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Modernism was after WWI (1914-1918 and after). It was a series of cultural movements. There were systems in place that promised people that their needs would be fulfilled and that failed them. They were disillusioned, angry and anxious; and they expressed this through art, literature, architecture etc. This was the beginning of the avant-garde movement. Hemingway's zero endings Ezra Pound - "make it new" stream of consciousness impressionism self-reflexivity People began to question everything, including the existence of God. Modernists recognized that the old order had crumbled - they were happy that the old had given way to the new, but were deeply anxious about how to set up a new world order rejected certainty of Enlightenment Age thought (such as belief in experiments and rationality) - chaos and disorder was more real for them rejected the existence of an all-powerful creator saw traditional forms of art as outdated no fixed answer avant-garde:...

You no longer privilege only literary texts - you begin to recognize and appreciate other texts, such as annals, rituals, fashion etc, since they are also part of the era. There is no more foregrounding of certain texts over others, and there is equal importance given to co-texts. New Historicism opposes the exclusively text-based approach. There is no more isolation. Texts cannot exist in a vacuum. New Historicism borrows heavily from Marxism, as with the the proposition that every text is rooted in social relations, factoring power struggles, and material conditions of life. Stephen Greenblatt  started this; he first used the term. Here's some ppt points: parallel reading of literary and non-literary texts reaction to text-only approach which placed literature in a vacuum; it was a recovery of the referent textuality of history and historicity of texts: texts and co-texts old historicism saw history as objective, unchanging and which can be recovered easily new hist...

Notes and excerpts from Susan Gubar's introduction to 'Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century': (i) Feminist studies have multiplied into various forms of inquiry in which every category linked to gender has itself undergone critical redefinition. (The book was published in 2000.) Just as proponents of identity politics enlarged the meaning of the term "women" by combining such categories as race and sex with gender analysis, post-structuralist thinkers used gender analysis to display the instability of such categories as race and sex. (ii) That is, the terms race, sex, religion, and caste started out as fixed phrases w.r.t. gender, but considerations of gender quickly complicated their meanings. (iii) Gubar held the "passionate belief that the pedagogic function of feminist studies depends on abrogating scholarly ghettoization and that its future vitality hinges on our ability to bring gender into play with different sorts of difference...

9-10 on 26 Nov, 2015 Narratology: draws from structuralism 1. nothing can be considered in isolation 2. every narrative is made up of units, combined using rules study of narratives - structure, why, mechanisms, procedures, how it makes meaning for you nature of story cultural practice difference between plot and story Narrative: the way in which you describe something, a recounting of events Bordwell: Narrative is a series of events bound by a cause-and-effect relationship, or a causal link Narrator:  anonymous, 1st person, 3rd person, "objective", subjective whoever does the recounting Narratee: to whom the recounting is done Aristotle: first person to give clear picture of narratology according to him, tragedy was superior to other epic forms because of spectacle (out of plot-character-thought-diction-song-spectacle) and because they're self-contained plot is the heart and soul of tragedy: hamartia (tragic flaw - jealousy, pri...

Structuralism claimed to be objective and scientific and that by being systematic, it would yield answers . However there were never any answers. Roland Barthes' 'The Death of the Author' became the turning point in structuralism. Death here is figurative - when the book is complete and published and the author no longer has any control over the book and how it is read and what meanings are drawn from his/her text. "The death of the author is the birth of the reader." Post-structuralism reveals that everything has a centre except for language. A centre is basically the structure, a point of reference - the Sun in the Solar System, Jupiter for all its moons, for instance. Language cannot have a centre. It is fluid and dynamic. This is the reason that one word may have more than one meaning. In structuralism: A specific domain of culture understood through a structure Modelled on language Relates literary texts to a larger structure (a particular genre) E...

things are not understood in isolation units combine with each other based on rules the world is made up of structures, made up of systems, made up of units structuralist analysis - interrelationship of units and rules -  meaning linguistics - a structuralist perspective: literary texts are made up of language, which is made up of words (units) and grammar (rules) 9 Nov 2015 structure is universal; content may differ - ex: Mad Libs Meanings are outside; attributed - human mind structures units and rules to give meaning focus on chickens (structures) not eggs (individual texts/ elements) everything is understood in terms of larger context structure remains constant - universal elements and their interpretations may differ based on sociocultural context no text has inherent, intrinsic meaning; meaning is attributed to it by us deeply rooted in linguistics (the science of language) Ferdinand de Saussure literature is made up of language (language is a signi...