M.

A PART-1 LITERARY MOVEMENT-1

1.(a) Literary Movement: a movement is an "act or process of moving." Therefore, a

literary movement is the act or process by which literature moves: there is a
progression. And literature moves,the whole of it, not only certain parts or particles of
it. Thus, at the end of a specific movement, literature will be in another place,
position or posture - to paraphrase my dictionary - than it was at the
beginning.

It happens that Merriam- Webster has been relegated to the rare

book room and that, oddly enough, everything I have said so far
smacks of common sense, a tool perfectly inept for the pursuit of
criticism. We should not wonder, therefore, that in handbooks on
literary studies "movements" are discussed as static phenomena,
while in manuals on physics they are examined in chapters on dynam-
ics. A movement, in our distinguished profession, has come to mean
a period or an epoch, an era or an age. There are quite a few other
pseudo-synonyms, such as trends and schools, circles and coteries.
Some critics have doubted the usefulness of movement studies and
of literary periodization as well. Each work, they have argued, stand-
ing by its own virtue and merits, is unique. Its evaluation, therefore,
should not take place within the framework of a period or a genre.
There is at least one obvious answer to that objection. No appraisal
is possible without implicit or explicit comparisons. Value judgments
are based on a set of rules governing the field of aesthetics; clearly, by
itself and viewed in isolation no poem is either good or bad. Thus, to
ignore comparison amounts to discarding critical appraisals. But who
made the rules? The authors themselves by tacitly or overtly compet-
ing with their peers; in doing so they give momentum - a word re-
late to movement - to literary life.
The analysis of the driving forces,the dynamics of literature, the
study of its motor, so to speak, to use again a term derived from
movere like movement, suggests some challenging thoughts. I should
I like to divide them into three parts. It is first necessary to clarify the nature of literary
movements; then, to answer questions concerning the role of aesthetic and stylistic
movements in literary history; and, finally, to ask ourselves what are the
consequences of the separation of aesthetics and stylistics from the whole of
literature, not only for literary history but for criticism as well.

(b) Far from helping to delineate how a particular author is different, period terms
obscure it by superimposing a predetermined schema that is reductive.7 In this
sense, they obscure what they purport to describe. While period terms might be a
convenient way of dividing up literary history for undergraduate and graduate
programs at the university, or for certain anthologies written primarily for students,
the argument that period terms assist the scholar in determining the
the uniqueness of a particular author or work is, quite simply, false. The
the opposite, in fact, is frequently the case. A brief analysis of the poetry of
Frank O’Hara (1926–66) in several recent works of literary history will
show the extent to which period terms have such a levelling effect. In the
process of showing this, I will also mention briefly some insufficiencies
and incoherencies regarding the definition and time span of some of
the period terms currently employed in works of literary history, after
which an alternative to period terms will be proposed.
There are, however, two problems with this initial statement. First, Perkins assumes
that there are such things as “ages” in human culture, and implies that they possess
an objective definition. This, however, is false. Not only are ages, as
Foucault notes, the historian’s arbitrary imposition on an otherwise
dynamic system, but there is little agreement among literary historians
as to the arbitrary definition and time span of many of the supposed
literary ages.
The meaning and time span of terms such as “romanticism” and “modernism” have
been the subject of much debate over the past fifty years, and no other term is
currently more highly debated than the term “postmodernism,” which has been
variously defined as “incredulity toward metanarratives” (Jean-François Lyotard), the
dissolution of the distinction between high and low culture (Fredric Jameson), a
“Kunstwollen” or as merely an aspect of “modernism” and is said to have begun
anywhere from the mid- 1940s to the mid-1960s.10 Because of this, the term
“postmodernism” has been applied to almost every cultural phenomenon in the past
thirty years and engenders a whole gamut of philosophical and aesthetic ideas that
make it nearly impossible to use the term in a coherent and applicable way. Terms
based on political dynasties, such as “Elizabethan” or “Victorian,” or those based on
cultural changes, such as “the Renaissance” or “the Enlightenment,” have not fared
much better, as many scholars have noted, due primarily to the awkwardness of
employing a time period used to identify political or social changes, which may or
may not have affected what or how people write.11 Therefore, to assume, or even to
state uncritically, that there are such things as ages nd that they possess some
agreed-upon definition and time span is to ignore one of the principle
problems in using them to categorise and analyse past texts.

2.(a) Like Plato, Horace sees nature as the primary source for poetry, but he argues
that poets should imitate other authors as well as imitating nature.Horace places
particular emphasis on the importance of decorum in poetry, and on the
necessity of “join[ing] the instructive with the agreeable.” He urges poets to
keep their audience in mind at all times, and he advises that writers “either follow
tradition, or invent such fables as are congruous to themselves.”By the time of his
introduction to Maecenas, Horace was writing in at least two genres: satires that he
called both sermones (verse conversations) and saturae (satires) as well as poems
that he referred to as iambi (iambics), although that collection is commonly called the
Epodes.
new literary history688

and that they possess some agreed-upon definition and time span is to

ignore one of the principle problems in using them to categorize and