, or transforms elements of another

• the original title of Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern meets King Lear

metafiction

• fiction about fiction → openly commenting on its own fictional status

• e.g.: John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), in which Fowles interrupts the narrative to explain his procedures, and offers the reader alternative endings (each chapter begins with a motto from a literary work from the Victorian period)

historical novels

• a novel in which the action takes place during a specific historical period well before the time of writing

• attempts to depict accurately the customs and mentality of the period

• e.g.: E.g. Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s parrot: the history of the French author gets fictionalized

narrative techniques

• double nature of the narration + the narrator appears in the novel → hard to distinguish between the author and the narrator → the narrator is also a character (the narrator in The French Lieutenant’s Woman and in Flaubert’s Parrot)

• unreliable narrator (Stevens in Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day)

magic realism

• a kind of modern fiction in which fabulous and fantastical events are

  included in a narrative that otherwise maintains the ‘reliable’ tone of

  objective realistic report

• fantastic attributes given to characters in such novels –levitation, flight, telepathy, telekinesis – are among the means that magic realism adopts in order to encompass the often phantasmagoric political realities of the 20th century

• E.g. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: story-telling tradition (realistic) tale-tradition (supernatural)

  • 1001 children were born at midnight -- Schecherazade tells 1001 stories to delay her execution; the story starts with Aadam – he was the first man according to the Bible, etc.

• e.g.: Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and other stories

social criticism

• e.g. Seamus Heaney’s The Tollund Man: the poet says he feels at home → maybe because violence has been always in our lives, not just 2000 years ago, when the bodies were most probably sacrificed for fertility goddesses

• e.g. Tony Harrison’s V: 1980s: Margaret Thatcher came into power →

  heavy industry was closed down; miner’s strikes, unemployment, racism,

  football hooliganism. V= versus (left vs right); victory (sign used by Churchill and Thatcher); verse (self-reflexivity); vandalism

• e.g. Brian Friel’s Translations: individual and national identity is taken

  away by the English; question of self-identification: Sarah finally manages to pronounce her name

• e.g. Caryll Churchill’s Serious Money: satire on Thatcherist era

surrealism

• is better known and easier to define in the visual arts than literature

• surrealism is not quite same as magic realism

• metaphors become the real, effacing the world of reason and common sense

• the Surrealists favorite analogy for their art: dreaming → the unconscious mind reveals its secret desires and fears

• conscious vs. unconscious

  • boundaries become unclear

  • is it for children? → rather for young adults: Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland

Angela Carter on Surrealism

• dreams are a way of the mind telling itself stories

• using free association and dream imagery when writing

• taking apart mythologies in order to find out what basic, human stuff they are made of in the first place

• her surrealistic stories reveal dreamlike qualities

• Rhetoric disruption: tradition needs to be reinvented/ adapted, in its original form it is not considered applicable for the newer generation

Angela Carter (1940-1992)

• British novelist, short story writer and journalist

• feminist literary critic

• background of social mobility, teenage anorexia, travels

• known for magical realism, Gothic fiction, subversive reimaginings of fairy tales and myths

• her works blended dark fantasy, eroticism and political allegory → often callenged the patriarchal norms by exploring themes of gender, power and sexuality

• 1979 | The Bloody Chamber

  • 10 stories - reinterpreting classic fairy tales and Gothic tropes through a feminist psychoanalytic lens

  • exposes the violence and eroticism of folklore

  • major themes:

    • feminist revsions of fairy tales: dismantles the “damsel in distress” trope → gives agency to female characters

    • gothic horror & eroticism: her prose is lush which hightense sensory excess

    • power & sexual politics: explores abuse, objectification and liberation (The Tiger’s Bride, The Company of Wolves)

    • intertextuality & metafiction: draws on Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Marquis de Sade but twists their morals → functions as a critique of how fairy tales enforce gender roles

The Bloody Chamber (1979)

• the first story, based on the story of Bluebeard

• the heroine remembers the train ride as she left Paris with her new husband

• she thinks of leaving her mother, a strong, independent woman who had fought pirates and killed a tiger in her youth

• the mother asks if the heroine loves her husband, and the heroine admits that she does not, but she is still determined to marry him

• the mother accepts that the marriage will lift their family from poverty, as the heroine’s husband is very rich and a Marquis

• this first story introduces many of the motifs Carter finds in the fairy tales: a poor, virginal heroine being “rescued” by a wealthy, experienced man

• she also introduces a strong female character in the heroine’s mother

• the Marquis is in a position of total power over the heroine – he is rich, she is poor; he is experienced, she is innocent; he is older, she is young

• the heroine decides to visit her husband’s secret room to gain knowledge about him – much like Eve eating the apple or Pandora opening the box

• this is the enlightenment that brings about a kind of metamorphosis in the heroine: no longer can she be enthralled by her husband’s wealth, power, and experience (in the chamber she discovers both the depths of his sadism and her own courage and seemingly inevitable fate – object of lust, torture)

• the story takes on a more magical-realist element as the bloody mark seals itself to the key: another reflection of the bloody sheets of the heroine’s lost virginity and other emblems of sex and violence that will appear in the book

• in the original Bluebeard story the heroine is saved by her brothers, but here her mother is the rescuer: this adds an element of female agency to the story

The Courtship of Mr Lyon

• , the second story, based on the story of the Beauty and the Beats

• again, the heroine is young and virginal

• the symbol of the rose first appears, here representing Beauty’s purity

• the spaniel acts as the archetypal valet

• again, the heroine’s family is poor, and the father is basically at the mercy of the Beast, though for now the Beast is hospitable and kind

• the Beast is the first of several “metamorphic” creatures: all of them living on a kind of threshold between worlds, in this case half-lion, half-man

• the Beast actually takes on the appearance of a lion: Beast has a terrifying outward appearance, but a lonely and sympathetic soul

• Beauty and the Beast begin to connect and fall in love, but their differences require a metamorphosis of some kind

• the act of love in the female body – menstruating and losing virginity – is associated with a magical transformation (bringing pain and enlightenment)

• the Beast dying: though the Beast initially had all the power in the relationship, he has given it up out of love, sacrificing himself like a lamb instead of a lion

• metamorphoses: the Beast has become less lion-like in his inability to hunt and kill, and also in his love of Beauty, he is ready to be transformed to man

The Tiger’s Bride

• the third story, another version of Beauty and the Beast

• in this case the father loses Beauty not out of love (taking a rose for her), but out of his own weakness

• as she strips away the petals of the flower, it symbolizes her stripping away the outer layers of attachment and personality to find her true core (this image reflects the motif of nakedness, and foreshadows the metamorphosis)

• like the other female protagonists, this heroine is initially treated as an object to be manipulated and gambled away

• the Beast in this version is associated with a tiger, a reminder of the heroine’s mother in “The Bloody Chamber”

• Beauty pricks her finger on the rose: not just a symbol of the heroine’s purity and virginity, as it also has thorns – showing the pain of her objectification, but also her own fierceness and pride

• as the heroine picked the petals off her rose, so The Beast wants the heroine to expose her true self to him (another kind of power in virginity: nakedness of both body and soul – that has never been seen or corrupted by anyone before)

• the Beast has a “bestial” desire, but he does not abuse his power

• the valet says that if the heroine will not let The Beast see her naked, then she must see The Beast naked (the heroine grows suddenly terrified, but she nods)

• the valet covers The Beast with his cloak as he removes his “mask” 

• the valet then moves to cover The Beast back up, but the heroine stops him, and she undresses herself

• the Beast makes himself vulnerable in revealing his true self, as he requested the heroine to do

• in “The Courtship of Mr Lyon” the Beast become more human by giving up hunting, but in “The Tiger’s Bride” the heroine grows more wild – a lamb learning to run with tigers

• animal v human: nudity as the ultimate negative

• animal/human relationship: lot of resemblances in sexuality

• sexuality is more animal than human (marginal): considered dangerous

• the woman becomes a beautiful tiger (crossing of the boundaries)

• nakedness: considered more horrible than anything else

• being naked has an sexual aspect, but it also means being vulnerable – defenceless against danger (primitiveness of man, natural)

• nudity: unacceptable as it is a feature of the animal and also represent vulnerability