Chairperson : Professor MadhurimaVerma

Co-ordinator : Professor Praveen Sharda

Course Leader : Professor Praveen Sharda

M.A. ENGLISH, SEMESTER-II

PAPER I: (LITERARY MOVEMENTS - II)

• Introductory Letter (i)

• Syllabus (ii)

CONTENTS

L.No. Topic Authors Page

Unit I
1. “Realism and the Novel Form” Prof. Praveen Sharda
Ian Watt
Unit-II
2. “Introduction” to Modernism: Mr. Rohit Sharma
A Guide to European Literature
Bradbury and James McFarlane

3. “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” Mr. Rohit Sharma

Ezra Pound
Unit-III
4. “Theorizing the Postmodern: Mr. Rohit Sharma
Towards a Poetics” Linda Hutcheon

5. “Towards a Concept of Postmodernism” Dr. Rajesh Kumar Jaiswal

Ihab Hassan
6. “The Library of Babel” Borges, Jorge Luis Dr. Rajesh Kumar Jaiswal

Unit-IV
7. “Introduction” to The Empire Writes Back
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin Ms. Ravinder Kaur
8. “The Language of African Literature”
Ngugi wa Thiong’o Ms. Ravinder Kaur
Unit-V

9. “The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization Prof. Praveen Sharda

and a Forgotten Challenge to it”
Ted Underwood
10. “Against Periodization; or, On Institutional Time”
Eric Hayot Prof. Praveen Sharda

Vetter: Professor Praveen Sharda

E-Mail of Department - [email protected]

Contact No. of Department

`1 - 0172-2534325
Dear Student,

In this paper, you will be studying some of the major literary movements whose
understanding is essential for a critical engagement with literature. Each movement has
its own specific set of aesthetic and ethical values. A study of these movements will
enable you to identify particular literary tastes and trends. In each unit, you will be
studying a specific movement and a primary text belonging to the movement. After
you study, you will be able to relate primary texts with their respective movements.
You are expected to study the primary texts closely.

In case of any doubts, do not hesitate to visit the department during working days.

Happy Reading!

Course Coordinator

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 SYLLABUS

Literary Movements –II

Many distinct literary movements mark the journey of writing from ancient times to the very
contemporary. The paper identifies some of the major literary movements that form the
essential frame of reference for a critical engagement with the vast corpus of literature.
Movements such as classicism, romanticism or realism constitute the primer of critical
vocabulary and therefore a basic understanding of these movements is necessary for a
nuanced understanding of varieties of literary articulation. Each movement has its own
specific set of aesthetic, cultural and ethical values and preferences. The writers and writings
that fall within a movement, despite their heterogeneity and particularities, do converge in
terms of fostering an identifiable literary taste and trend. Though these movements do occur
in literatures of the world, and across languages, yet the focus of this course is primarily on
European literature, with special accent on the British. The course is divided into five units.
Each unit consists of general introductory essays on the specific movement and some primary
texts that belong to the movement. The emphasis of the paper is on the historical and
conceptual understanding of various literary movements. The students are expected to study
the prescribed texts closely. The students are also expected to study books and articles
mentioned in the suggested readings to enhance their understanding of the primary texts, but
there will be no question on the suggested readings. The paper shall consist of five
compulsory questions – one each from a unit. Each question shall however have internal
choice. The paper shall carry a total of 80 marks.

Unit I Realism

1. Ian Watt, “Realism and the Novel Form”, The Rise of the Novel, (University of
California Press, 2001) 11-36.
2. George Eliot, Chapter 17, Adam Bede, Volume 3,(William Blackwood and Sons,
1859) 223-244.

Unit II Modernism

1. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane “Introduction” to Modernism: A Guide

to European Literature 1890 –1930 (Penguin, 1976), 1-35.
2. Ezra Pound, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste”,
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/58900/a-few-donts-by-
an-imagiste

Unit III Postmodernism

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 1. Linda Hutcheon, “Theorizing the Postmodern: Toward a Poetics”, A Poetics of
Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (Routledge, London & New York,
1988) 3-21.
2. Ihab Hassan, “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism”, The Postmodern Turn
(Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1987) 1-10.
3. Borges, Jorge Luis. "The Library of Babel", Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew
Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1998) 112-118.

Unit IV Postcolonialism

1. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin. Eds. “Introduction” to The Empire
Writes Back (Routledge: London & New York, 1991) 2002, 2nd Ed. 1-13.
2. Ngugi wa Thiong’o ,”The Language of African Literature”, Decolonizing the
Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Harare: Zimbabwe
Publishing House, 1987) 1994 rpt. 3-33.

Unit V Debating ‘Periodization’ in History

1. Ted Underwood, “The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization and a Forgotten

Challenge to It (1886–1949)”, Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical
Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies (Stanford & California: Stanford
University Press, 2013) 114-135.
2. Eric Hayot, “Against Periodization; or, On Institutional Time”, New Literary
History, Vol. 42, No. 4, (Autumn 2011), 739-754.

Secondary Readings

• Ann L. Ardis, Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 1880-1922 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2002)
• Bill Ashcroft, Key Concepts in Post-colonial Studies (London & New York:
Routledge, 1998)
• Chris Baldick, The Modern Movement: 1910-1940 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004)

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• Norman F Cantor. Twentieth-Century Culture: Modernism to Deconstruction
(Peter Lang, 1988)
• Peter Childs. Modernism (London & New York, Routledge, 2000)
• Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory (Allen & Unwin, 1998)
• Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London & New York: Routledge
1998)
• Pam Morris, Realism: The New Critical Idiom (London & New York: Routledge,
2006)
• Dennis Walder, The Realist Novel (London & New York: Routledge, 1995)
• Ira Mark Milne, Project Editor, Literary Movements for Students (Gale Cengage
Learning, 2009)
• John McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism (Delhi: Viva Books, 2000)

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 Lesson No. 1

Realism and the Novel Form

Ian Watt

Structure

1.0 Objectives

1.1 Introduction

1.2 A Detailed Summary of “Realism and the Novel Form”

1.2.1 Realism - The Defining Quality

1.2.2 What is Philosophical Realism

1.2.3 Emphasis on Particularity and Not Universals

1.2.4 Coordinates of Time and Place

1.2.5 Formal Realism

1.3 A Practical Illustration from Chapter XVII of Adam Bede by George Eliot

1.4 Summary of the Script

1.5 References

1.6 Further Reading

1.7 Model Questions

1.0 Objectives

After reading this lesson you will be able to achieve the following objectives:

● Understand the factors contributing to the rise of novel

● Compare and contrast earlier writings with those of late eighteenth century

● Comprehend the contribution of philosophical realism to the rise of novel

● Evaluate formal realism and its contribution to authentic portrayal

● Correlate the attributes mentioned by George Eliot to Ian Watt’s ideas

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1.1 Introduction

It was in 1957 that Ian Watt published his book The Rise of the Novel. He expressed the
credo (a statement of basic belief) that informs the rise of the novel form in a his 1968 essay
in the journal Novel, “The whole question of the historical, institutional and social context of
literature is very widely ignored, to the great detriment, not only of much scholarly and
critical writing, but of the general understanding of literature at every educational level.”
Watt extends the meaning of ‘novel’ beyond its imagined ontology or being, and views it as
an expression of an author, a culture, and a literary history. He rejects the view that the novel
is an autonomous object and insists that ideas and novels do not exist independently of one
another. They are always interrelated and interdependent. An artist too cannot be perceived
separately from the social and moral conventions of his time. He regards the author as
someone shaped by and also as responding to the codes and conventions of his time. The
critic relates the growth of the novel’s form to changes in the intellectual and social milieu of
the eighteenth century. His encyclopedic knowledge of the seventeenth and eighteenth
century enables him to show that the works of Defoe, Fielding and Richardson take their
meaning from the world which produced them.

In an era of self-consciousness about theory and the tendency of some critics to speak in a
dismissive manner about humanistic criticism, it is time to question ourselves about why we
read as we do. We do need to distinguish between the various strands of Anglo-American
novel criticism such as New Criticism, Neo-Aristotelianism and Contextualism. The Rise of
the Novel remains an important refutation to the critics who restrict their attention to the
autonomous text and also those who only emphasize the reader’s response to the text. Watt’s
book speaks as an alternative to the tendency to see every work as about the reading and
writing of itself. His contention is that literary criticism can be true or false insofar as it
provides the correct material for understanding the text and insofar as it accurately reads the
text. The credit for changing the way novels were read in England and America goes to Watt
along with other critics like Leavis, Booth and Van Ghent.

1.2 A Detailed Summary of “Realism and the Novel Form”

The first chapter of the book The Rise of the Novel prescribed to you contains three key
words - ‘realism’ ‘novel’ and ‘form’. Let us take them up one by one. It is doubtlessly true
that Daniel Defoe, Richardson and Henry Fielding are regarded as the pioneers of the novel
form which became popular towards the end of the eighteenth century. However, they did not
provide a working definition of the novel which would separate it from the old genres.
Realism which was associated with the French school of the realists seemed to be the only
distinguishing feature of the novel, something which distinguishes it from the previous
literary writings. This form was quite different from the prose fiction of the past; from
Greece, the Middle Ages and the France of the seventeenth century when Gustave Flaubert
was the leading exponent of literary realism in his country.

1.2.1 Realism - The Defining Quality

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 Watt emphasises realism as the defining characteristic of the novel and also the factor which
differentiates it from previous prose fiction. Its prehistory can be traced from all earlier
fiction which portrayed low life, for e.g., the picaresque tale is realistic because economic or
carnal motives are given importance in the presentation of human behaviour. There were
bitter controversies over the use of ‘low subjects’ and what was regarded as the immoral
tendencies of Flaubert and his successors. Realism also came to be used as an antonym of
‘idealism’, a position taken by the enemies of French idealists. Continuing the French
tradition, the eighteenth-century English novelists achieved its climax by romanticizing the
seamy or the unpleasant side of life. The sublime was not made the subject of the novel form.
Thus, Defoe’s “Moll Flanders is a thief, Richardson’s “Pamela” is a hypocrite, and Fielding’s
“Tom Jones” is a fornicator.

The historians with a broader perspective have been able to do much more to determine the
idiosyncratic features of the novel. In a drive towards critical awareness of its aims, the novel
of the French Realists should have actually focussed on the correspondence between the
literary work and the reality it imitates. Moreover, critics began to believe that the novel’s
realism does not reside in the kind of life it presents but in the way it presents it. The novel
portrays all the varieties of human experience and not merely those suited to one particular
literary perspective. It is the novel more than any other form which raises the problem of the
correspondence between the literary work and the reality which it imitates. According to
Watt, this issue of the novel’s realism can best be clarified with the analysis of concepts
given by the philosophers. The Scholastic Realists of the Middle Ages as well as the
philosophers claimed that it is ‘universals’, ‘classes’ or ‘abstractions’ and not the particular
concrete objects and feelings of sense perceptions which are the true realities.

Watt, while tracing the emergence of the novel in the modern period, separated it from its
classical and medieval heritage by its rejection of universals. Modern realism having its
origins in Descartes and Locke begins from the position that truth can be discovered by an
individual through his/her senses. It was Thomas Reid who gave it its full formulation in the
eighteenth century. However, regarding the external world as real through the senses does not
shed light on literary realism. To understand the general temper of realist thought and the
methods of investigating realism and the issues raised by it, the novel turns to philosophical
realism.

1.2.2 What is Philosophical Realism

Let us now understand what philosophical realism is. In the early eighteenth century, the
critical tradition implied a strong classical preference for the general and universal. This
tendency was always strong in the Romance and was gaining importance in criticism as well
as aesthetics. The features of philosophical realism were the study of the particulars of
experience by an individual investigator who is free from the body of past assumptions and
beliefs and the correspondence between words and reality. This brings us to the
correspondence between life and Literature. It was Aristotle who insisted that it was man’s

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task to oppose the meaningless flux (constant change) of sensation and achieve a knowledge
of the universals which constituted the ultimate and immutable reality. A change was ushered
in by the new trends in philosophy generally termed as Philosophical realism. The emphasis
shifted from the universals to the particulars and the guiding principle was that everything
which exists is guided by the particular. The novel was an attempt to embody or give
expression to the individual or particular apprehension of reality, and therefore the actors in
the plot and the scene of their actions had to be placed in a new perspective. The plot had to
be acted out by particular people in particular circumstances rather than by general human
types such as virtue, jealousy or vice against a background determined by literary
conventions.

Watt’s contention is that it was the psychological approach of Hobbes and Locke
which came out in favour of particularity. Lord Kames in “Elements of Criticism” said, “it is
only of particular objects that images can be formed and Shakespeare’s appeal is there due to
every article in his descriptions being particular. Defoe and Richardson established the
characteristic literary direction of the novel form long before any support from critical theory.
Particularity of description is typical of the narrative manner of their novels - Robinson
Crusoe and Pamela. The first biographer of Richardson, Mrs. Barbauld wrote that he had “...
the accuracy of the finish of a Dutch painter, content to produce effects by the patient labour
of minuteness.” This concept of realistic particularity can be demonstrated from other aspects
of the novel such as narrative technique, characterisation and presentation of background.
However, the novel differs from previous forms of fiction due to the individualisation of its
characters and detailed presentation of their environment. The issue of personal identity was
debated a lot in France by Descartes and in England by Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Reid. A
novel’s realism in modern times is the realism which it evokes and the problems it raises
breaking free from the traditional beliefs and assumptions. This creates the correspondence
needed between literature and life.

1.2.3 Emphasis on Particularity and Not Universals

In an illustration of the novelist’s inclination towards particularity, individual identity was

established by giving proper names to individuals just as human beings are named in ordinary
life. In social life, proper names are the verbal expression of the particular identity of each
individual. Taking forward the debate between universals and particulars, Hobbes says,
“Proper names bring to mind one thing only, universals recall one of many.” In previous
forms of literature, historical names or type names were preferred. The names set the
characters in the context of a large body of expectations formed from past literature rather
than the context of contemporary life. Such names denoted particular qualities or carried
foreign, archaic or literary connotations not related to literary life. The characters of fiction
did not have both--a given name and surname. The early novelists named their characters in a
manner that they were regarded as particular individuals in the contemporary social

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environment. Daniel Defoe used proper names which were casual and sometimes
contradictory but rarely conventional or fanciful. Most of their main characters like Robinson
Crusoe or Moll Flanders have complete and realistic names as well as surnames. Samuel
Richardson faced the problem of giving names that are subtly appropriate and suggestive, and
yet sounded like ordinary realistic ones. In his novel Pamela (1740), the romantic
connotations of the name are controlled by the common place family name of Andrews.
Nearly all of Richardson’s proper names are authentic and suited to the personalities of the
bearers like Clarissa Harlowe, Robert Lovelace and Sir Charles Grandison. Fielding’s
characters such as Hartfree, Allworthy and Square are modernized versions of the type name,
and names like Tom Jones suggested that Fielding had his eye as much on the general type as
on the particular individual. In his last novel, Amelia, Fielding realized that characters were
to be particular persons and not types. Thus, his neoclassical preference for type-names finds
expression only in the minor characters such as Justice Thrasher, Bondum the bailiff;
whereas, the main characters have ordinary and contemporary names. Some later twentieth
century novelists like Smollet and Sterne somewhat broke away from this tradition only at the
cost of destroying the reader’s belief in the literary reality of the character concerned.

In the next section of the first chapter, Watt sheds light on the exploration of the personality
as undertaken by many novelists from Sterne to Proust. The writer quotes the views of Locke
who regarded personal identity as an identity of consciousness through duration in time. Both
Locke and Hume emphasised the importance of memory which contained past thoughts and
actions or the chain of causes and effects which constitute our person. Thus, the body or the
storehouse of memories was important in defining self-awareness. In the definition and the
exploration of individuality, existence at a particular locus in space and time is significant or
otherwise the ideas become general when separated from the circumstances of time and
place.

1.2.4 Coordinates of Time and Place

Watt lays down a very important characteristic of the modern novel, “.... the characters of the
novel can only be individualised if they are set in a background of particularised time and
place.” Plato’s view regarding forms or ideas as timeless and unchanging continued to
exercise influence till the Renaissance which viewed time as the shaping force of man’s
individual and collective history. It is the portrayal of life by time which the novel has added
to literature’s ancient preoccupation of portraying ‘life by values.’ Spengler attributed the rise
of the novel to the need of ‘ultrahistorical’ modern man to deal with the whole of life.
Northrope Frye too saw the ‘alliance of time and the Western man’ as the defining
characteristic of the novel. The time dimension separated the novel from the earlier tradition
of using timeless stories to mirror the unchanging moral verities (true principles or beliefs).
Modern plots use past experience as the cause of present action and causal connections
through time replace the reliance of earlier narratives on disguises and coincidences. The time
dimension has a great effect on the characters in the novel as their development is revealed in
the course of time. The detailed depiction of the concerns of everyday life depends on the

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time dimension which in the modern novel is a much more discriminated time-scale than had
been used earlier.

Time played a very different role in ancient, mediaeval and renaissance literature as
compared to the novel. Aristotle’s unity of time and classical view of reality as existing in
timeless universals implies that the truth about existence can be unfolded as easily in a day as
in the space of a lifetime. The celebrated personifications of time as the winged chariot or the
grim reaper focus not on the minute changes in time as time flows but on the supremely
timeless fact of death and our being prepared for it. Such images are fundamentally
ahistorical and typical of the minor importance given to the temporal dimension. This
ahistorical outlook is associated with a striking lack of interest in the minute-by-minute and
day-to-day temporal setting. Shakespeare too was close to the medieval conception of history
according to which the wheel of time churns out the same examples in all periods of time.

In early fiction, the sequence of events is set in a very abstract continuum of time and space
and allows very little time in the human relationships. The new orientation towards time was
reflected in the novels of Defoe which reveal a picture of individual life as related to time or a
historical process which is acted against a background of most ephemeral thoughts and
actions. Although the time-scales in his novels are sometimes contradictory, yet there are
vividly realised moments in the lives of his characters, “moments which are loosely strung
together to form a convincing biographical perspective.” In Richardson’s work, the events of
his narrative were located in an unprecedented detailed time scheme. In his novel Pamela, the
superscription of each letter gives us the day of the week and often the time of the day acting
as an objective framework for greater temporal detail. The letter form induced in the reader a
continual sense of actual participation in the action. The “instantaneous descriptions and
reflections” engaged the attention best and in many scenes the pace of the narrative was
slowed down by minute description to something close to that of actual experience.
Richardson achieved for the novel what D.W. Griffith calls as the technique of ‘close-up’ for
the film. Fielding revealed dislike of Richardson’s use of the present tense in Shamela (an
Apology for the life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews). It was in Tom Jones that Fielding used an
Almanac and all the events of his novel are chronologically consistent in relation to each
other and to the actual time taken and external considerations as the proper phases of the
moon and the time-table of the Jacobite rebellion in 1745, the year of action.

In the next section of the first chapter Watt affirms the idea that the individual is
defined by a reference to the coordinates of space as well as time. The novel in its
representation of any particular moment of existence had to do so in a spatial context. The
description of the place was general and vague as time in tragedy, comedy and romance.
Shakespeare had no regard to the distinction of time or place and Sidney’s Arcadia was
‘unlocalised’. It was Defoe who visualised the whole narrative in an actual physical
environment and did supply occasional vivid details which helped readers to attach Robinson
Crusoe and Moll Flanders to their environments. Richardson paid considerable attention to
interior spaces throughout his novels. In Clarrisa, the Harlowe Mansion becomes a
terrifyingly real physical and moral environment. Fielding is as careful about the topography
of his action as he is about its chronology though his landscape descriptions are very

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conventionalised. In the novel Tom Jones, many of the places on the protagonist’s route are
given by name and the exact location of others is implied by various other kinds of evidence.
It was in a historical psychological novel by Stendhal that the environment was given a great
deal of importance and it was this pursuit of likeness to the reality that led early novelists to
initiate the power of ‘putting man wholly into his physical setting’. This differentiated them
from previous writers and also explains their importance in the tradition of the new form.

In the next section of the first chapter, Watt compares the philosopher and the novelist in
having a common aim--the production of what appears to be an authentic account of the
actual experiences of individuals. The adaption of prose style to give an air of complete
authenticity is closely related to this aim. In the writing of the Greek romances which
rhetorically involved the use of ornamental language, the writings of Sidney were
distinguished by the use of alliterations, repetitions and rhetorical questions. The Classical
critical tradition had no use for the undecorated and unembellished realistic descriptions;
whereas, the basically realistic descriptions of Defoe and Richardson required something very
different. Both these pioneers of the novel form made a break with the accepted canons of
judgement and aimed to make the words present their objects in all their concrete
particularity. Although Fielding did not cut himself off from the traditions of Augustan prose
style yet he presented readers with a clarified and sorted (organised) report of his findings.
His patent selectiveness of vision destroys one’s belief in the reality of the report and shifts
the reader’s focus to the skill of the reporter. According to Watt, the function of language in
the novel is largely referential and it works by ‘exhaustive presentation’ rather than by
‘elegant concentration’. It is because of this factor that the novel is the most translatable
genre, and needs less historical and literary commentary than other genres. It is Defoe and
Richardson who aim ‘to convey the knowledge of things’ and their novels pretend to be no
more than a transcription of real life.

It was the realist tradition in philosophy, especially the ideas of Locke which pervaded the
eighteenth century and did have some influence on the realism of the novel. However, both
the philosophical and the literary innovations must be seen, as Ian Watt says, as parallel
manifestations of each other. It was the unified world picture of Middle Ages after the
Renaissance that underwent a change and presented itself as an unplanned aggregate of
particular individuals having particular experiences at particular times and places. It is
philosophical realism which helps to define the distinctive narrative mode of the novel.

1.2.5 Formal Realism

The narrative mode is the sum of literary techniques whereby the novel’s imitation of human
life follows procedures of philosophical realism to report the truth. These are followed
whenever the relation to reality of any report (of events) is explored. Ian Watt compares the
novel’s mode of imitating reality with another specialised group--the jury in a court of law.
Both the readers and the jury members want to know ‘all the particulars’ of a given case. For
example, time and place of occurrence as well as identities of the parties concerned. Just as

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the jury takes into account the ‘circumstantial view of life’, the novel too adopts the same
perspective. The narrative method putting into practice this circumstantial view of life is
‘formal realism’. The adjective ‘formal’ which is used in the title of the chapter characterises
the set of narrative procedures so commonly found together in the novel and hardly so in
other literary genres.

Formal Realism is thus the primary convention that the novel is a full and authentic report of
human experience and is obliged to satisfy the readers with details such as individuality of
actors, particulars of time and place of action and a referential use of language. While
presenting a report on human life, it (Formal Realism) need not be truer than the different
conventions of other literary genres. However, the accurate transcription of reality does not
produce a work of enduring literary value and this logic is responsible for the widespread
dislike of Realism today. On the contrary, formal realism like all other conventions has its
advantages amongst which the more immediate imitation of individual experience in all its
temporal and spatial environment can be singled out. It is the novel as a literary form which
satisfies the readers’ wishes for a close resemblance between life and art thereby making
lesser demands than other genres. The advantages of formal realism are not just limited to a
detailed correspondence to real life but also to other literary distinctive qualities.

Defoe and Richardson did not discover formal realism but they applied it much more
completely than before. Homer did share with them that clearness of sight and there were
many passages in later fiction from Chaucer to Bunyan where the characters and their actions
are presented with a particularity as authentic as that in any eighteenth century novel.
However, the total literary structure was not oriented in the direction of formal realism and
the plot was usually traditional and highly improbable. Thus, many previous writers
especially from the seventeenth century professed to have a wholly realistic aim but their
solemn declarations were as unconvincing as those of medieval hagiography. The
resemblance to reality or verisimilitude had not been assimilated in earlier fiction, prior to the
eighteenth century. It was Defoe and Richardson who accepted the requirements of literal
truth and were independent of literary conventions interfering with their intentions. It was the
development of a narrative method which was “like reading evidence in a court of Justice ''
which, according to Hazlitt, was the most conspicuous manifestation of that variant of prose-
fiction, the novel. Thus, Defoe and Richardson can be credited with bringing into being the
most important aspect of this genre, its formal realism.

1.3 A Practical Illustration from Chapter XVII of Adam Bede by George Eliot

When George Eliot wrote her first novel Adam Bede in 1859, she did not anticipate that Ian
Watt in his book The Rise of the Novel (1957) would be repeating many of her ideas
contained in chapter XVII of her book. In this chapter, she engages herself in a conversation
with her readers, herself and her fellow novelists. The narrative is in the first person singular
when she is talking to her readers and about herself and in the first-person plural ‘us’, when

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talking of her fellow novelists. She spells out her task as a novelist and the principles to be
followed by other novelists of her kind. Ian Watt in the first chapter of his book is also
discussing the nature and function of the novel and the contribution of the early novelists
towards the rise of the novel. In this particular section, you will be reading about the
similarities which can be drawn between the concepts of Watt and their illustration in this
chapter from Adam Bede. The chapter has a suitable title, “In Which The Story Pauses A
Little”, which is self-explanatory. Halting the pace of the story, Eliot says that the real
vocation of the novelist is to avoid any arbitrary picture of reality and instead to give, “... a
faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind.” (187) This
brings to our mind Watt’s definition of the novel as an authentic picture of reality. Eliot
further says that in the imitation of reality “... the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the
reflection faint or confused… but I feel bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that
reflection is… as if I were in the witness-box, narrating my experience on oath.” Watt too
reiterates that the reader wants the events from the novelist in all their circumstantial detail,
as if s/he were a person speaking from the witness-box. Eliot’s implication is that depending
on the nature of reality, the outline will be sometimes disturbed or the reflection faint.
Whatever be the picture of reality, the author must narrate the circumstances of the evidence
as if s/he were on oath while standing in the witness-box. Despite the number of years
separating them, both Eliot and Ian Watt emphasise that the novel is closest to capturing or
imitating events as they happen in real life.

In the first chapter of his book, “The Rise of the Novel”, Watt specifies formal Realism as the
chief characteristic of the novel genre. The narrative method according to which the novel
represents the circumstantial view of reality is formal realism. The novel “... is therefore
under an obligation to satisfy its readers with such details of the story as the individuality of
the actors concerned, the particulars of the times and places of their actions, details which are
presented through a more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary
forms” ( Watt 28). Thus, the conventions of the novel form make much smaller demands on
the audience than do most other literary conventions. The majority of readers in the last two
hundred years have found in the novel a literary form which most closely satisfies their
wishes for a close correspondence between life and art. Eliot demonstrates formal realism in
practice in the novel Adam Bede. In the given chapter, Eliot while picking up the thread of
the narrative offers a detailed description of the two Rectors--the present one and the earlier
one through the memory of an old man, Adam Bede in all its authentic particularity.

According to Watt, it was Richardson’s use of the letter form in his novel
Pamela (1740) or Virtue Rewarded which induced in the reader a continual sense of actual
participation in the action. The “instantaneous descriptions and reflections” engaged the
attention best and in many scenes, the pace of the narrative was slowed down by minute
description to something close to that of actual experience. In the very beginning of the
chapter, Eliot involves the reader by making use of the second person, “Ten to one, you

`14
would have thought him a tasteless, indiscreet, methodistical man.” Here, she is referring to
Mr. Irwine, the Rector of Broxton and also the Vicar of Hayslope and Blythe. Eliot also
makes use of the question form many times to seek the participation of the reader, “But my
good friend, what will you do then with your fellow-parishioner who opposes your husband
in the vestry?”(188) By making use of this narrative method, Eliot wants the reader’s
involvement in the action. Thus, what Ian Watt says about the novel’s realism, “It does not
reside in the kind of life it presents but in the way it presents it”, is true for both Eliot and
Richardson as novelists. The use of the epistolary form by Richardson and the use of many
questions to seek the concurrence or agreement of the reader are effective means of
presentation.

Eliot says that readers want the facts to be improved and in accordance with the correct views
which it is their privilege to possess. The reader wants the ‘Virtuous’ ones to be on the right
and the ‘faulty’ characters to be on the wrong side. The novelist speaking from the witness-
box confirms to her readers that “these fellow mortals, everyone must be accepted as they are
....” She wants to be the novelist to create the world not better than as it exists but just write
about “.... the real breathing men and women, who can be chilled by your indifference or
injured by your prejudice....”. What Eliot really desires is an authentic or true to life picture
of reality. It is while giving her preferences that Eliot lays down the principles to be followed
by all novelists “.... Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no
motive to be false, ... It is hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate
feelings....” Eliot affirms her precious quality of truthfulness due to her delight in Dutch
paintings which are despised by the people who regard themselves as noble and dignified and
above everything else. George Eliot admires these paintings as they arouse sympathy in their
portrayal of “... faithful pictures of a monotonous homely existence... the fate of so many
more among my fellow – mortals than a life of pomp…”. Eliot as a novelist is concerned
about the life and events of ordinary mortals leading monotonous lives rather than those who
lead a luxurious life. She chooses commoners as her subjects, “... an old woman bending over
her flower pot or eating her solitary dinner while the noonday light, softened .... falls on her
mob – cap....”. Her focus is on the precious ‘necessaries’ of life It is Richardson’s biographer
who admired the accuracy of his finish and compared him to a Dutch painter because of his
quality of rendering in minute detail

The novel’s guiding principle is that everything is guided by the particular, it is an attempt to
give expression to the individual or particular apprehension of reality and the plot has to be
acted out by particular people in a specific place and time. Eliot specifies the time “Sixty
years ago-- it is a long time, so no wonder things have changed--all clergymen were not
zealous.” The year is specified, 1799, the places in question are the living spaces of Broxton
and Hayslope. Readers desire an authentic portrayal of reality which is supplied by the
details of time and place and a detailed portrayal of Mr. Irwine and Mr. Ryde is supplied
through the meta-narrative of Adam Bede. All the events of description are filtered through
his consciousness.

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 The novel, as a genre is closest to the imitation of the minute details of human life and
hence also the most elaborate and translatable according to Watt. Eliot admits that her eye is
on the idiosyncrasies of characters - a fact supported by Watt. The Novelist appears to be
talking to her idealistic friend and also to his readers: “What vulgar details! What good is
there in taking all these pains to give an exact likeness of old women and clowns? What a
low phase of life! What clumsy, ugly people!” (190) French Realism too was accused of
focusing on the low phase of life but the novel chose to give a picture of life “... not
altogether handsome”. The earliest characters of fiction were never sublime but continuing in
the French tradition, the English eighteenth century novelists achieved their climax by
romanticizing the seamy or the unpleasant side of life. Thus, Crusoe’s Moll Flanders is a
thief, Pamela a hypocrite and Tom Jones is Fornicator. Eliot too wants her characters not
from amongst cloud-borne angels, prophets, ‘sibyls’ or heroic warriors but representatives of
“a monotonous homely existence.”

At times Eliot turns into a commentator, giving or writing a prescription for a happy
life, “Yes! Thank God; human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not
wait for beauty--it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.” She wants the divine
beauty of form to be cultivated the utmost in men, women and children - in our gardens and
in our houses. She does not want herself and her fellow writers to impose any aesthetic rules
which shall banish common characters, rough, unsophisticated, raw people who are not
visually attractive or handsome in the least. “Let us always have men ready to give the loving
pains of a life to the faithful representing of common place things, .... There are few prophets
in the world. Few sublimely beautiful women; few heroes.” Expressing herself in the first
person, Eliot desires to write about people who are her everyday fellow-men, whom she
knows and has constantly been in touch with. She desires the ‘vulgar’ citizens who assist her
in day to day living to be her subjects and in the foreground of her writings.

It is Ian Watt who brought out the role of memory in relating events as well as recalling them.
In the novel and in this chapter, it is Adam Bede who fits the role of a meta-narrator in
exploring the character of Mr. Irwine by connecting the past with the present. It is by
comparison and contrast with the present Rector, Mr. Rhyde that the old man, Adam Bede is
able to bring out the humane and the simple, caring attitude of Mr. Irwine. The consciousness
of Adam Bede filters both the Rectors, the present in comparison with the past and deduce for
the readers that the present one, Mr. Rhyde is sourish-tempered, too commanding and
overbearing; whereas, Mr. Irwine was understanding, non-interfering and never arrogant. The
first-person narrative of Adam embedded in the narrative of the third person narration of Eliot
extols the virtue of the simplicity of the truth against the vices of pride and conceit. Although
Adam Bede is uneducated and speaks the worst English because of its incorrect grammar, the
omniscient narrator admires him for his wisdom. The novelist confesses that she has learnt of
life’s sublime mysteries by living a great deal among people ‘more or less commonplace and
vulgar.’ Inferentially, Eliot wishes to inform her readers that the appropriate subjects for
fiction are the characters from everyday life and their activities placed in a proper space and
time. Such are also the views of Ian Watt who traces the rise of the novel to the emphasis on
the particular embodiment of an individual apprehension of reality.

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Self-Assessment Questions

1. Literary ___________ was first challenged by the novel.

2. The novel is the logical literary vehicle of a culture which in the last centuries has set
a value on __________ .

3. (a)__________ and (b) _________ are the great writers in literature who did not take
their plots from mythology and (c)________.

4. Realism came to denote a belief in the ________ apprehension of reality.

5. The classical world’s view of reality implied that the truth about existence could be
unfolded in the space of a (a)________ as in the space of a (b) ________ .

1.4 Summary

In this lesson, you have read about the contribution of philosophers and writers at the end of
the eighteenth century to the rise of the novel. It was realism which was its defining
characteristic. Defoe, Richardson and Henry Fielding contributed to the Formal Realism of
the novel. In French realism, it was desired that there should be a correspondence between
the literary work and the reality it imitates. You know by now that at first a lot of attention
was paid to the universals and Aristotle rejected the change or the flux of life. It was the
novel which was an attempt to embody or give expression to the individual or particular
apprehension of reality and therefore the actors in the plot and the scene of their actions had
to be placed in a new perspective. The plot had to be acted out by particular people in
particular circumstances rather than by general human types such as virtue, jealousy or vice
against a background determined by literary convention. This concept of realistic particularity
could be demonstrated from other aspects of the novel such as narrative technique,
characterisation and presentation of background. However, the novel differs from previous
forms of fiction due to individualisation of its characters and detailed presentation of their
environment. The issue of personal identity was solved by giving proper names to the
characters in fiction and their resemblance to real life was demonstrated by putting them in a
proper time frame and a proper setting or a place. Thus, by now you understand that the novel
began to flourish when the attention shifted from the universals to the particulars based on the
idea that everything which exists is guided by the particular.

The mode of comparing the novel’s mode of imitating reality with another specialised group-
-the jury in a court of law is an important aspect of the first chapter. Both the readers and the
jury members want to know ‘all the particulars’ of a given case, e.g. time and place of
occurrence as well as identities of the parties concerned. Just as the jury takes into account
the ‘circumstantial view of life’, the novel too adopts the same perspective. George Eliot in
her novel Adam Bede brings out the same comparison many years before the publication of
Watt’s book. The narrative method putting into practice this circumstantial view of life is
‘formal realism.’ The adjective ‘formal’ which is used in the title of the chapter characterises

`17
the set of narrative procedures so commonly found together in the novel and hardly so in
other literary genres. Most of the aspects of the novel form such as its manner of imitation,
the objects of imitation and the question of their authenticity have all been anticipated and
expressed by Eliot in chapter seventeen of Adam Bede.

Answers to SAQs

1. Traditionalism 2. Originality 3. (a) Defoe, (b) Richardson (c) history

4. Individual 5. (a) day (b) lifetime

1.5 References

1) The Importance of Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel by Daniel R. Schwarz in The
Journal of Narrative Technique, 61-73. Vol.13, No.2(Spring 1983)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/30225060

2) www.bl.uk>articles>the- rise- of- the novel

1.6 Further Reading

Daniel R. Schwarz, “The Importance of Ian Watt's "The Rise of the Novel"”

https://www.jstor.org/stable/30225060?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

John Mullen, “The Rise of Novel”

https://www.bl.uk/restoration-18th-century-literature/articles/the-rise-of-the-novel

Nicholas Seager, The Rise of the Novel: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism

1.7 Model Questions

1. What are the features of philosophical realism and how did they contribute to the rise
of the novel?

2. What is formal realism and how does it lead to an authentic portrayal of reality?

3. How does George Eliot anticipate the essential attributes of a novel in Chapter XVII
of Adam Bede?

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 Lesson No. 2

“Introduction” to Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890 –1930 by Malcolm

Bradbury and James McFarlane

Structure

2.0 Objectives
2.1 About the Authors
2.2 Introduction to the essay
2.3 Detailed Summary of the Text
2.4 Summary of the Lesson
Self-Assessment Exercise
2.5 Glossary
2.6 References
2.7 Further Reading
2.8 Model Questions

2.0 Objectives
After reading this essay, you will be able to:

● Define Modernism as a literary movement

● Acquaint yourself with other literary movements that simultaneously existed in
Europe
● Summarise Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane’s views on Modernism
● Have a broad understanding of how literary movements are formed and what should
be taken as their root characteristics
● Identify the representative literary writers and texts of Modern English literature
● Learn the meaning of certain literary terms related to Modernism
● Critical analyse the text prescribed to you

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2.1 About the Authors
Malcolm Bradbury (1932-2000) was a well-known British novelist, academic and
literary critic, best known for his book The History Man (1975), a satirical work on academic
life. He also received literary acclaim for his first novel Eating People Is Wrong (1959). He
has worked as a professor at the University of East Anglia's former School of English and
American Studies (EAS) from 1970-1994. Bradbury wrote several other books and essays
of criticism and literary history, along with a number of television plays, for which he has
won many awards.

James Walter McFarlane (1920-1999) was a reputed scholar of European literature,

best known for editing English translations of famous playwright Henrik Ibsen in his book
The Oxford Ibsen, a work that came out in eight volumes. Founding Dean of the School of
European Studies, University of East Anglia, he was also an Emeritus Professor of European
literature at the university. He co-edited the book Modernism: A Guide to European
Literature 1890 –1930 (1976) with Malcolm Bradbury.

2.2 Introduction to the essay

Modernism is generally considered to be a literary movement fathered by France in

the last quarter of nineteenth century; in Britain, it is assumed to have started in 1890. It is
also used as a collective term for a number of artistic revolutions that took place in the
domains of art, literature and music – Symbolism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Post-Impressionism,
Futurism, Imagism and a few others. There exists many debates regarding the essential
character of Modernism; however, it can be positively claimed that Modernism was a radical
break with classicism, which became most pronounced in its conscious rejection of the
convention models of art and literature. Writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf
deliberately broke the narrative frames of the novel and explored the characters’
unconscious/subconscious so as to propose incoherence as the new mode of aesthetic
sensibility. Stream of Consciousness is one of the representative concepts and practices of
modern literature. A similar tendency of incoherence could be seen in poetry which reflected
through a deliberate violation of traditional syntax and imagery. Darwin and Freud apparently
provided people with new frames to see religion, culture and society, but they also impelled
them to find new centres for reference. The First World War further aggravated in the hearts
of people, especially artists, the growing meaningless and insufficiency of the old values,
something that had been the centre of their life. This gradual dislocation of cultural and
literary values is reflected through various art forms of the modern period. T. S. Eliot’s The
Waste Land ably depicts the futility and anarchy that prevailed in the early twentieth century.
As far as the literary forms are concerned, experimentation became the new mode of
creativity, and writers invented many new styles of articulation which became quintessential
to modern art.

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 Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, in this introductory essay entitled “The
Name and Nature of Modernism”, investigate the meaning and character of the term
‘Modernism’. During the long period after the supposed advent of Modernism, many critics
have endeavoured to find the essential nature of modern art and literature. The authors of the
present essay include the opinions and arguments of different critics, while at the same time
problematizing the term Modernism by putting those opinions face to face. After tracing the
nuances of the term ‘modern’ and why it was adopted to refer to a literary movement,
Bradbury and McFarlane attempt to define Modernism in terms of its time span, its
characteristics and popular modes of its artistic expression. Representative faces of the period
and their respective works have also been discussed in order to highlight the literary spirit of
Modernism. However, unlike previous critics who wrote about Modernism in a more
emphatic manner, the essayists take an inconclusive stance – and very reasonably so –
suggesting that the term could be used to attain different meanings, and only few assertions
could be made with confidence. Rather than creating a narrative around the movement, they
explore its various strands to make it more comprehensible as a literary and cultural
movement. While they successfully establish the cultural and semantic relevance of
Modernism in the history of English literature, the essayists conclude the text with an appeal
for further research in the matter so as to clearly highlight its nature, and its association with
other movements that flourished simultaneously. A possible division between Modernism
and Postmodernism has also been proposed in this regard.

2.3 Detailed Summary of the Text

‘Unlike dates, periods are not facts. They are retrospective conceptions that we form
about past events, useful to focus discussion, but very often leading historical thought
astray.’
G. M. Trevelyan

The introduction to the book Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890 –

1930 (1976) is a critical analysis of the term ‘modernism’, its semantic and conceptual
connotations, and of the characteristics that define it. It begins with a peculiar but significant
analogy between culture and seismology. The authors Malcolm Bradbury and James
McFarlane write that “cultural seismology” – is similar to the process by which the
magnitude of an earthquake is recorded on a Richter Scale – attempts to document the
literary/cultural shifts and their magnitude. These “shifts and displacements of sensibility”,
which usually mark their presence through art and literature, can be categorised into three
separate orders depending on the level of impact they have marked on life, culture and
literature. Further defining the process of literary history in seismological terms, Bradbury
and McFarlane suggest that the first order of literary shifts is of the most ephemeral kind,
producing minor “tremors of fashion” and lasting only for a decade. The second order of
displacements is of a larger magnitude, whose “effects go deeper and last longer, forming

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those extended periods of style and sensibility which are usefully measured in centuries.” The
third category is of the greatest magnitude, which records the “overwhelming dislocations” of
literary trends, and “cataclysmic upheavals of culture”, and which shakes even the most
fundamental of our beliefs and conventions. The essayists state that the beginning of
twentieth century, which is often associated with the advent of Modernism, is of the third
“cataclysmic order.”

Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane further try to emphasise the compelling
difference between other previous literary/historical shifts of English literature and that of
Modernism; the latter they say is catastrophic. Herbert Read, for instance, claims that that
there is “a difference in kind” between the literary revolutions (Quattro Cento, Romanticism,
Impressionism and others) that have taken place before and the much deeper shift in literary
tastes and trends that we have witnessed during the first quarter of the twentieth century; “it
is not so much a revolution, which implies a turning over, even a turning back, but
rather a break-up, a devolution, some would say a dissolution.” C. S. Lewis has also
defined the modern age in exuberant terms by saying that it is the “greatest of all divisions in
the entire history of western man – greater than that which divides Antiquity from the Dark
Ages, or the Dark from the Middle Ages.” This difference can be clearly discerned in the
artistic pieces of the Dadaists and the Surrealists, or in the poetry of T. S. Eliot and Ezra
Pound which reflected a profound novelty, and were “new in a new way.” However,
Bradbury and McFarlane are of the opinion that while the idea of this Great Divide between
the past and present (between the homogeneously conventional and the peculiarly modern)
has gained much support, critics have not been able to come to an agreement regarding the
nature, form and character of Modernism. Critics admit that there is something specifically
unique about modern art and literature, but there is an evident difference between the
characteristics that they propose for its condition. We are therefore left with personal or
partial accounts of details (yet not agreeable enough to become a concept) for a very complex
and unresolved phenomenon called modernity.

The essayists further problematize the idea by stressing the semantic plurality of the
word ‘modern.’ The word ‘modern’ is quite general in its usage; apt as it is to define the
condition and sensibility of a particular time or age, the situations to which it is bound are
subject to change. Modernity, in this sense, is just a set of notions, often random and
inconsistent with one another, together with the methods and viewpoints by which these
notions are produced and applied. The theoretical yearning to signify something by the
signifier ‘Modernism’ is a victim to its “semantic instability”, making it ever fluid and
adaptable to the subjective views, circumstances and interpretations. Bradbury and
McFarlane claim that the meaning of ‘modern’ changes much faster than similar terms of
comparable function, like ‘romantic’ or ‘neo-classical.’ Even if we associate the term with a
particular time period, the stylistic claims attached to it are vague and unclear. Various
movements like Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Imagism and others have been delineated
to define the character of Modernism in art and literature, but even these movements are not
uniform in nature, some of them even being contradictory to each other. Notwithstanding, all
these arguments do not stand to claim that Modernism has not existed as a literary movement.

`22
It is an important phase in the evolution of English literary tradition, marked by newness and
experimentation; however, the scale, span and the character of Modernism in literature and
art are yet to be conceptualised.

In order to fix and stabilise the term ‘modern’ in literature, Bradbury and Malcom
approach it through the ‘style’, which they suggest can be one of the defining characteristics
of Modernism. Eliminating all other possible connotations of style – which might lead one to
further abstraction – they define it as “a conscious mannerism, elected by some writers and
artists though not by all, which expresses a prevailing, dominant, or authentically
contemporary view of the world by those artists who have most successfully intuited the
quality of the human experience peculiar to their day, and who are able to phrase this
experience in a form deeply congenial to the thought, science, and technology which are part
of that experience.” Twentieth century art is evidently marked with discontinuity and
experiment in style, and an attempt to achieve the highest potential of art. Many writers
rejected the association of such characteristics of discontinuity and shock with modernity that
makes the twentieth century art a blend of different strands, which, though they are
antithetical in nature, overlap each other at several points.

It would not be erroneous to state that twentieth century writers visibly took a turn
towards the ‘style’ and ‘technique’ of art. Turning away from humanistic and representational
aspects of art, writers strived for a book which transcends the real, material and the
humanistic, which is independent of any external attachment, and which claims to be
aesthetic on the basis of the “internal force of its style.” It has been considered as an
opportunity for art to fulfil itself, to achieve the optimum sophistication of artistic possibility.
“The moral imperative of technique” set the writers and artists free to explore the stylistic
possibilities of art, which do not and cannot come under the sway of what is worldly or real.
The imagination is to be given preference over reality, and reciprocally, the dismembered
reality is to be transcended by the disposition of artistic technique.

This movement “towards sophistication and mannerism”, towards introversion,

technical display, and internal self-scepticism” has been taken as the defining factor of
Modernism. This preoccupation with the formal technique as modern art did not only imply a
new paradigm of aesthetics, a new mannerism in arts, a chaos of ideas, a disintegration of old
values; in fact, an alienation of human being simultaneously became a reflection of modern
art and literature. The structure of society reaches a “formal crisis” where the myth and other
organising principles collapse due to a lack of central control, as was apparent in Yeats’
quintessential poem “The Second Coming.” On the one hand, the imaginative power of a
writer is set free to traverse the farthest realms of consciousness; while on the other hand, his
artistic faculties come under the strain of possible disaster and dismemberment of values that
hold life. It is a freedom from literary conventions and the objectivity of time on one side,
and a feeling of imminent danger to cultural cohesion and an awareness of its “auto-
destructive” tendency on the other, and all at the same time.

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 Along with this unprecedented engagement with artistic technique, the time span
under observation also witnessed the First World War, which compelled people, especially
the artists to lose faith in civilisation and reason. It also brought forth new visions and
viewpoints through which the world could be interpreted or re-interpreted; Marx, Freud and
Darwin provided people with new frames to see culture and social values, though these
critical frames were too substantial to avoid the destruction they brought along, and they
ultimately made the world aware of the darkness and dejection intrinsic to it. The old belief in
the interdependence of the individual and society was put to question, and entities (like
language and causality) that earlier seemed real were now nothing but “subjective fictions.”
Bradbury and Malcom assert that Modernism is our art because it responded to that scenario
of chaos. If art is a reflection of society, then that is what modern art did. The period which
we call modern was chaotic in spirit, and it compelled the contemporary art to depict this
spirit as it was, i.e., a heart afraid of the catastrophic change that the world is about to
witness, and a mind with a number of questions – real and philosophical – trying to find
answers to them in the darkest chambers of consciousness. In this sense, “Modernism is not
art’s freedom, but art’s necessity.” The period was dominated not by rhythmic tunes but by
an outburst of words that were ironic and fictive, and the idea of creativity was under the
sway of “de-creation.” However, it is equally true that all artists did not believe in this
collapse of conventional structures of art, and proposed that modern art has not “de-realised”
(fictionalise in an incredible manner) the experience, it has rather expanded it. What they
probably meant was that the new experiences and their unique (to the extent of eccentricity)
artistic articulation do not contradict or counter the old, it is rather a new addition to the
Western literary tradition.

Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane are of the opinion that the “paradox of
Modernism” lies somewhere between these two explanations. Modern art tends to divide its
audience in two categories: those who understood it and were equipped with the special
techniques and contexts inherent to it; and those who rejected it as nonsensical and hostile.
There is no denying the fact that this kind of art – which Ortega y Gasset in his
Dehumanisation of Art refers to as a “delightful fraud” – pulled itself to the extent of
exclusivity and uncommonness, and alienated a major part of the audience. However, if
observed from the opposite viewpoint, the artistic pieces of the period were avant-garde not
only because of their advanced nature, but also because they revolutionised the human
consciousness and guided it towards the future. In this sense, the presiding spirit called
Modernism “has expressed our modern consciousness, created in its works the nature of
modern experience at its fullest. It may not be the only stream, but it is the main stream.”
From this stance, the “historical neatness” of Modernism becomes discernible; like any other
previous age, period or movement, it claims the deep social and intellectual crisis it
witnessed, expressed the usual discontentment with the art of the immediate past, and
commanded the aesthetic sensibility of the greatest writers of its time. “A movement that is
international in character and marked by a flow of major ideas, forms and values that spread
from country to country and developed into the main line of the western tradition.”

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 The idea of modernism both as the “supreme modern expression” and as something
“of marginal importance” seems acceptable only because it was not simply a shift in aesthetic
sensibility; rather, it was a cultural crisis, prodding an urgent inquiry into the structures of
religion and philosophy, while questioning simultaneously the integrity of all literary forms.
That is why the perpetual quest for style becomes a dominant feature of modern art and
literature; a style highly individualistic and solitary. Irving Howe remarks that no style of
modern art stayed long, for every form emerged with an innate quality of self-denial; the
“autotelic constituents” of a work seemed to make the style vulnerable to repetition, and
every form ended with its own creation. It is in this sense, write Bradbury and McFarlane,
that modernism is an “international tendency”, and whose significance – cultural as well as
literary – can be traced. And yet, narrowing it down to single universal tradition would be
reductive, unfair to numerous strands it is made of. There is no centre to it, only centres that
seem to come together at times and scatter into impulses of varied sources – an outcome of
the “primary impulse” intrinsically producing many versions of its own.

Modernism seemed to have sprouted long before it came to fruition. That is why it is
difficult to trace its exact place and time. The term imply not a single movement, but
movements which appeared and touched their peaks in different countries at various times:
the bohemian spirit of Modernism was active in Paris from the 1830s; the idea of making
‘experiment’ as the new foundation of creativity was welcomed by many countries; the
acceptance of Modernism as “a special state of exposure” existed in Nietzsche; Walter Pater
proposed the idea of “multiplicity of consciousness” in 1870s; Charles Baudelaire was the
first to propose the need for “imagination to produce the sensation of newness”; and many
other aspects of it – “its use of anti-form or de-creation of established conventions”, its
inclination for the “hard, resonant and witty image”, and its sense of anguish – can be traced
back through the Western tradition enriched by authors like Lawrence Sterne, John Donne, or
Francois Villon. In some countries, it prevailed for long periods; whereas at many places, it
created only minor ripples ultimately leaving the cultural surface calm and soothing. Many
witnessed it as a natural or logical development in the history of European art and literature.
It is not surprising that Modernism can simultaneously mean many things to different people,
depending on the stance that one takes to understand it, and the idea/concept that one choses
as its centre, so much so that what the Modernism means in England today could be very
different from what it meant at the time of Matthew Arnold. Similarly, it may reflect
significant differences in its meaning from time to time, country to country, and language to
language; and that is what that makes Modernism international in character.

Cyril Connolly in his book The Modern Movement: One Hundred Key Books from
England, France and America, 1880-1950 (1965) clearly identifies France as the source of
modern movement, which then moved towards America expanding both its scope and energy
to the fullest. Being fully aware of the difficulty of assigning a starting point to the
movement, Connolly suggests that 1880 could rightly be taken as the advent of Modernism;
whereby, “Enlightenment’s critical intelligence had combined with Romanticism’s exploring
sensibility” to produce the first generation of modern literature which he saw in French
writers Gustave Flaubert and Charles Baudelaire. Then followed a number of authors which

`25
we now refer to as modern – Andre Gide, Paul Valery, W. B. Yeats, Marcel Proust, T. S.
Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, D. H.
Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, E. E. Cummings, Thomas Mann, Aldous
Huxley, Robert Graves and others. Connolly locates the peak of Modernism between 1910
and 1925. His views are seconded by Edmund Wilson in his seminal book Axel’s Castle,
wherein, he strives to establish an essential connection between Symbolism and Modernism.
Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson in their book The Modern Tradition extend their
inquiry beyond the confines of literature, and search other domains of intellect so as to fix the
nature and span of Modernism. It expanded its scope to include even the shades of
Romanticism found in Goethe, Wordsworth and Blake. Nevertheless, what they saw as the
“high intensity” period again coincided with Connolly’s first quarter of the twentieth century.
Many other critics like A. Alvarez and Frank Kermode also present similar views regarding
the period of Modernism, whose creative force spanned first thirty years of the twentieth
century, and whose common spirit is to be found in Pound, Eliot, Joyce and Kafka.

Clearly, different critics have converged at a point regarding the time-span that can be
vaguely applied to the modern movement. However, there have been different opinions on
locating the exact moment, the landmark work which set the ball of Modernism rolling.
Virginia Woolf observed a radical change in human and social relations, and in the
perceptions of religion, politics and literature after the death of King Edward in 1910, the
year which is also known for the first Post-Impressionist exhibition. On the other hand, it was
in 1915 that D. H. Lawrence wrote in Kangaroo that “the old world ended”, and pointed at
the “profound transition” that was taking place. Richard Ellmann pushes things earlier to
1900, asserting that the Edwardian period is full of modernist strains, and is representative of
the movement in question. Having said that, Harry Levin would rather identify the advent of
Modernism in literature with the remarkable year 1922 which records the publication of
Ulysses by James Joyce, The Waste Land by Eliot, Brecht’s first play Baal, Lawrence’s
Aaron’s rod, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and Rilke’s Duino Elegies. Contrarily, some
critics consider the period of early twenties as the “point of exhaustion” of modernist
impulse. More surprising is the opinion that Modernism as a movement has never been
exhausted, and has made its way through World War II to the present times. The last opinion,
if taken as true, puts the whole task of searching the beginning and character of Modernism to
question; because it makes no sense to define its limits if it hasn’t ended yet. Furthermore, if
the continuity of Modernism till the present is to be taken as true, then all other literary texts
and characteristics that we have been recording as “Postmodern” would become an extension
of Modernism; “the art of chance or minimalization”, “the idea of absurd”, “parody or self-
exhausting fictionality”, “the new novel” of France, “the non-fiction novel” of Germany, art
in multimedia forms, and many others. Frank Kermode has strongly favoured the argument of
continuity in his essay “Modernisms”; wherein, he identifies many similar tendencies
between Modernism and what he refers to as “Neo-Modernism”, though he does differentiate
the both, saying that the early Modernism was much obsessed with the ‘form’, while “Neo-
Modernism” subverted the ‘form’ by putting it into perpetual practice. It was a re-
arrangement of the scattered pieces of early Modernism. Other critics however assert that the
idea of modernity’s continuation seems improbable because the “new aesthetic or group of

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aesthetics” based on the works of Borges, Beckett, Burroughs or Cage is not only a shift in
style, it is rather a cultural shift, a politics that has to be outlined distinctly.

Bradbury and McFarlane conclude their introduction by saying that the avant-garde,
which once stood as a hallmark of Modernism, has also reached its advanced stage; it has
entered the domain of ordinary, thus reflecting through the radical behaviour of the populace.
The “anarchism and revolutionary subjectivism” of Modernism predominate, but it has lost
its newness and has become commonplace. Ihab Hassan, in his essay “Postmodernism”,
endeavours to distinguish some of the continuities and discontinuities, suggesting that some
newer developments have taken place, which cannot be ignored. He suggests that we must
reconsider Modernism, and give way to the seemingly linear entity called Postmodernism,
though the latter is under a greater influence of technology and dehumanisation. Similarly,
other associated wings of Modernism like Surrealism and Romanticism should also undergo
the process of revision in order to add clarity. The place of Postmodernism in the history of
literature and art is difficult to establish; however, there is no denying the fact that it has
made the delineation of Modernism all the more difficult, adding to the abundance of
versions it already had.

2.4 Summary

This lesson has been designed to give you a general definition of Modernism, a
literary movement that spanned vaguely from 1890-1930. Apart from discussing the various
traits that are usually attributed to Modernism, it also provides you with a brief knowledge of
many other literary movements that come together to add meaning to Modernism. In the
prescribed introductory essay entitled “The Name and Nature of Modernism”, Malcolm
Bradbury and James McFarlane conduct thorough research on Modernism as a literary and
cultural movement. It is a detailed analysis of the various connotations of the word “modern”,
opinions of different critics on the topic, the time span in which Modernism dominated
Western tradition, the place of Modernism in the tradition of English literature, and of the
nature and character of literary Modernism. While many features of Modernism have been
explained along with the contemporary literary models, thus highlighting ‘style’ and
‘technique’ as the defining features of the movement, the essayists give no concluding remark
regarding the nature of Modernism. However, they establish the essential difference between
Modernism and other literary movements including Postmodernism. The essay also points to
the permeability and heterogeneity of literary movements, suggesting that the approach to
study them should be broader and expansive.

Self-Assessment Questions
i) What is Cultural Seismology?
ii) Modern art turns its attention from realistic and humanistic representation towards
________________ in pursuit of a deeper penetration of life.
iii) Name a few literary and artistic movements of modern period.

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 iv) According to Bradbury and McFarlane, Modernism is not so much a revolution,
which implies a turning over, even a turning back, but rather _________”
v) Which factors are taken as “common base” for a definition of Modernism?
vi) What is the ‘Great Divide’?
vii) From one point of view, modern art is a conscious mannerism, ____________
which are part of that experience.

2.5 Glossary

Stream of Consciousness- It is one of the representative styles of the modern novel. In

literary criticism, it is that narrative mode or technique of novel which tries to capture the
unbroken flow of thoughts that run in the writer/character’s mind, often incorporating the
broken syntax, incorrect grammar, irregular punctuation, sensory impressions, momentary
thoughts and fleeting ideas. James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway are
two famous examples of the stream of consciousness novel.

Futurism- It was an early twentieth-century artistic movement located in Italy and Russia. It
emphasised the importance of power, speed and energy of machines in the dynamic changes
that were taking place in the modern period. Futurism propounded innovation and extremism
as vital to art and poetry, and promoted artistic pieces that reflected an element of aggression.

Seismology- It is the scientific study of earthquakes.

Richter Scale- It is a device used to measure the strength or magnitude of an earthquake. The
earthquake’s magnitude is determined using the logarithm of the amplitude (height) of the
largest seismic wave calibrated to a scale by a seismograph.

Cataclysmic- It is a derivative of the noun-word ‘cataclysm’ which means a momentous and

sudden event resulting in large scale damage and destruction.

Avant-garde- Avant-garde is French for ‘advance-guard’, and is used to refer to the artists or
works that are radical and experimental. Their style and technique are usually marked with a
bold rejection of the conventional models of literature, art and culture.

Surrealism- It was an artistic movement founded in Paris in 1924 with the publication of
Surrealist Manifesto by Andre Breton. It is often considered as a successor to a similar short-
term artistic movement called Dadaism. The brutality of the First World War, and the
destruction that ensued as its result induced in the hearts of people a feeling of disgust and
despair. The result of that feeling was surrealist art, which exposed the false rationality of
social and human values, and shocked people with its negativity and dark humour. It was
only after the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936 that a surrealist group was
established in England.

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Symbolism- Symbolism as a literary movement implies a literary preference, especially in
poetry, for symbolic suggestion and evocation, thus rejecting a plain and explicit description.
It is used to refer to a group of French writers who propounded this technique towards the
end of the nineteenth century. Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stephane Mallarme and
Paul Valery were the representative faces of symbolist poetry in France; whereas, it
prominently reflected in the English poetry of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, Wallace
Stevens and Dylan Thomas.

Answers to self-assessment questions

i) Cultural Seismology is an invented phrase used to refer to the study of cultural

and literary movements.
ii) ….Human consciousness and art…
iii) Cubism, Imagism, Impressionism, Dadaism and Futurism.
iv) ….a break-up, a devolution, some would say a dissolution….
v) The movement towards sophistication and mannerism, towards introversion,
technical display, internal self-scepticism, has often been taken as a common base
for a definition of Modernism.
vi) ‘Great Divide’ has been used to refer to the huge difference between Modernism
and other previous literary and cultural movements.
vii) …elected by some writers and artists though not by all, which expresses a
prevailing, dominant, or authentically contemporary view of the world by those
artists who have most successfully intuited the quality of the human experience
peculiar to their day, and who are able to phrase this experience in a form deeply
congenial to the thought, science, and technology…

2.6 References

● Childs, Peter. Modernism. New York: Routledge, 2000. Print.

● https://icglobalmodernism.weebly.com/uploads/2/3/8/0/23805158/the_name_and_nat
ure_of_modernism.pdf
● http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/definitions/avant-garde-art.htm
● Bradbury, Malcolm and James McFarlane. Editors. Modernism 1890-1930. New
York: Penguin Books, 1976.

2.7 Further Reading

● Drabble, Margaret. Editor. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. New York:
OUP, 2000. Print.

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 ● Ardis, Ann. L. Modernism and Cultural Conflict 1890-1922. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2002. Print.
● Preminger, Alex. Editor. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry sand Poetics. London:
Macmillan Reference, 1986. Print.

2.8 Model Questions

Ques 1. What is Modernism? Define it as a literary movement?

Ques 2. Discuss Malcom Bradbury and James McFarlane’s views on Modernism.
Ques 3. What approach should be taken while delineating a literary movement? Discuss it in
context of the essay “The Name and Nature of Modernism.”
Ques 4. Debate the idea of literary movement as a ‘porous’ or ‘perfect’ entity, with special
reference to the period of Modernism.
Ques 5. What defines the character of Modernism? Also highlight the different opinions on
the span, nature and intensity of the Modern period.

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 Lesson No. 3

“A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” by Ezra Pound

Structure

3.0 Objectives
3.1 About the Author
3.2 Introduction to the essay
3.3 Summary and Analysis of the Text
3.4 Summary of the Lesson
3.5 Glossary
3.6 References
3.7 Further Reading
3.8 Model Questions

3.0 Objectives
After reading this essay, you will be able to:

● Define Imagism as a literary movement, along with some imagist poems as examples
● Discuss the role of several poets, especially Ezra Pound, in the development of
Imagism
● Outline the nature of Imagism
● Summarise Ezra Pound’s views on Imagism
● Identify the representative artists and texts of Imagist movement
● Critical analyse the text prescribed to you

3.1 About the Author

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 Ezra Pound (1885-1972), one of the most influential figures of modern poetry and
criticism, was an American expatriate poet and literary critic. He is considered to be the inner
force behind various modern literary and aesthetic movements, especially Imagism and
Vorticism. He became the dynamic-interface between America and Europe, promoting
several literary and intellectual exchanges. His contributions to English poetry and aesthetics
are multifarious, and it was he who, along with W. B Yeats, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and D.
H. Lawrence and a few others, showed English and American poetry the doors of
Modernism, thus visibly breaking off with the Victorian era. The unique significance of Ezra
Pound as a critic becomes evident taking into account the immense influence that he had on
the lives and poetic sensibilities of the writers that we now associate with modernity: Pound
served as a secretary and literary guide to W. B. Yeats in the most productive period of Irish
poetry; it was Pound who discovered a young poet named T. S. Eliot, and thoroughly edited
his “The Waste Land”, a poem that was to become the classic model of modern English
poetry; he persuaded Harriet Monroe to publish T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock,” calling it in a 1914 letter to Monroe “the best poem” he had seen from an
American; Pound also turned out to be the reason behind the publication of James Joyce's
Ulysses, which is generally considered as the greatest English novel of the early twentieth
century, as well as a model for stream of consciousness novel. Besides, he contributed to the
acceleration of literary careers of such famous writers as William Carlos William, H. D.
(Hilda Doolittle), Marianne Moore and Ernest Hemingway. T. S. Eliot wrote that “Mr. Pound
is more responsible for the 20th‐century revolution in poetry than is any other individual.”
Joyce also, considering himself to be his discovery once stated: “Nothing could be more true
than to say that we all owe a great deal to him. But I most of all surely.”

His own contribution to English literary criticism and poetry is equally vast. Pound
wrote a number of critical reviews and articles for various reputed periodicals such as the
New Age, Egoist, Little Review and Poetry magazine; whereby, his aesthetic principles came
to the fore, and made readers aware of his literary, artistic, and musical preferences, thus
offering information helpful not only for the interpretation of his own poetry, but also modern
poetry as a whole. The primary objective of Pound’s poetic creation was, in his own words,
to “make it new”; the “it” in the phrase positively refers to the old, or what is valuable in the
past, in the long tradition of English literature. It is probably because of this sense of
preservation of the past through the ways innovative and suitable for the present that his
poetry contained a number of quotations and allusions. While reading his poetry, a reader is
expected to be as well-read as he himself was. Well versed with several languages like Latin,
Chinese, Italian and French, his oeuvre included several works of translation, poetry and
criticism: Personae (1909), Exultations (1909), The Spirit of Romance (1910), Ripostes
(1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), Imaginary Letters (1930) Guise to Kulchur (1938),
more than fifty other books and hundreds of articles on a variety of topics. The Cantos,
supposedly the single modernist epic modelled on Dante’s Divine Comedy, also became a
reason for his fame; Pound started writing this long poem around the First World War in
1917 and died in 1972 leaving it unfinished as a 120-section epic.

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 The only blot that Ezra Pound had on his long reputed life was his conscious
sympathy for Fascism. Around a decade before the Second World War, Pound started
developing some interest in economics, and his obsession with the subject increased with his
readings and observations until he found himself in a position to have an opinion on the
economy and governance of a country. His opinionated nature drifted him towards anti-
Semitism, and soon led him to support the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini. Once a poet
fascinated by lofty ideals and mythological subjects, he now preoccupied himself with the
things that were so less worthy of his investigation. In 1939, Pound visited the United States
in the hope to prevent the imminent war between his native country and the one he had
adopted as his own. After his unsuccessful return to Italy, Pound set out recording numerous
broadcasts for Rome Radio, wherein he openly spoke in favour of Mussolini, condemning the
United States, and claiming that the reason behind America’s determination for war were a
few Jewish bankers. The hatred that he developed for the Jews made him a bitter person. In
1945, Pound was arrested and handed over to U.S. Forces for treason. For several months, he
was kept at a detention centre, and for some time also in a steel cage of the size six-by-six,
which supposedly led to his mental breakdown. “The Pisan Cantos”, a section of his epic
poem written during this detention is considered as the finest thing that Pound ever wrote. It
reflected a blend of his long and profound learning with his personal experiences. He was
then flown back to the United States for the appearance of trial, but was found to be too
insane to stand any rigorous judgement. Consequently, he was sent to St. Elizabeth Hospital
in Washington DC, where he remained until 1958. Pound continued to write during his
confinement at St. Elizabeth’s. There he wrote sections of his long poem, “Section: Rock-
Drill,” published in 1955, and “Thrones,” which appeared afterwards in 1959.

In 1958, the famous English poet Robert Frost went ahead with a petition for Ezra
Pound’s release from the legal confinement of St. Elizabeth Hospital, saying that if Pound
spent the last phase of his life in a place like that, it would be such a disgrace to a man of his
worth. Moreover, the time he spent at St. Elizabeth was interpreted as his penance, and his
reputation as a litterateur started improving. His friends and well-wishers tried to obscure the
fact of his unethical commitment to Fascism by highlighting his poetic contributions to the
world of English literature. After his release, Pound returned to Italy immediately, and in
1969, published “Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII.” It also remained a mystery
whether Pound actually was insane, or he posed it just to spare himself the deadly fate that
many of his kind had met after the Second World War. That he was a great writer gifted with
sharp intellect and poetic sensibility however remains unquestionable. Towards the end of his
life, he had adopted a complete silence, possibly because of the profound remorse for his past
life and actions. He died in Venice in 1972. An epitaph that he wrote earlier in his life says:

Write me when this geste, our life is done:

“He tired of fame before the fame was won.”
(In Epitaphium)

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3.2 Introduction to the essay

Imagism was a literary movement that dominated the poetic sphere of England and of
America roughly during the period from 1912 to 1917. Sometimes, the use of the word
‘movement’ to define Imagism seems unsuitable considering the shortness of time in which it
operated; the term ‘vogue’ seems more appropriate to characterise its literary function.
Moreover, critics often remark that the characteristic products of Imagism are more
recognizable than its theoretical framework. French critic and translator Rene Taupin once
remarked that “it is more accurate to consider Imagism not as a doctrine, nor even as a poetic
school, but as the association of a few poets who were for a certain time in agreement on a
small number of important principles.” Nevertheless, it was the first innovative endeavour of
the modern period of English literature.

The pioneers of the Imagist movement proposed clarity of expression and preciseness
of detail in poetry, against what Ezra Pound called the “rather blurry,
messy…sentimentalistic mannerish” poetry which appeared at the turn of the century. Ezra
Pound was the first to set this vogue in motion and the first references to the word were found
in the appendix to his Ripostes (1912) which established its association with the ideas first
proposed by English philosopher and poet T. E. Hulme; the latter appealed for an accurate
picture of poetic subject, thus ruling out the acute subjectivity of Romanticism on one hand,
and the excessive sophistication of Neo-classicism on the other. Although, the credit for
founding the imagist movement often goes to Ezra Pound along with a few others, it was
Hulme who endorsed this idea in his poetry and criticism; Hulme was very clear about the
kind of poetry he wanted to create: I want to speak verse in a plain way as I would of pigs:
that is the only honest way. In his essay “Romanticism and Classicism,” Hulme wrote that the
language of poetry is a “visual concrete one….Images in verse are not mere decoration, but
the very essence.” Pound on the other hand defined image as “that which presents an
intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” The movement is often seen as a
reaction against the passionate spirit of Romantic poetry.

Although, the opinions on the conceptual structure of Imagism were scattered, Ezra
Pound, along with F. S. Flint managed to streamline it through a couple of literary
manifestos, and it can be confidently said that Imagism stressed on the economy of language
and precision of description. Imagist poems tend to be short often structured by a single
image, composed with no restriction of metrical regularity, thus producing a hard, dry and
concentrated image. In this sense, this poetic trend also had Japanese Haiku as its influence,
emphasizing the removal of the element of verbosity from poetry. It is often suggested that
the typical imagist poem is written in free verse; however, it just seems to be a later
assumption. Ezra Pound was of the opinion that “one should write vers libre (free verse) only
when one ‘must,’ that is to say, only when the ‘thing’ builds up a rhythm more beautiful than
that of set metres, or more real, more a part of the emotion of the ‘thing,’ more germane,

`34
intimate, interpretative than the measure of regular accentual verse; a rhythm which
discontents one with set iambic or set anapaestic.” On the other hand, the writer was free to
choose any subject of his choice, and was bound to give, without commenting or
generalising, his own mental impression of the object or scene, thus allowing it to create its
own rhythms naturally. While the theme takes a backseat in such poetry, the image itself
becomes the centre of a poetic composition, independent of any moral standpoint. Like a
photograph, the moment is captured in an image, which may or may not contain a specific
message, or it can be said that the task of creating the message/meaning is wholly left to the
reader. Ezra Pound’s poem “In a Station of a Metro” is quintessential of imagist poetry, thus:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.
(Ezra Pound)

The juxtaposition of the faces of commuters in a metro find complete harmony with
the petals on a tree. While no unnecessary words are used to conjoin the verses, the
comparison is made complete by a semicolon. In 1913, Ezra Pound and F. S. Flint further
publicised the Imagist school through their articles in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. The next
year Pound published Des Imagistes: An Anthology – partly in order to promote the poetry of
R. Aldington and H. Doolittle – which also contained poems written by F. S. Flint, Skipwith
Cannel, Amy Lowell, William Carlos William, James Joyce, F. M. Hueffer (Ford Madox
Ford), Allen Upward, John Cournos, Max Michelson and Pound himself. As soon as Pound
lost interest in the movement, Amy Lowell succeeded him as the spokesperson of Imagist
poets. (Pound then derisively called the movement as “Amygism”). Under her leadership,
several anthologies called Some Imagist Poets (1915-1917) were published in series. D. H.
Lawrence and Marianne Moore also joined her for a short period of time. The first two
anthologies featured Lowell’s rigorous efforts to delineate imagist theory. Afterwards, Lowell
also felt that the movement has ceased to invoke more interest.

“A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” by Ezra Pound was originally published in Poetry

magazine in 1913; however, Pound also made it a part of a broader viewpoint that he
propounded in his essay “A Retrospect” which he published in 1918. The central idea of
Pound’s essay was briefly reiterated in three points that he along with other poets of his group
formulated a few years before: 1) Direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or
objective; 2) To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation 3) As
regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a
metronome. Clearly proposing the concreteness of description, Pound strove for the treatment
of subject as the final entity, which should be described in its own terms. Undue
ornamentation is to be avoided; words other than those necessary must contribute to the
meaning or aesthetics of the image created. In all cases, poetry should have a rhythm; a poetic
composition should contain words that create its own music, not necessarily adhering to set
patterns though. Ezra Pound’s manifesto “A Few Don’ts by an Imagist” is an elaboration of
these three tenets. And a reader would always find a harmony between what Pound preached
and what he practiced in poetry. In his introduction to the Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, T.

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S. Eliot aptly noted that “it is necessary to read Pound’s poetry to understand his criticism,
and to read his criticism to understand his poetry.”

3.3 Summary and Analysis of the Text

Ezra Pound begins his short and prescriptive essay “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” by
defining “image” as something “which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an
instant of time.” And he used the term in a technical sense, as it is employed in new
Psychology. Pound’s intention immediately becomes clear when the definition is viewed in
context of poetry. Human mind is a complex thing, and contains thousands of thoughts and
ideas at a single instant of time; however, it also, at the same time, has the capacity to
scrutinise the multitude of ideas and express what is meaningful and comprehensible. In
poetic expression, the scrutiny is all the more acute; yet acuter if the poetry is imagist;
because in the creation of an imagist poem, not only will the mind separate many unrelated
thoughts that exist inside it from what it specifically wants to convey (a rather involuntary
and spontaneous process), but it will also filter those ideas and elements that are related but
implausibly imaginary (un-imagist-ly imaginary to be precise), only then the hard, clear
poetic image of the subject could be created. In order to create an exact image of the situation
or object, even the poetic correlatives are to be eliminated, thus limiting the focus to the only
thing that is in question. An excerpt from W. B. Yeats’ poem “The Scholars” could be
viewed as an example of the imagist experiment:

Bald heads forgetful of their sins

Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines,
That young men, tossing of their beds
Rhymed out in love’s despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.
(“The Scholars”)

Here, the synecdoche “bald heads” is representative of the old scholars, and the poem
is often interpreted as a disregard to the overarching scholarship, whereby the common
human emotions (here, love) are usually relegated. However, our concern here is to observe
the image that has been created in the poem. The poem is a fine example of the three rules
that were finalised by the imagist group as mandatory to write poems of this kind: 1) Direct
treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective; 2) To use absolutely no word that
does not contribute to the presentation 3) As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of
the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome. Accordingly, Yeats in his poem “The
Scholars” focuses directly on the scholars, which are referred to as the “bald heads”, thus
immediately evoking in the imagination of the readers an image, not only physical, but also
qualitative, as the phrase “bald heads” obviously does not evoke a positive picture in the

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minds of the readers. The idea is then elaborated without any circumlocutory expressions.
Abstract ideas are not completely ruled out, but they are only subordinate in nature, thus
adding to the formation of the central image. In Ezra Pound’s opinion such a presentation
gives a sudden liberation, “a sense of freedom from time limits and space limits”; it is, in his
opinion, an experience to be found only in the greatest works of art. The elaboration of these
three basic rules is as follows:

Language

With regards to the language of poetry, Pound is completely in favour of a concrete

diction. Using many adjectives or superfluous words makes the image of a poem dull and
scattered. Phrases like “dim lands of peace”, “abstruser’s musings”, “mock study on my
swimming book” and “unknown omnipotence unfurled” are too adjectival for a good poem.
Such usage of words is unwarranted, as it tends to make the poem look verbose, which is
definitely not a good thing. Another problem with this kind of phraseology is that it mixes
concrete with abstract. The subject of a poem is a natural object and it should not be
described in words that tend to make it abstract; it should rather be described in its own
terms, in a language that is concrete. If one different set of image(s) is used to define other,
make sure that the image or metaphor used is equally concrete, and so must be the
comparison itself. The concreteness of comparison hardens the task of a poet, and compels
him to choose his words carefully and economically. Let us, for instance, take a short imagist
poem written by Amy Lowell:

The chirping of crickets in the night

Is intermittent,
Like the twinkling of stars.

(“Nuit Blanche”)

The subject has created an instantaneous image in the mind of a poet, and the same
has been articulated in a very few words. The simile “the twinkling of stars” has been used to
describe “the chirping of crickets”; however, both the images are complementing each other
in concrete terms, avoiding all kinds of verbosity or abstraction. Also, the intermittent
chirping of crickets in the night immediately forms a solid image in the mind of a reader, an
image both visible and audible. Imagists liked to see and describe things in their natural
dispositions. If abstraction is used to describe a subject, it happens only because of the
writer’s ignorance of the fact that “the natural object is always the adequate symbol.” Pound
warns the poets to avoid such abstractions as are visible in the phrases like “shadows
numberless” or “embalmed darkness.” Such ideas, he suggests, can very well be expressed in
prose in an elaborate manner; in poetry, the expression of this kind only reflects the
mediocrity of a poetic composition. Since abstract details or comparisons are to be avoided in
good poetry, the task of a poet becomes as difficult as that of a good prose writer, and he

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cannot think of shirking all the hard work and difficulties that are an essential part of writing
poetry. No intelligent person will be deceived by a superfluous and lofty expression in poetry,
and an ordinary reader too, after some time, will be tired of such poetry. “It is better to
present one Image in a life time than to produce voluminous works”

In order to highlight the seriousness of the art of poetry, Ezra Pound chalks out an
analogy between poetry and music. An aspiring musician would spend years learning to play
an instrument, including the basics, the ear-training, the music notes and much more before
he actually starts playing it right. The task of a poet is quite similar; the art of verse also
demands such a long and strenuous exercise. Pound then directs the poets to be cautious
about the overwhelming influence of other writers. It is good to admire great poets, and one
can read as many of them as one likes. But a poet should not come under the sway of a
particular writer to the extent of outright imitation, and should allow his own poetic talent to
sprout and deliver. He should have the capacity and patience to absorb what has been gained
from others, and then re-create the same. A direct imitation of the decorative vocabulary of a
poet that one admires is unethical and regressive; it obstructs the progress of an artist.
‘Influence’ in this case should mean an addition or impact that helps one find his own
uniqueness. In any case, if a poet happens to inherit some of the traits that any great poet had,
he should be sincere enough to give due credit to them; if acknowledgement is not executed,
then he should try to conceal what has been inherited. Lastly, Pound passingly suggests that
ornamentation should be done in poetry only if it is needed. One should not unnecessarily
ornament the ideas, and should try to stick to a more direct and genuine expression; if at all,
language is used to decorate an idea, it should create the aesthetic effect essential to poetry.

Rhythm and Rhyme

In his essay “A Retrospect”, Pound defines poetic rhythm as that “which corresponds
exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed.” In Pound’s view, the goal of a
poet should be as difficult as a musician; however, it sometimes becomes questionable to
keep such ideals in poetry. Even though such a harmony between words and rhythm could be
achieved in music (with great effort only), it seems difficult to materialise such “absolute
rhythm” in poetry. Ezra Pound, however, suggests that in order to create such rhythms, one
should acquaint himself with the finest cadences; the exercise would have more chances of
becoming fruitful if one listens and absorbs such cadences in a foreign language so that “the
meaning of the words may be less likely to divert his attention from the movement” of music.
Saxon Charms, Hebridean Folk Songs, the verse of Dante and the lyrics of Shakespeare, he
suggests, could be taken as touchstones; of course, the words and the rhythms are to be
separated at first. A poet should be able to dissect the lyrics into words and rhythm, and then
should take the latter as his primary focus. It is the syllable that creates rhythm in poetry, so
he should analyse all the syllables, “long and short, stressed and unstressed”, and learn how
they function. Even though the primary objective of poetry is not to create good music, and
its literary worth is not subject to its melodious pattern, if a poet choses to make rhythm the
central element of his poem, it should deliver only what is best. A person new to poetry

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writing is also supposed to know the usage of rhyme, assonance and alliteration; not only
should he know how to put words into rhyme, assonance or alliteration, he should also know
the different ways of putting these devices to use. “The mastery of any art is the work of a
lifetime.”

Ezra Pound believed that the art of description should rather be left to a painter; a poet
would never be able to describe something as minutely and aesthetically as a painter does. A
poet is rather accountable for his presentation. Illustrating his argument with Shakespearean
“dawn in russet mantle clad”, he asserts that there is no descriptive element in this verse:
“there is in this line of his nothing one can call description, he presents.” The shift from
‘description’ to ‘presentation’ has been one of the formative shifts in modern English poetry.
Consider H. D.’s (Hilda Doolittle’s) poem “Oread” as an example:

Whirl up, sea—

whirl your pointed pines,
splash your great pines
on our rocks,
hurl your green over us,
cover us with your pools of fir.
(“Oread”)

For Pound, the presentation of the poetic object is of profound and central
significance. Furthermore, it is not just a simple presentation; it is an exploration of
something new, something that has not been said already. Like a scientist, a poet cannot
claim to be a poet unless he has actually discovered something; for this achievement, he has
to first set himself in the search of what has been discovered already, and then has to proceed
from that point onwards. Pound himself had sifted through a large number of ancient poets so
as to discover what has been said once and for all and what has been left for the modern poets
to write. However, he comes to the conclusion that the field of literature is unending and
inexhaustible. He is of the opinion that if we still feel the emotions that poets who came
centuries before did, then we must recreate those emotions and experiences, “through
different nuances, by different intellectual gradations.” The practice of writing about the same
things in the same old manner produces poems without vitality and conviction, and becomes
the reason for public’s indifference toward poetry.

The rhythmic structure of the poem, Pound asserts, should not destroy the shape of its
“words, or their natural sound, or their meanings.” Pound explained that in good poetry, the
metrical patterns of the verse do not dictate the mood of the poem; rather, the mood directs
the choice of words, the simultaneous sounds of which are of different pitch and demand their
own line breaks. This is where poetry differs from music, where the lyrics are set to a fixed
pattern of musical notes. Nevertheless, Pound is confident that the best poetry creates a
musical effect, however irregular it may be. The pleasure that a good poem gives to an ear
makes it more untranslatable than prosaic poetry; the poetry that “strikes upon the
imaginative eye of the reader will lose nothing by translation into a foreign tongue.”
Rhyming scheme may also add flavour to its musicality, if applied with some element of
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surprise, which implies that the rhyme scheme of a poem can never be predetermined or
prearranged. Pound drops, towards the end of the essay, names of several writers in whose
poetry he seemed to have found these elements to a great extent: Sappho (Greek), Gaius
Catullus (Latin), Francois Villon (French), Theophile Gautier (French), Heinrich Heine
(German), and Geoffrey Chaucer (English) if one is not well versed with any of these
languages. One can hone one’s skills as a poet also by reading good prose or by the exercise
of translation which can sometimes lead you to the secret behind best poetic compositions.

With regards to the symmetrical forms of poetry, Ezra Pound is of the opinion that
one should not adopt one if one does not have the capacity to fulfil its technical demands;
poets often end up filling the left out space of a symmetrical form with unnecessary words
and phrases, or what Pound refers to as “slush.” “Form.—I think there is a ‘fluid’ as well as a
‘solid’ content, that some poems may have form as a tree has form, some as water poured
into a vase. That most symmetrical forms have certain uses. That a vast number of subjects
cannot be precisely, and therefore not properly rendered in symmetrical forms.” Ezra Pound
also disfavours the use of synaesthesia in poetry. The intermixing of the perception of one
sense by trying to define it in terms of another”, he contends, is only “the result of being too
lazy to find the exact word.” The implementation of the said rules, Pound believes, would
wipe out nine-tenths of all the bad poetry that is now accepted as classic, and would also save
many of the future poets from the crime of producing such low-standard poetry. Pound
concludes by saying that a person must possess the natural talent/gift of poetry before he
expects to reap the fruitful results of this disciplined exercise.

Undoubtedly, Ezra Pound’s arduous efforts seemed to have given Imagism a literary
and theoretical shape. However, it is often asserted that the genre of poetry is more liberated
than other genres, and it is impossible to bound poetic compositions to just one theory or
concept; poetry, in fact, defies all theories and concepts. The rules of Imagism were difficult
to follow in practice; a comprehensive and holistic adherence to Imagism is all the more
difficult. That also explains the short life of the Imagist movement, until it was subsumed by
a larger entity called Modernism. Although Imagism gave poetry a short break from the
overarching imagination of the romantic period, and liberated the poet from the restriction in
the choice of subject, it was reductive in its own way. Its shortness and brevity hampered the
free flowing imagination of a poet, and the indirectness/loftiness of poetic expression is
sometimes completely ruled out. While imagists excessively stressed on the concreteness of a
subject and its articulation, they ignored the fact that there are a lot of ideas that are abstract
in nature, and that could at best be defined through abstraction, or that abstraction could
supplement what is never found in concreteness. The significance of theme is also relegated
in the imagist process, hence limiting poetry to a certain criteria. Nonetheless, it stood out as
a distinctive trend in modern poetry, and almost all major contemporary writers (including T.
S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, D. H. Lawrence, James Gould Fletcher and W. B. Yeats), at one
point of time or the other, came under the influence of imagist experiments and produced
poems to remember for a lifetime.

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3.4 Summary of the Lesson

This lesson has primarily dealt with the definition of Imagism, and its scope as a
literary movement. It has also – as it is found in several manifestoes of imagist poetry –
elucidated its different characteristics. Imagism flourished in English literary circles from
1912-1917, and was pioneered by Ezra Pound with the help of F. S. Flint and others. It also
contains, along with several imagist poems written by different writers, a critical summary of
the prescribed essay “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” by Ezra Pound.

Self-Assessment Exercise:
i) According to Ezra Pound, an ‘Image’ is that which presents an __________.
ii) It is better to present _______ in a lifetime than ________.
iii) In order to make his point, Pound creates an analogy between the art of ____ and
____.
iv) What kind of language does Imagism propose?
v) Poets should not be unnecessarily descriptive, for it is a task of the ____.
vi) If you are using a symmetrical form, __________________________.
vii) Enumerate the three rules of Imagist poetry?

3.5 Glossary

Vorticism- It was an aggressive artistic and literary movement that vehemently attacked the
sentimentality of nineteenth century literature. It celebrated violence, energy, and the
machines. In visual arts, this aggression was expressed by irregular patterns, sharp angles and
loud colours. It was dominated by Wyndham Lewis, but had also included Ezra Pound, C. R.
Nevinson, Edward Wadsworth and others.

Fascism- It is a kind of dictatorial regime that practises ultrnationalism, force, and strong
regimentation of society and economy. The first fascist movement started in Italy during the
First World War under the leadership of Benito Mussolini, before it spread to other European
countries.

Anti-Semitism- It refers to a feeling of hostility towards or prejudice against Jews as a

cultural, racial, or ethnic group.

Haiku- It is a poetic form of Japanese origin, having three unrhymed verses containing five,
seven, and five syllables respectively. A haiku poem also contains a reference to a season.

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Synaesthesia- Also used as a poetic device, Synaesthesia refers to the description of the
perception of one sense in terms of another. For instance, describing voice as velvety, or
coloured. John Keats made ample use of this device in his poems.

Answers to self-assessment exercises

i) …. an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time….

ii) It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.
iii) In order to make his point, Pound creates an analogy between the art of music and
art of poetry.
iv) Imagism proposes a straightforward and undecorated language.
v) A painter
vi) If you are using a symmetrical form, don’t put in what you want to say and then
fill up the remaining vacuums with slush.
vii) 1) Direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective; 2) To use
absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation 3) As regarding
rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a
metronome.

3.6 References

● https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ezra-pound
● https://www.nytimes.com/1972/11/02/archives/ezra-pound-a-man-of-
contradictions.html
● Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Edited with an Introduction by T. S. Eliot.
● https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69409/a-retrospect-and-a-few-donts
● Baldick, Chris. The Oxford English Literary History: The Modern Movement (1910-
1940). New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Vol.10. Print.

3.7 Further Reading

● Preminger, Alex. Editor. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry sand Poetics. London:

Macmillan Reference, 1986. Print.
● Nadel, Ira. B. Ezra Pound: A Literary Life. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Print.
● https://www.biography.com/writer/ezra-pound
● Jones, Peter. Imagist Poetry. New York: Penguin, 1972. Print.

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3.8 Model Questions

Ques 1. Define Imagism with special reference to Ezra Pound.

Ques 2. Write an essay on Imagism and its contribution to modern English literature.
Ques 3. Explain with examples the literary features of Imagism.
Ques 4. Critically analyse the essay “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” by Ezra Pound.
Ques 5. Was Imagism a ‘movement’ or a ‘trend’? Debate while quoting examples form
imagist poetry.

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 Lesson No. 4

“Theorizing the Postmodern: Toward A Poetics” by Linda Hutcheon

Structure

4.0 Objectives
4.1 About the Author
4.2 Introduction to the essay
4.3 Summary and Analysis of the Text
4.4 Summary of the Lesson
4.5 Glossary
4.6 References
4.7 Further Reading
4.8 Model Questions

4.0 Objectives
After reading this Lesson, you will achieve the following objectives

● Delineate the characteristic features of Postmodernism

● Establish the difference between Modernism and Postmodernism
● Define with examples a few literary concepts significant to Postmodernism –
Metafiction, Irony, Parody and others
● Analyse Linda Hutcheon’s views on Postmodernism
● Identify the major literary forms of postmodern period

4.1 About the Author

Linda Hutcheon is a well-known Canadian academic and a University Professor

Emeritus in the Department of English and Centre for Comparative Literature at the
University of Toronto, Canada, where she has taught English and Comparative Literature for
many years, and has also supervised various research projects, dissertations and theses.
Working collaboratively with hundreds of scholars, she has also contributed to large research
projects like the multi-volume Rethinking Literary History, which was awarded a Major
Collaborative Research Initiatives grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research

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Council of Canada in 1996. Her oeuvre is a diverse and versatile body of work that includes
theories on such varied subjects as parody, irony, narrative, feminist theory, opera, literary
theory, and ethnic minority writing in Canada. Her theoretical works include A Poetics of
Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988); The Politics of Postmodernism (1989);
Narcissistic Narrative: the Metafictional Paradox (1980); A Theory of Parody: The
Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (1980); The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of
Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction (1992); Splitting Images: Contemporary Canadian
Ironies (1991); Opera: Desire, Disease, Death (1994) with her spouse Michael Hutcheon;
Rethinking Literary History: A Forum on Theory (2002); and most recently A Theory of
Adaptation (2006). She is famous for her deep research in the field of postmodernist culture
and theories, the topic on which she has written several books. Apart from several academic
awards that she has won, she also has to her credit the distinction of becoming 117th President
(the third Canadian and the first Canadian woman to hold this designation) of Modern
Language Association.

4.2 Introduction to the essay

Chronologically, the term Postmodernism is vaguely applied to the period after

World War II (post-1945) when the after effects of First World War took their worst turn in
the form of Nazi totalitarianism and mass extermination of Jews, excessive industrialisation
and rampant capitalism, threat to environment, increasing population, weakening of human
relationships, and a constant fear of total destruction due to the invention of atomic bombs.
Culturally, it was marked by a constant scepticism towards the objective structures of
knowledge like Religion and History. It also exposed the foundations of our society and
concocted relationships, while highlighting philosophically the meaninglessness of human
existence and the underlying ‘void’. In this sense, Postmodernism in literature and arts find
its parallels in the movement of Poststructuralism in linguistics, which records the same
undermining of objective structures of language and meaning. This profound shift in
perspective reflected through various disciplines such as literature, philosophy, architecture,
visual arts, communication and technology. The postmodern sensibility gained momentum in
the 1960s, giving rise to many literary innovations.

Postmodernism in literature is sometimes depicted as a continuation of modern

period, whereby, the counter-traditional experiments that began during Modernism took turn
to extremism in postmodern art and literature. However, it establishes its distinction from the
similar tendencies of Modernism through its ironic and playful spirit. Modern writers
lamented the loss of meaning in life, and their writings were constantly marked by nostalgia
and bewilderment, and a quest to find new center in this chaotic world; postmodern writers,
instead of lamenting, ridiculed the very possibility of meaning. Instead, it celebrated the
possibility of multiple meanings, and the freedom to create them. Thomas Pynchon's
postmodern novel The Crying of Lot 49 is a perfect example of this futile endeavour to
stabilise knowledge. While Modernism diminished the gap between ‘high art’ (Classicism)
and ‘low art’ (Popular culture) by rejecting the differences between them, Postmodernism

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took a step further by mixing them both, thus, eliminating the very possibility of a neat and
simplified difference. Consequently, parody and pastiche became the new literary weapons,
in which the incoherence of meaning is conveyed through a mixing of the serious and the
playful.

The campaign of Modernism was founded on serious intentions. Contrarily, the

postmodernist venture was frisky and facetious; Theatre of the Absurd could only have been
an invention of postmodern literature. While modern writers gave primacy to form, for
postmodern writers literary forms themselves became the subject of parody. The idea behind
postmodernist futuristic endeavours was to expose the vulnerability of literary structures. The
disorientation of contemporary world, which was once tragic, became a matter of freedom
from the past, and a sense of parody governed the postmodern spirit. The belief that this
world is incomprehensible made the spirit of Postmodernism light-hearted and humorous.
The shift from Modernism to Postmodernism was actually a shift from crisis to confrontation,
from historical shock to psychological sedimentation.

Furthermore, intertextuality, temporal distortion, fragmented narratives told by

unreliable narrators, unrealistic and improbable plots, self-reflexivity, multiple point of
views, dark humour, and a direct involvement of the reader also became frequent features of
postmodernist writings. It democratised art and literature by incorporating such popular
modes of expression as films, music, television, cartoons and newspapers. The fictions of
Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino depicted the postmodern tendency to oscillate between
the systems of reality and fantasy. Magic Realism and Metafiction became the new orders of
fiction. Marked by a blend of literary genres and styles, the postmodern mood reflected best
through prose fiction, notably in works by American novelists such as Vladimir Nabokov,
John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, and by British authors John Fowles, Salman
Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Peter Ackroyd, Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson.

4.3 Summary and Analysis of the Text

Clearly then, the time has come to theorize the term (postmodernism),
if not to define it, before it fades from awkward neologism to derelict
cliché without ever attaining to the dignity of a cultural concept.
(Ihab Hassan)

Linda Hutcheon begins her essay “Theorising the Postmodern: Toward a Poetics”
pointing to the confusion and vagueness often associated with the term ‘postmodernism’,
something which makes this word both obscure and fascinating. Moreover, it is often defined
with negative features, using words like discontinuity, disruption, dislocation, decentring, and
indeterminacy. These words do not sound unfamiliar; we have used them to describe
modernism too, and it makes the task of defining ‘postmodernism’ all the more difficult. If

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such ‘dislocations’ and ‘disruptions’ have also taken place in years before the supposed
advent of postmodernism, them how do we distinguish the two concepts/theories/poetics –
Modernism and Postmodernism. One thing is clear though, that postmodernism, like
modernism, is a contradictory phenomenon. It subverts and demolishes the very ideas it
builds upon; and Hutcheon has exemplified this argument by giving instances from various
disciplines like literature, architecture, linguistics, history, dance, television, music and
others. Hutcheon is of the opinion that critics have often attached to postmodernism a sense
of negativity, defining it in terms that not only adds to its vagueness as a concept, but also
portrays it as undesirable as a cultural movement, if it is one. Hutcheon’s intention while
discussing postmodernism is to avoid such polemical generalisations. She also clarifies the
word postmodernism cannot be used as a synonym for ‘contemporary’ just because we have
not yet put a full-stop after its duration; nor is it as international in character so as to include a
number of simultaneous trends prevalent in different countries, which rather diminish its
character than highlighting it. For instance, a critic would want to include “neo-baroque” of
Spain in postmodernist circles, even though the words ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’
imply something else there. Only a definition clearer and more specific would do justice to
postmodernism.

Linda Hutcheon tries to look at postmodernism through several frames, one of which
is history. She argues that postmodernism as a cultural activity is “resolutely historical”, by
which she implies that there is a constant reckoning to the past. However, this recollection of
the past is not sentimental or nostalgic in character. It is not the ideal state to be appreciated,
retrieved or craved for; postmodern recollection of the past is a “critical revisiting, an ironic
dialogue with the past of both art and society.” In that, it is different from modernism which
claimed a “purist break with history.” The 1980 Venice exhibition which supposedly marked
the institutional recognition of postmodernism in architecture was titled “the presence of the
past.” This critical and deliberate reworking of the past also explains the ruling spirit of irony
in postmodernist art and literature. For instance, this “ironic reworking of the history of film”
is evident in several movies like A Clockwork Orange (1971) or Nineteen Eighty-Four
(1984).
Time and again, Linda Hutcheon points to this postmodernist contradiction of exposing or
subverting the very system within which it operates.

In literature, she prefers to exemplify her argument through the genre of novel; in
particular, those novels or works of fiction that consciously include historical events or
personages, like The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Midnight’s Children, Ragtime and Famous
Last words. Such works are often referred to as “historiographic metafiction” because they
tend to incorporate and reflect upon the concepts/disciplines of literature and history.
Operating within the domains of literature and history, such postmodernist texts question the
authenticity of their function as separate disciplines. Such texts are self-reflexive because of
the theoretical awareness of history and fiction on one side, and of the knowledge of fluidity
of such disciplinary constructs on the other. It aptly points to the “inherent contradictoriness”
of postmodernist literary forms; the above mentioned literary works subvert the conventions
of history and fiction by operating within the same fields of human knowledge; hence, the

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postmodern need for such neologisms as ‘midfiction’ or ‘metafiction.’ And this conflict
inside postmodern texts becomes multivalent when writers become self-conscious about their
“literary heritage and about the limits of mimesis.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred
Years of Solitude keeps escaping the labels that are adopted to define it; it is metafiction,
magic realism and historical novel all at the same time, alluding very strongly to real political
and historical realities. Despite working in such porous territories, the postmodern writer has
managed to connect to its readers. Hutcheon takes this idea as the starting point of his critical
venture.

While other critics see this tendency to question the inherent contradictoriness of the
structures of knowledge as a result of the dissolution of bourgeois hegemony, and the
subsequent appearance of mass culture in the main stream. Hutcheon is of the opinion that the
supposed division between the high culture and mass culture is not an initiation of
postmodernism; rather, it is an idea that postmodernism intends to challenge. The emerging
voices of this period are not to be homogenised into a single whole – the “self”, which is then
pitted against the ‘other.’ Postmodern differences are always multiple and provisional. These
emerging voices should be left just as “differences” which would not have any exact opposite
to entail a binary opposition. The binary opposition of ‘self’ and ‘other’, for example, is
created on concealed hierarchies within class, caste, race, gender or ethnicity. Postmodernism
highlights these multivalent differences, both internal and external, not as having a
“centralised sameness”, but as decentralised orders – “cultures (uncapitalised and plural); for
instance, mass culture was further extended to the local(s) and regional(s).

This multivalence turns out to be a disparity between modernism and postmodernism.

Modernists like T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, even after realising the vulnerability of
universals, tried to stabilise the aesthetic and moral values; in that, they have been seen as
humanists. Postmodernists refuse to provide this world with any stable arrangement of things
and values, any final artistic and mythical structure or what Lyotard referred to as “master
narrative”, thus stripping modernists of their only possible consolation. Postmodern
awareness of the “inevitable absence of such universals” or of the “illusory” nature of all
master narratives is all the more firm. For them, those who lament the loss of meaning or
center in this world are actually mourning the impossibility of creation of any stable
structures of knowledge. The initial and impulsive result of this “incredulity towards master
or metanarratives” was well depicted in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953).

The vulnerability of master narratives has continuously been exposed throughout

history, and in this sense, postmodernism is not something radically new. What Foucault,
Derrida, Habermas, and Baudrillard are doing today find its theoretical parallels in the works
of Freud, Marx and Nietzsche. All of them – in one way or the other – attempted to challenge
the “empiricist, rationalist, humanist assumptions of our cultural systems.” Foucault’s The
Order of Things (1970) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) are two early examples of
such deliberate contestations. However, it is undeniable that to postulate such challenges is to
operate in a paradoxical frame that is doubtlessly postmodern, since the oppositions and
arguments made tend to be epistemological in character, ultimately pushing themselves to the

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same vulnerability that it posed to challenge. However, what is important in all these
“internalised challenges to humanism” is the interrogation of the notion of consensus, which
proves out to be illusory in nature. Postmodernism is a constant reminder of the fact that
social realities are structured through discourses; it exposes the “everyday processes of
structuring chaos, of imparting and assigning meaning.”

On the other hand, the instability of postmodern knowledge-systems is not to be

interpreted as its hopelessness; it is not that “the modernist world was a world in need of
mending and the postmodern one beyond repair.” Despite its profound belief in the artifice of
ethical systems, it kept on holding the mirror to society. And a few literary endeavours like
Bertolt Brecht’s Epic Theatre provoked a change from within. Postmodernism propounded
that all systems of knowledge are human constructs, but it did not deny the consolation that
such systems should be provided to human beings; it just made them aware of the limitations
of their belief systems. Challenging and questioning, Hutcheon asserts, are positive values,
for they lead us to our limitations. Even if unable to provide us with immediate solutions,
they are to be taken as positive and forward steps toward change. This thought was also
propounded by Roland Barthes, an early postmodern thinker, in his Mythologies (1973). In
this context, Hutcheon brings to the fore the importance of the 1960s in the formation of the
postmodern condition. The 1960s contemplated a unique function of art, which was different
from the elitism of “Arnoldian” art. Moreover, it was the intellect gained through the 1960s
which led to the cultivation of an advanced literary culture, a creative sensibility that would
not only be diversely innovative, but also self-reflexive, thus making different writers aware
of the “limits of language, of subjectivity, of sexual identity” and of “systemization and
uniformization.” This constant interrogation of the western modes of thinking, of liberal
humanism is perhaps essential to the postmodern condition.

II

Second section of Hutcheon’s essay focusses on the permeability of literary and non-
literary genres. As Theodore Ziolkowski had noted this trait in 1969: “new arts are so closely
related that we cannot hide complacently behind the arbitrary walls of self-contained
disciplines.” The hitherto accepted limits were now abandoned, letting the intermixing take
place: literary and visual arts (Shosaku Arakawa’s The Mechanism of Meaning); novel and
autobiography (Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men); novel and history (Salman Rushdie’s
Shame); the genres of theoretical treatise, literary dialogue and novel (Giorgio Manganelli’s
Amore); and lastly, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose incorporates three different
discourses – the literary-historical, the theological-philosophical, and the popular-cultural.
Similarly, the narrative of Carlos Fuentes’s The Death of Artemio Cruz is made complicated
by including not only the three possible voices of narration (first, second and third) but also
the three tenses (present, past and future). Postmodernism fiction has also posed a challenge
to the traditional notions of perspective. “The perceiving subject is no longer assumed to be a
coherent, meaning generating-entity. Narrators in fiction become either disconcertingly
multiple and hard to locate (as in D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel) or resolutely provisional
and limited – often undermining their own omniscience (as in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s

`49
Children).” However, such interlacing of genres takes no uniform route, which perhaps
would have made the process of hybridization and labelling easier.

This postmodern tendency to play with the conventions becomes the new mode,
however impossibly difficult it is to methodise this newness. Jerzy Kosinski calls such criss-
crossing of genres – fiction and non-fiction – as “autofiction”, for it is the work rather than
the author that decides its own nature and course, and not the other way round. Rosalind
Krauss has called such works “paraliterary”, since they betray the literary genres on one
hand, and their own critical assessment on the other. Moreover, postmodernism has cast aside
modernist secret or hidden desire to revive stable meanings. And this is the point where it
clearly broke off with modernism; and that is where parody emerges as a perfect postmodern
form, for it celebrates and makes fun of this “ironic discontinuity” that is at “the heart of
continuity.” A postmodern text parodies what it imitates, thus putting the whole idea of
authenticity and originality to question. This postmodern rejection of the totalising of
differences could mistakenly be read as its pessimism, or even nihilism. But it is to be
understood that postmodernism does not establish the end of all meanings or possibilities; it
just receives them as provisional, thus acknowledging the practical purpose for which such
meanings are forms. It highlights that the meanings and certainties we have are the result of a
“complex network of local and contingent conditions.”

In such conditions, the concept of ‘art’ is viewed with an eye of suspicion. In

Derrida’s words, all texts will be looked at as “breaches or infractions”, for postmodern
practices constantly resist the conventional categories of art, literature, aesthetics and
criticism. That is probably the reason behind Derrida’s “constant self-consciousness about the
status of his own discourse”; it rules out the possibility of conceptual criticism. Linda
Hutcheon at this point questions this very essay on postmodernism, which is founded on the
concept of causality – a logical development of things. What could then possibly be the
correct way to theorize a cultural phenomenon, especially something as contradictory and
multivalent as the one we are dealing with now? All major critics including Stanley Fish,
Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Richard Rorty, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, and
Lyotard have pointed this theoretical crisis in their works. What they finally suggest is that
postmodernism has ruled out the possibility of a ‘master narrative’, for such dominant
narratives give birth to hierarchies. “There are no natural hierarchies; there are only
those we construct.” This “self-implicating” style “allow postmodernist theorising to
challenge narratives that do presume to ‘master’ status, without necessarily assuming
that status for itself.” For instance, when Lyotard proposed a “meta-narrative theory of
postmodernism’s incredulity of meta-narrative” or when Foucault propounded “anti-
totalizing” epistemes, they were well aware of the fact that they are becoming the victims of
their own logic. Therefore, there is no point throwing it back at them, because they realise it
already. It is these “masterful denials of mastery, the cohesive attacks on cohesion, and the
essentializing challenges to essences that characterise postmodern theory.”

It is clear now that orders, structures, values, meanings, and identities can no longer
be perceived as universal and incontestable; they tend to survive only because they serve one

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practical purpose or the other, or because they provide values to beings and things. The
theory and practice of postmodernism seems easy to locate now; it is positioned within the
systems it challenges, the systems which have been constructed by human beings for their
socio-cultural needs. Since these systems are not natural, they are ideological, as well as open
to revisions. Better systems can be constructed by understanding the complex web of
religion, philosophy, literature and society, without portraying the suggested system as final
and without ideology. It must be admitted – in all cases possible – that critic’s own position is
also ideological. “I think the formal and thematic contradictions of postmodern art and
theory work to do just that: to call to attention both what is being contested and what is
being offered as a critical response to that, and to do so in a self-aware way that admits
its own provisionality.” In this sense, postmodernism seems to have become “an ongoing
cultural process or activity”, and Linda Hutcheon further suggests that what we need, “more
than a fixed and fixing definition, is a ‘poetics’, an open, ever changing theoretical structure
by which to order both our cultural knowledge and our critical procedures.” It is a self-
conscious phenomenon that proposes provisional solutions without claiming any finality, nor
does it accept the finality of other proposals. Within the context of literary theory and
practice, it highlights the complex and problematic relation between theory and art, which
overlap at several points but are never fully compatible with each other. In Lyotard’s words:

A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he

writes, the work he produces are not in principal governed by pre-established rules,
and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgement, by applying
familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the
work of art itself is looking for.

III

When criticism starts reflecting on itself or in other words, when it becomes self-
reflexive, that is the point where it gives way to theory. One cannot find a better reason for
the emergence of such a large variety of theoretical discourses in the postmodern period. In
Jameson’s words, postmodernism manifested itself through ‘theoretical discourse’, with its
areas ranging from psychoanalysis, linguistics, literature, feminism and Marxism to
philosophy, history, politics and historiography. For instance, history has often been
incorporated in the critical study of novel genre. But the genres of magic realism, and other
postmodern genres of semi-historical or para-historical fiction have posed a challenge to
history itself. Is history an objective mode of knowledge, or is it a reflection on past events
using limited and subjective sources? To assume that postmodernism has abandoned history
as obsolete and redundant is equally wrong. It never denies the existence of the past; it just
accentuates the fact that our knowledge of history is now completely dependent on the
available texts, which also include the eye-witnesses. Furthermore, the social institutions and
practices of the past have themselves become the ‘text’ of analysis, thus aiding feminist and
Marxist theories in ways divergent and innovative. Several postmodern texts, namely China

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Men, Corregidora, Mumbo Jumbo, The Scorched-Wood People, Falubert’s Parrot,
Antichthon, and The White Hotel, testify to the argument.

Linda Hutcheon then briefly discusses some recent critical texts – namely, Evan
Watkin’s The Critical Act: Criticism and Community (1978), David Carroll’s The Subject in
Question: The Languages of Theory and the Strategies of Fiction (1982), Peter Uwe
Hoehendahl’s The Institution of Criticism (1982) and Allen Thiher’s Words in Reflection:
Modern Language Theory and Postmodern Fiction (1984) in order to understand and define
the poetics of postmodernism, which she believes, could be understood through “the
overlappings of concern between philosophical and literary theory and practice”, which again
leads us back to the ‘post’ position of postmodernism, and its “contradictory dependence on
and independence from that which temporally preceded it”, i.e., Modernism. This
reconsideration, however, would now be done in aesthetic, philosophical and ideological
terms.

Is postmodernism afflicted with a natural tendency to reject, thus leading us to eternal

denial and instability? Was modernism, in this sense, a better mode of criticism – “something
that mediates theory and practice in the field of literary studies?” Of the many arguments put
forward on the issue (by its defenders and detractors), Linda Hutcheon chooses to delineate
her postmodern poetics in contrast with Terry Eagleton’s 1985 article “Capitalism,
Modernism and Postmodernism.” Eagleton, she believes, has done too much of theorising
without having exemplified his indictment of postmodernism as a negative phenomenon.
Terry Eagleton is of the opinion that postmodern art is ahistorical, and hence, apolitical;
moreover, dissolution of binaries due to multiplication of differences has further put a
challenge to organised and focussed protest. In addition to that, Eagleton did not seem to
have any belief in the “subversive potential” of such postmodern devices as irony, parody and
humour. Art that promoted non-high forms had been considered by him as “kitsch” (an object
of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion). He proposes to put back into art the real
historical world and humanist subjects, along with more realistic forms of literary expression.
In short, he portrays postmodernism as “an act of becoming coextensive with commodified
life itself.”

Linda Hutcheon believes that there is a lack of coordination between Eagleton’s

theory and the texts which were supposed to testify his theoretical ideas. His theory is “too
neat” and opinionated. For instance, Doctorow’ Ragtime cannot be considered ahistorical as
is suggested by Eagleton; postmodern treatment of the past can neither be termed as
“sentimental or nostalgic”, nor can it be located in antiquarianism. It rather confronts the past
in order to contest any “modernist discarding or recuperating of the past in the name of the
future.” Similarly, magic realism in Midnight’s Children is not a style without depth; nor can
Coover’s The Public Burning be labelled as apolitical. The effects of parody, irony and
humour could be far-reaching and serious. Furthermore, postmodern texts like The White
Hotel and Kepler are neither wholly “post-metaphysical”, nor devoid of humanist subjects.
Few other critics have also tried to undermine the creative potential of postmodern cultural

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practices by theorising it in negative and simplified terms, and also by basing their arguments
on distorted exemplification.

Many critics have observed postmodernism’s attraction to popular art forms, like
detective stories in fiction, because of which it has also bridged the gap between elite and
popular art. Even though true to a great extent, even this proposition needs to be understood
in context of its complex practice. Typical postmodern novels like The French Lieutenant’s
Woman or The Name of Rose use and abuse the conventions of both popular and elite culture,
while being at the same time the object of academic research and popular best-sellers. Such
historiographic metafictions, about which Hutcheon has also discussed in the beginning of
the first section, clearly acknowledge their discursive nature, thus operating within – and
subverting from within – the discourses of history, philosophy, semiotics, theology, political
science, and literature and literary criticism.

Towards the end, Linda Hutcheon states that it is not possible to expose the hidden
unity – if there is any – behind postmodern postulations, because it readily accepts the
“irreconcilable incompatibilities” of all logic-systems; in fact, this is the idea on which
postmodern poetics builds its premise on. It also acknowledges its position as another
ideology, while defining its function. The proposed model of contradictions, she suggests,
could not be interpreted as impasse, for it would open some new possibilities of plurality and
contestation in various disciplines; however, the idea of this poetics being another
“discriminating scholarly discourse” is undeniable. Clearly, referring to the proposed poetics
as “postmodern” ideology, Linda defines its function as “inscribing and contesting its own
provisional formulations.” Postmodern poetics might not produce universal truths, for it is not
its intention to do so; it would rather teach to recognise the value of differences and
contradictions. Art and theory are to be understood as “signifying processes”, which implies
that they are ever changing and evolving. Understanding this, we shall be able to comprehend
our role in the making of our culture, in the formulation of social codes, customs, and
practices through which we define and make sense of it.

4.4 Summary of the Lesson

This lesson has been designed to make you aware of the postmodern artistic and
cultural tendencies. It clearly differentiate postmodernism from modernism, highlighting the
peculiar functioning of writers, genres, theories and discourses in postmodern period. Linda
Hutcheon has tried to understand postmodernism as an ongoing process, a ‘poetics’ that
eliminates the very possibility of authoritative meaning and theory in literature and culture. In
the last section of her essay, Hutcheon specifies the functioning of ‘postmodern poetics’
(criticism and theory) in context of its literary and cultural practices.

Self-Assessment Exercise

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 i) What is a postmodern paradox?
ii) Postmodernism calls to attention both ___________, and to do so in a self-aware
way that admits its own provisionality.
iii) Mention the names of a few literary modes of the postmodern period.
iv) Postmodernism has ruled out the possibility of what Lyotard refers to as the ____.
v) Name two postmodern novels that subvert the idea of history.

4.5 Glossary

Theatre of the Absurd- Critic Martin Esslin first coined this expression in his essay “The
Theatre of the Absurd” (1960) to designate a particular trend in the genre of drama during
and after the Second World War. Such plays essentially depicted the absurdity and futility of
human existence as was expressed by Albert Camus in his philosophical essay “The Myth of
Sisyphus” (1942). In drama, this absurdity is usually articulated through disjointed plots,
purposeless situations, meaningless dialogues and confused/irrational characters. It also
violates the standard conventions of characterisation and thematic unity. Samuel Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot (1953), Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit (1944), Jean Genet The Balcony (1955),
Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (1959), and Harold Pinter’s The Dumbwaiter (1960) are a few
famous examples.

Irony- It is the literary contrast or incongruity between two meanings (verbal irony) or
situations (situational irony) – one that is expected or implied and the one which is real and
actual. In verbal irony, the implied meaning differs sharply from the actual, thus creating an
aesthetic effect. It can as simple as saying, “What a pleasant day!” when it is actually raining
heavily. Take another example from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: in his speech, Marc
Antony refers to Brutus several times as an “honourable man,” knowing that Brutus aided in
the murder of Caesar. The owner of a big construction company not being able to fix his own
house is an example of situational irony. Dramatic Irony on the other hand happens when
the audience or readers are aware of something, which the characters of a movie, story or
play do not know. For example, in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the
readers/spectators know that Juliet has taken a sleeping potion to fake her death, but this is
not known to Romeo, who believes she has actually died and proceeds to kill himself.

Parody- It can be simply defined as a ridiculous or distorted imitation. It is a work that

mimics the style of an author, work or genre in an exaggerated way, so as to produce a comic
effect. The idea behind parody is to make fun of the ‘original’ text, author, or style that it
imitates. Parodies can take many forms, including fiction, poetry, film, visual art, and more.
A Radio-Jockey imitating the style of a famous actor or singer is a contemporary example of
parody.

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Pastiche- It is a literary piece that imitates another work, author, style or genre in a light-
hearted and amusing way. The idea behind such imitation is to highlight and celebrate the
style or work of another author, rather than creating a mockery of it. It differs from Parody,
because it does not ridicule or look down upon the original. The imitation is not always
limited to a single work, and the resulting literary or artistic composition sometimes becomes
a mixture –too incongruous at times – of several things borrowed from many sources.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), a play written by Tom Stoppard is one of the
best examples of pastiche. The plot of Stoppard’s tragicomedy develops upon two minor
characters – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who appear for a brief moment in
Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.

Magic Realism- It is a narrative mode that amalgamates ‘reality’ with ‘fantasy’; it portrays
“the imaginary, the improbable, or the fantastic in a realistic or rational manner.” While
incorporating the elements of mythical or supernatural world, its setting usually remains
normal, giving an authentic description of human life and society; and hence the expression
magic-realism. While the term was coined by German art critic Franz Roh, it is generally
associated in literature with the fictional writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez; One Hundred
Years of Solitude (1967) by Marquez is a classic example of magic realism. Midnight’s
Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie is another text written in this literary mode.

Point of view- It refers to the angle, perspective or position from which a story is narrated; it
is established through the manner by which the setting, characters, situations, events, actions
and dialogues are presented to the reader. This mode is important in the genre of novel. For
instance, in a third-person point of view, the narrator usually stands outside the narrative and
refers to the characters of the story by their names or by pronouns that are suitable for each
one of them. First-person narrator on the other hand speaks as “I”, and is – more or less – a
participant in the story. These point of views can be further modified by the writer as per
his/her convenience: for instance, a third-person narrator may have an access to the
characters’ innermost thoughts and feelings, in which case he becomes the omniscient third-
person; or he may keep his knowledge about the characters limited to a certain extent, thus
equally or partially sharing the curiosity of his readers.

Dark Humour – Also known as Black Humour or Black Comedy, it is a form of humour
which depicts human suffering as absurd and comic rather than tragic and pitiable. On the
surface, it seems non-serious and insensitive towards the tragedies of human life, but the
reader understands the underlying gravity of the matter. Laughter, it proposes, is the only
appropriate response to the meaninglessness of human existence. The novels of such writers
as Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Joseph Heller, and Philip Roth contain
elements of black humour. Auschwitz jokes on the holocaust aptly define the character of
black humour, take one for instance:

What’s the difference between a Jew in the oven and a pizza?

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 The pizza doesn’t scream because it’s a pizza. And the Jew doesn’t scream because
he’s already been gassed to death before being put in the oven.

Metafiction- It is a work of fiction that openly draws attention to its fictional nature. Such
works are self-reflexive in the sense that the author often asserts his position by making his
presence felt to the reader, and keeps reminding him that what they are reading is a work of
fiction, thus intentionally breaking the convention of literary realism. The idea of
verisimilitude is completely neglected in such literary works. The technique is devised to
comprehend/question the relationship between ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’, or sometimes, to
understand the very art of fiction itself. Jorge Luis Borges’ collection of short stories
Ficciones (1941-56) is one famous example.

Epic Theatre- It is a theatrical movement which gained momentum in the first half of the
twentieth century. A number of theatre practitioners, especially German playwright Bertolt
Brecht, were involved in such theatrical productions which rather than adhering to
Coleridge’s idea of ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, promoted an active belief of the
audience in the fictiveness of a literary text, and subsequently their response and participation
in the social events depicted on the stage. Various techniques used for this purpose were:
actors playing multiple characters; enacting a play in full lights; director giving instructions
during the final enactment of a play; and breaking of the fourth wall by addressing the
audience directly.

Answers to self-assessment exercises

i) Postmodern paradox is the position of questioning conventional structures by

using those very structural modes that it intends to challenge.
ii) ….what is being contested and what is being offered as a critical response to
that….
iii) Parody, Pastiche, Irony, Metafiction, Magic Realism and Dark Humour.
iv) Master Narrative
v) Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie and The French Lieutenant’s Woman by
John Fowles.

4.6 References

● Hutcheon, Linda. The Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory Fiction. New York:
Routledge, 1988. Print. Web Version (2003)
● Lyotard, Jean. Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979. Print.
● http://aurora.icaap.org/index.php/aurora/article/view/55/68

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4.7 Further Reading

● Chute, Hillary. “The Popularity of Postmodernism.” JSTOR

● Preminger, Alex. Editor. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry sand Poetics. London:
Macmillan Reference, 1986. Print.

4.8 Model Questions

Ques 1. Discuss the nature of Postmodernism, as it reflects in postmodern life and literature.
Ques 2. Write an essay on the literary movement of Postmodernism, thus highlighting its
multifarious traits and tendencies.
Ques 3. Postmodern functioning is paradoxical in nature. Explain.
Ques 4. Summarise the essay “Theorising the Postmodern: Toward a Poetics” by Linda
Hutcheon.
Ques 5. How is Postmodernism different from other periods of English literature? Try to
locate its uniqueness in literary history.

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 Lesson No. 5

Towards a Concept of Postmodernism

IHAB HASSAN

‘One listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine
for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and “retro ”clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a
matter of TV games.’

--Jean–Francois Lyotard

Structure

5.0 Objectives
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Postmodern Vocabulary
5.3 An Overview of the Text
5.4 Summary of the Lesson
5.5 References
5.6 Further Readings
5.7 Model Questions

5.0 Objectives
After reading this lesson, you will be able to:

● Highlight why postmodernism is a wide-ranging and fluid category

● Explicate the different understandings of the term in relation to different
theorists/critics

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 ● Explain the rupture and continuity between modernism and postmodernism
● Elucidate literary, cultural and critical concerns and implications of postmodernism

5.1 Introduction
You have already been introduced to the expression ‘Postmodernism’ in relation to the text,
Theorizing the Postmodern: Toward a Poetics, authored by a distinguished Canadian critic,
Linda Hutcheon. Hutcheon’s text makes it clear that the term perplexes its readers on account
of its multiple meanings in literary-cultural studies lexicon.

Postmodernism, it is maintained by critics, registers significant transformations in society as a

result of technology, economics, and the media; that has led to significant shifts and
alterations in cultural and literary productions. In order to capture the multi-faceted changes,
the word postmodernism has been invented, adopted, defined and redefined. Hence, a range
of ideas refer to and has been developed in the domains of philosophy, theory and
aesthetic/literary productions. Postmodernism is often understood by
juxtaposing/differentiating it with/from that of modernism. It has been argued that “where
modernism is preoccupied by consciousness, showing how the workings of the mind reveals
individuals to be less stable and unified than realist psychology would have us believe,
postmodernism is much more interested in fictionality”(Patricia Waugh). Here, fictionality
refers to the world represented in a text, which is linguistically constructed, framed and
presented to us from a certain perspective. The text is considered as a construct and not an
imitation/representation of the world outside. The text is not a mirror image of reality. This
way, postmodernism registers a critique of realist approaches both to narrative and to
representing a fictional 'world'. However, it remains unclear whether postmodernism registers
a break with modernist attitudes and techniques or it extends and adapts them.

‘Postmodernity’ is commonly used to refer to a historical and cultural condition marked

digitalization and consumerism/commoditization’ and postmosernism refers to the cultural
texts (such as literature, films, TV, music, fashion etc.) and aesthetic sensibilities produced in
these texts.

5.2 Postmodern Vocabulary

Since postmodernism resist definition, does not represent a fixed philosophical position and
embraces multiplicity, it’s quite plausible to give a set of terms its dynamic, fragmented and
paradoxical nature. Ihab Hassan remarks that postmodernism may be summarized by a list of
words prefixing ‘de-’ and ‘di-’: ‘deconstruction, decentring, dissemination, demystification,
delegitimation, disappearance’ (Ihab Hassan, Beyond Postmodernism, 1989, 309).

Undecidability involves a condition where it gets difficult to choose between the two
conflicting interpretation. For instance, whether postmodernism is a critique or extension of
modernism, remains undecided.

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Dissemination involves a sense of scattering, a scattering of identity, centre, and presence.
Postmodernism entails dissemination without any assurance of a centre or destination.

Grand Narratives The term was introduced by Jean Francois Lyotard, a French
philosopher. Grand narratives such as Christianity, Marxism, and the Enlightenment attempt
to provide a framework for everything. Such narratives emphasized a progress of societies
towards justice and equality. Grand narratives are said to have lost their legitimacy and
efficacy in the contemporary world.

Little Narratives Contemporary world view is characterised by little narratives, according to

Lyotard. Little narratives present local explanations of individual events. They are
fragmentary and non-totalizing.

Simulation Generally a distinction and hierarchy is made between the real and its copy.
Postmodernism challenges such hierarchies. ‘Technology can give more reality than nature’,
in Umberto Eco’s words. Simulations signify images on computers, TV, magazine etc. these
images have seductive and insidious effects on people. Simulations produced by technologies
fabricate/distort reality.

Deathlessness means without depth, shallow. According to Fredric Jameson, postmodern

culture is one of depthlessness, a cultural logic of late capitalism, also called an information
age, in which the real is mediated by simulations. Depthlessness involves the idea that we do
not see the reality of the world around us but only what we have been indoctrinated into
seeing.

Pastiche is distinguished from parody. Both rely on imitation of earlier texts or objects. In
parody, there is an impulse to ridicule by exaggerating the original. Pastiche is a blank
parody, in which there is no sense of distance from any norm. Pastiche is eclectic in
character. The quote on the top by Lyotard exemplifies pastiche.

5.3 An Overview of the Text

When attempting to identify Postmodernism, Ihab Hassan, in From Postmodernism to
Postmodernity describes how it “eludes definition” and is, like Romanticism and Modernism,
fluid as it will “shift and slide continually with time, particularly in an age of ideological
conflict and media hype”. Yet this shifting of the word has not prevented it from “haunting”
the discussions of various areas of culture and society such as architecture, the arts, social and
political features, media and the entertainment industry. Hassan goes on to explain that the
term is “an essentially contested category,” meaning that no one theorist can unambiguously
explain the movement. In “Towards a Concept of Postmodernism”, Hassan endeavours to
categorize the term inclusive of its fluidity and in this light, he continues to attempt at
understanding Postmodernism before he can define it.

Ihab Hassan begins his essay “Towards a Concept of Postmodernism” by stating that
the complexities of language, culture and consciousness are conveyed through the strains of
silence in literature. It means that we can perceive what is meant to be understood only by
consciously analysing what the author could not express in his writings. Hassan says that it is
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difficult to define the word postmodern; we can equate it with various things, like eerie and
strange music, but still, what we will achieve in the end can only be an experience or
intuition. Hassan tries to define the concept of postmodernism by putting forth various
questions, for example, how to perceive a phenomenon which is different from modernism.
Supposing that we got the answer to first question, what would one make out of the new and
provisional concept generated out of our efforts, that is, postmodernism? Whether one can
create a probative scheme, which is both chronological and typological, out of this
phenomenon which will account for its artistic, epistemic and social character? Hassan also
tries to ascertain the relation between this new phenomenon postmodernism and the earlier
models of high modernism of the twenties. He tries to access the difficulties that are inherent
in this process of creation of a definition of a new term.

Hassan is unsure about the existence of postmodernism in contemporary times but

contends, that the movement of history is in manner that is both continuous and
discontinuous, and it is due to this reason that the prevalence of postmodernism never
suggests that the past influences the present, as he writes, “the prevalence of postmodernism
today, if indeed it prevails, does not suggest that ideas of institutions of the past cease to
shape the present. Rather, traditions develop, and even types suffer a change”. This statement
can be understood in with the help of the example of any tradition, which started as a
(sometimes, partial) fulfilment of a necessity, but overtime developed into a tradition.
Hassan names Darwin, Marx, Baudelaire, Nietzsche and many other thinkers of the previous
centuries whose thoughts and cultural assumptions still continue to affect the Western mind.
But the thing to note here is that these cultural assumptions tend to revise themselves by
being reconceived multiple times, otherwise there would be the risk of history repeating
itself, and it is in this light that one can consider postmodernism too to be a significant
revision of the Twentieth century Western societies.

A number of thinkers and scholars from the fields ranging from psychoanalysis,
history, philosophy, literary theory, and even dance, music and architecture are listed as they
evoke a number of related cultural tendencies, values and attitudes, which can be termed as
postmodernism. Hassan tries to locate the origin of the word, which was used by Federico de
Onis in 1934, Dudley Fitts in 1942, and even by Arnold Toynbee in 1947. Hassan says that
the sense of time as enjoyed by the poets and prophets is somewhat lacking in the manner of
literary scholars. Scholars like Irving Howe and Harry Levin considered postmodernism as a
“falling off from the great modernist movement”. As for Hassan, he says he wanted to
“explore the impulse of self-unmaking which is part of the literary tradition of silence”.
Hassan puts pop and mass culture, Superman and immanence in one category, and silence
and deconstruction, Godot or indeterminacy in the other, and writes that all these can be the
aspects of the postmodern universe.

The history of the nomenclature of literary terms helps validating the “irrational genius
of language”. By this Hassan tries to say that it is the illogical nature of language that results
in the creation of new terms—“there is a will to power in nomenclature, as well as in people
or texts”. With the creation of every new term, a space is created in the language, Hassan
even goes as far to say that “a critical concept or system is a poor poem of the intellectual

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imagination”, that is, when an intellectual person fails to create a poem, he creates a new
critical concept. The battle of books or the battle of the intellectuals is actually a battle
against death. Hassan cites Marx Planck who believed that no one can ever manage to
convince his intellectual opposite, even if one is contending in theoretical metaphysics, one
simply tries to outlive each other, which means that every theoretician tries that his theory
must be accepted for as long time as possible. William James describe this process in a bit
pleasanter way: he writes that new theories or terms are rejected by the scholars initially by
being termed “nonsense”, then they are partially accepted by saying that the concept was
“obvious”, then they are “appropriated” by the scholars as “their own discoveries”. This
process is visible in the history of the creation of every newly formulated concept.

Hassan avoids agreeing totally with the post-moderns as against the moderns (he terms
them “ancient moderns”), because we are living in an age where values take no time to
become void: “the sense of supervention may express some cultural urgency that partakes
less of hope than fear”. The importance of culture is clear from the way scholars like Lionel
Trilling named his most thoughtful work Beyond Culture, George Steiner tried to define
‘postculture’ in his In Bluebeard’s Castle, and even Kenneth Boulding argues that “‘post
civilization’ is an important part of The Meaning of the 20th Century. Daniel Bell says that the
word ‘post’ has become the norm of the day, as the potential of the word ‘beyond’ which was
employed earlier has totally been exhausted. The author is trying to prove that there is always
a will and counter-will to every intellectual power (which can be termed as an imperial desire
of the mind), but both the entities—will and desire—are caught in a historical moment of
supervention. Thus, whether postmodernism would be denied or accepted depends upon the
psychopolitics of academic life, which includes the “various dispositions of people and power
in our universities, of critical factions and personal frictions, of boundaries that arbitrarily
include or exclude no less than on the imperatives of the culture at large”, and this
(reflection) is what we are trained to do in our critical fields.

This reflection makes it important to address numerous conceptual problems that make
postmodernism and at the same time conceal it. Hassan lists ten such problems—the problem
of nomenclature comes first: what should we name the age we are living in, as the term
‘postmodernism’ contains what it wanted to evade—the word ‘modern’. Secondly, there is no
consensus among the scholars about the meaning of postmodernism, which makes the
concept semantically unstable. Hassan next puts forward the difficulty concerning the
historical instability of numerous literary concepts and their openness to change.

History is a palimpsest, that is, a platform where the past, present and future
intermingle in such a way that we cannot ascertain one from each other. Culture and history
also act the same way—one can be a Victorian, Modern, Postmodern all at the same time.
Next, he says that every period must be perceived in terms of both continuity and
discontinuity and both the perspectives should be complementary and partial, because
postmodernism would then enable a double view by invoking two divinities simultaneously.
Then, a ‘period’ will not necessarily need to be called a ‘period’ as it is “both a diachronic
and synchronic construct”. We need not seriously claim for an inaugural date for the
beginning of postmodernism, but continually discover antecedents and successors of

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postmodernism. But at the same time, we cannot simply rest on the assumption that
postmodernism is anti-formal, anarchic, or decreative, as it again leads to the problem of
periodisation, “which is also that of literary history conceived as a particular apprehension of
change.” But the theory of change, as Hassan contends, “is best suited to ideologues
intolerant of the ambiguities of time”. He asks whether the concept of postmodernism should
be left, for the present time, unconceptualised.

Hassan questions whether postmodernism is only an artistic tendency or also a social

phenomenon, and even goes far to call it a mutation in Western humanism. He wonders
whether postmodernism is actually as descriptive as well as evaluative kind of category of
literary thought, or as Charles Altieri contests, it belongs to that category of “essentially
contested concepts in philosophy that never wholly exhaust their constitutive confusions?”

He builds a “family” of words connected to postmodernism, such as “Fragments,

hybridity, relativism, play, parody…an ethos bordering on kitsch and camp”. This list begins
to build a context around postmodernism, a way of describing, yet not defining the word.
What this implies is that fragments of previous genres are combined with irony and pastiche
to create the postmodern. What it also implies is that, after the postmodern era, nothing can
be taken from the previous as nothing original was designed.

By the term “indeterminacy”, Hassan means “a complex referent that these diverse
concepts help to delineate: ambiguity, discontinuity, heterodoxy, pluralism, randomness,
revolt, perversion, deformation”. Hassan has employed the term “indetermanence” to
designate two central and constitutive tendencies in postmodernism, the first is that it is
indeterminate, and second, that it is immanent. The tendencies are neither dialectical, now
antithetical, and they do not lead to any synthesis. They are “polylectic”, and this is a
tendency that evades postmodernism.

Simulacra has become a significant aspect of postmodern society but if we continue to

copy and re-use pieces from the past, then what can be copied from the postmodern era?
Hassan creates a list of Modernism versus Postmodernism, which is meant to both explain
and portray the complicated relationship between both movements. Under modernism, we
have words like Form, Distance, Interpretation and Grande Histoire, while under
postmodernism we have anti-form, participation, against interpretation and petite
histoire. The distinctions are clear, but how do they relate to both Modernism and
Postmodernism?

In regards to theatre in the Modern era, distance was imperative to a drama’s success.
Bertolt Brecht distanced the audience from the narrative in order to enable the viewer’s to
maintain a critical perspective on the action on stage. By creating this distance, audiences
could critically evaluate the meaning of the narrative, and therefore, their own lives. In
postmodern theatre, the participation of the audience is crucial and welcomed to allow
participants to re-evaluate the connection between art and reality. Audience members and
actors interact, creating the theatre experience together.

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 By creating the Modernist versus Postmodernist list, Hassan began to further
understand the postmodern technique. If one analyses art in its modernist form against its
postmodernist form, the distinction becomes clearer yet. Modernist art consisted of simplicity
of structure, uniformity, formalism, and order. It was usually bright, filled with shapes and
lack of definition.

Postmodernist art, however, is complex and eclectic. Taking different genres of artistic
technique and juxtaposing it; it can also be described as kitsch or ironic. Postmodern art uses
pastiche and parody to comment on the original piece of art that it represents. Literature has
also come under the scrutiny of postmodern thought as it combined elements of previous
genres and styles of literature to create a new narrative voice.

Hassan, however, does acknowledge the many problems that surround and conceal the
term. Other than the problem of context, the word itself has inherent problems as modern is
contained in the word, and it, therefore “contains its enemy within”. It cannot break away
from the clutches of modernism, and may only be regarded compared to modernism. Another
problem it encounters is the “semantic instability” as there is no clear agreement about its
meaning among theorists. These, nevertheless, are not the only problems facing
postmodernity as Jean Baudrillard suggests in his essay “Simulacra and Simulation”.

Hassan writes that there is a tendency of the human mind to generalise itself into
symbols and act upon itself through its own abstractions, therefore become increasingly
abstract by its own environment. But this tendency is more visible in America or France than
in England, where postmodernism is used in opposition to the term poststructuralist; in most
of the developed societies, postmodernism means an open, playful and artistic theory, which
has indeterminate forms, an invokes complex and articulate silences. But at the same time, it
denotes everything that already exists. There are some binaries that complement each other,
for example, terrorism and totalitarianism, part and whole, male and female principle; one
must wonder whether there is some decisive historical mutation which is still active. In this
essay, Ihab Hassan attempts to define the term by building a group of words that can be used
to contextualize the label. He also compares it to Modernism as it noticeably connects to
Postmodernism. What this list signifies is that the latter directly disagrees with the former,
where Modernism is concerned with ‘grand Histoire’ and meta-narratives, Postmodernism
relates to the ‘petite Histoire’ or anti-narratives. What we see advertised by the media is an
incessant representation of the real. When we see models advertising beauty products, we see
their beauty and know that we want the advertised product, however, on closer examination
of the model, we find that she has undergone hours of hair and make-up in order to look the
way she does. When we examine even closer, we realize the image itself was distorted by
editing software and the woman who modelled undoubtedly looks much different in reality.
These advertisements are simulacrums that represent only the advances in technology, not the
value of the beauty products. They create the illusion of reality while hiding the reality of the
images they advertise. There are various issues surrounding Postmodernism and because of
this it is a constantly shifting term, but what exactly can we understand from the term? It
describes an era of chaotic advertising and production, an array of techniques in architecture,

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art, and literature and an incapability to understand our current society accurately. It is
impossible to know where we will go from here, what will the next era focus on?

5.4 Summary of the Lesson

The above deliberation should make it clear that the term Postmodernism eludes definition. It
is a shifting term and marks a suspicion and suspension of the universality of reason.
Beginning in the mid-1980, postmodernism encompassing post structuralism and
deconstruction emerged as a critique of the aesthetics, ethics and epistemology of the
preceding practices in art, architecture, music, film, literature etc. Postmodernism celebrates
the very subverting of traditions. It questions everything considered to be totally true, real and
ultimate, argues that reality is contingent and cultural construct. It is very much incredulous
about modernist distinctions and certainties and challenges the modernist grand narratives of
human progress and liberation, rooted in Enlightenment. The proponents of Postmodernism,
depicts it facilitating a release from the traditional hierarchies operating through caste, class,
gender, religion and race etc., while its detractors treat it as serving the elite and dominant
social group at the expense of the others. Despite above contestations with regard to its
amorphous character, it is maintained by Hassan that postmodernism carries forward the
cultural traditions started by the thinkers including Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudelaire.
Such terms as ambiguity, heterodoxy, randomness, pluralism, and deformation are in
circulation to spot postmodernism. Prof Hassan’s text, Towards a Concept of Postmodernism,
reveals the strains of complexities of language, culture, consciousness exhibited in/through
literature.

5.5 References
Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn: The Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture, 1987.

5.6 Further Readings

1. Tim Woods, Beginning Postmodernism, Viva Books, 2018.
2. Christopher Butler, Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford Univ. Press,
2002.

5.7 Model Questions

1. What are the key highlights of the text Towards a Concept of Postmodernism?

2. What are some general characteristics of postmodernism?

3. Discuss postmodernism in relation to literature and culture.

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 Lesson 6

The Library of Babel

by Jorge Luis Borges
6.0 Structure

6.1 Objectives

6.2 Introduction

6.3 Jorge Luis Borges: An Introduction

6.4 An Overview of The Library of Babel

6.5 Some Postmodern Connections

6.6 Summary

6.7 Further Readings

6.8 Model Questions

6.1 Objectives

After reading this lesson, you will be able to:

● Appreciate the significance and intervention of Borges as a fiction writer

● Discuss the story The Library of Babel and its key concerns
● Relate/link concepts pertaining to postmodernism that you were introduced to in the
earlier lessons while considering the story
● Make a postmodern appraisal/reading of the story prescribed

6.2 Introduction

You have already become familiar with postmodernism. The two lessons dealing with the

conceptual explorations on postmodernism have been explained to you in relation to the

essays by Linda Hutcheon and Ihab Hassan, the key literary critics on postmodernism. As

you know, the term postmodernism registers a shift in perception. According to it there is no

objective reality independent of perception and no historical truth independent of narratives

and the historian’s positioning/location. It is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of

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reality and to explain the same objectively. Meaning of text cannot be independent of the

readers. A reader is not a passive consumer of a text as was presumed earlier. S/he is a co-

creator of meaning. Postmodernism essentially states that there is no such thing as an

objective, single truth independent of humans' capacity to interpret and explain. This will

become clearer to you when you have read and understood the story The Library of Babel.

The short story conceives of a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible

books of a certain format and character set. The story is an allegorical meditation on the

endeavour to live one’s best possible life in a universe that can seem hopelessly confusing

and disordered.

6.3 Jorge Luis Borges: An Introduction

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was an Argentine writer, poet, philosopher, translator, editor,

critic and librarian. In his writings he dealt with fictional places and toyed with the idea of

infinity and mythical narratives that go into influencing the readers a lot. His writings,

complex and concise and mostly located in Europe, evoke the world of fantasy. His fictional

works are practically unreadable. This should be clear even from the prescribed story. He

treats fiction as part of the reality. His fictional writings influence the world, rather than

merely describing it. Borges is of the view that literary production is never an original

activity. A writer reorganises previously existing corpus. And an author as the original

guarantor of meaning is no longer tenable. Readers functions as co-authors and co-creators of

the meanings of a text. D F Wallace, a literary critic observes:

Whether for seminal artistic reasons or neurotic personal ones or both, Borges
collapses reader and writer into a new kind of aesthetic agent, one who makes
stories out of stories, one for whom reading is essentially — consciously — a
creative act. This is not, however, because Borges is a metafictionist or a cleverly
disguised critic. It is because he knows that there’s finally no difference — that
murderer and victim, detective and fugitive, performer and audience are the same.

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 Obviously, this has postmodern, but Borges’s is really a mystical insight, and a
profound one.

His most famous works include Universal History of Infamy (1935), Ficciones (1944), The

Aleph (1949), and The Book of Sand (1975).

6.4 Overview of The Library of Babel

The Library of Babel is a short story narrated by an unnamed narrator with footnotes by a

fictional editor. The title “The Library of Babel” alludes to a story from the Old Testament

about the tower of Babel. The story tells of a time when all people on Earth spoke the same

language; they decided to build a tower together to reach heaven, and when they began to get

close to accomplishing this feat, God struck them down. Not only did God prevent the

humans from completing their tower, but God also scattered them across the world and

caused them to speak different languages so they would not be able to communicate and

work together the way they had while building the tower. This title foreshadows the

importance of both religion and language as major themes in Borges's story. Furthermore, the

word Library standing in place of the word tower puts the two structures in parallel, calling

attention to how the tower of Babel approached but did not reach infinity, while the narrator

of "The Library of Babel" believes the Library to be truly infinite.

The narrator begins by introducing the Library, which is “indefinite, perhaps infinite”

and makes up the whole universe in the story. The narrator describes the physical appearance

of the Library: identical hexagonal galleries bordered by bookshelves. The hexagons are

connected horizontally by small corridors and vertically by ventilation shafts. The narrator

goes on to tell the reader about various philosophical conclusions he and other librarians have

come to about the library. The two central axioms are that the Library has always existed and

that, because there are only twenty-five symbols used in all the books in the library in

different combinations, every book that can exist does exist. The denizens of the library have

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gone through many different stages: ecstatic hope that the books will solve every problem;

frantic searches for specific books; destruction of seemingly worthless or impenetrable

books; and mass killing of themselves or others in despair when their hopes are thwarted.

Borges begins the story by equating the Library of Babel, simply referred to throughout

the story as the Library, to the universe. The Library is made of “an indefinite, perhaps

infinite number” of rooms shaped like hexagons. The rooms in the Library are identically

designed and very sparsely decorated. There is a ventilation shaft in the middle of each room

that allows you to see from that room into the rooms directly above and below. In each room

there are five bookshelves on each of four of the hexagonal room’s six walls, meaning there

are twenty bookshelves in all. One wall of the room has an opening that leads to another,

identical room. On either side of the opening there are compartments; on one side there is a

compartment for sleeping upright, on the other side there is a bathroom. There is also a spiral

staircase so one can get to the floors above and below. The final decorations in each hexagon

are a mirror and two light bulbs that always remain on.

In the second paragraph, the narrator begins to talk about himself and the other people

who populate the Library. He says that he, like everyone in the Library, travelled when he

was young. He travelled in pursuit of a special book, “the catalog of catalogs”. He writes that

he is now an old man, preparing to die, and is still not far from the hexagon where he was

born. When people die in the Library, someone throws them over the railing of one of the

rooms’ ventilation shafts, and the corpse falls infinitely, decaying gradually. The narrator

says that people have argued about why the rooms are hexagonal, saying that “hexagonal

rooms are the necessary shape of absolute space or at least of our perception of space”. They

say that it is impossible for the rooms to have been triangular or pentagonal, though some

people have claimed to have seen or imagined a circular room containing only a huge,

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circular book, which they believe is God. The narrator says that he believes the Library “is a

sphere whose exact centre is any hexagon and whose circumference is unattainable”.

The narrator returns to the specifics of the identical rooms and the objects found in

them. On each of the twenty bookshelves in each room there are thirty-two books, each of

which contains four hundred and ten pages. Each page has forty lines and each line contains

“approximately eighty black letters”. The books each have letters on the front cover, but these

letters have nothing to do with what is contained in the book.

The narrator now lays out two “axioms”. The first is that the Library has existed

forever. This means that the world will also exist for a future eternity. The eternalness and

perfection of the Library “can only be the handiwork of a god”. The second axiom is that

there are twenty-five orthographic symbols used: twenty-two letters, space, comma, and

period. The discovery that there are only twenty-five symbols used to make up all of the

books in the Library allowed mankind to understand the random nature of what is contained

in the Library’s books. The narrator notes that his own father once found a book that was

made up of the letters M, C, and V repeated for the entirety of the book. Another book, which

the narrator says is “much consulted”, is a seemingly-random assortment of letters until the

phrase “O Time thy pyramids” on the second to last page.

The narrator says that the books in the Library are mostly made up of a “senseless

cacophony, verbal nonsense, and incoherency”, and it has long been debated whether it is

worthwhile to try to draw meaning from them. Some believe that these seemingly random

assortments of letters are actually in ancient or unknown languages. However, the narrator

says that the book made entirely of repeating M’s, C’s, and V’s could not possibly have

meaning in any language.

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 The narrator says that around five hundred years before, a chief of one hexagon found a

book that had random letters throughout the book but two pages that were exactly the same. It

is mentioned here in an editor’s note that there used to be one man for every three hexagons

in the Library, but suicide and lung disease have greatly reduced the numbers. One travelling

decipherer told the chief that the page was in Portuguese, while others said the language was

Yiddish, and by the end of the century that consensus was that it was written in “a Samoyed-

Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with inflections from classical Arabic”. It was this book that

allowed librarians to discover the second axiom mentioned above: that all books are made of

random combinations of twenty-five symbols.

This same librarian philosopher also posited that there are no two identical books in the

Library, meaning the Library must be “perfect, complete, and whole”, which is to say that it

must contain every combination of the twenty-five symbols possible. This, in turn, leads

people to postulate that the Library must contain every truth and every falsehood in every

language; in the Library there must be true histories of the future and the ancient past, but

also false and jumbled accounts of everything. This realization caused “unbounded joy” as

librarians all over the Library celebrated the eloquence of the world and went in search of a

series of books called The Vindications, which were “prophecies that would vindicate for all

time the actions of every person in the universe and that held wondrous arcana for men’s

futures”. Soon, the joy turned to greed, violence, insanity, and depression. Many books and

people were thrown down ventilation shafts. However, the narrator says that he knows The

Vindications do exist, since he has seen two of them; the problem is that the chance of one

finding their own vindication is close to zero.

Around the same time people started looking for The Vindications, the hope also

emerged that the “profound mysteries” of the world could be explained in some extraordinary

language existing in some texts in the Library. The people who search for this language are

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called inquisitors. They usually arrive at a hexagon, talk to the librarian there for a little

while, and leaf through a single, random book. The fact that such important knowledge was

certainly there, but could not be found amidst the vastness of the Library, has driven many

people to insanity and depression over the past 500 years. One group of librarians even

proposed that everyone should stop searching and start arranging symbols in random

combinations themselves until the books could be constructed. This was quickly banned by

the authorities, but the narrator says that in his childhood he saw some old librarians hiding in

bathrooms using disks and dice to mimic randomness.

Others had the idea to “eliminate all worthless books”. These ‘Purifiers’ would, like the

inquisitors, arrive at a new hexagon, flip through a book, and decide that the room did not

hold what they were looking for. However, they would then throw these books out,

presumably down the ventilation shaft. Many librarians in the narrator’s time still mourn the

loss of these books, but the narrator notes that the Library is so huge that “any reduction by

human hands must be infinitesimal”. Furthermore, the nature of the Library is such that for

any book thrown out there are many more that are nearly identical to it. The narrator says that

he believes the negative impact of the acts of the Purifiers has been exaggerated over time,

and that they were simply filled with religious zeal to find “the books of the Crimson

Hexagon—books smaller than natural books, books omnipotent, illustrated, and magical”.

Another superstition from that period was belief in ‘the Book-Man’, who was a

librarian who had read the book that was the compendium of all other books. A sect of

librarians worshiped and went in search of this Book-Man, and the narrator says that he

himself did such searching, trying to work his way to the compendium by following a trail of

linked books. He says that now he no longer believes he needs to find the Book-Man himself,

but he prays that the Book-Man exists somewhere, so that that full knowledge and

‘justification’ exists.

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 The narrator says that some ‘infidels’ believe that the Library is purely nonsense and

randomness, but he does not agree. He believes that all books, no matter how nonsensical

they may seem at first glance, can be read cryptographically, allegorically, or in a foreign

language.

The narrator points out that the very story that the reader holds in his hands exists in

many variations in the library and could be intended to mean many different things. The very

word “library” could mean “a loaf of bread or a pyramid or something else, and the six words

that define it themselves have other definitions”. The refutation of the story would also exist

in the Library, since it is infinite.

The narrator begins to sum up the story by telling the reader the sad state of the Library

today, by writing that “the certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or

renders us phantasmal . . . young people prostrate themselves before books and like savages

kiss their pages, though they cannot read a letter. Epidemics, heretical discords, pilgrimages

that inevitably degenerate into brigandage”. He writes that suicide becomes more frequent

every year and that he fears that the human race will become extinct. The Library, he writes,

will endure, remaining “enlightened . . . infinite . . . [and] pointless”.

The final paragraph focuses on the word “infinite”. The narrator specifies that he really

means the word; he believes that it is “not illogical to think that the world is infinite”.

However, he acknowledges that while the Library may be infinite, the number of books must

be large but finite. This would mean that “The Library is unlimited but periodic”. Therefore,

if a traveller could travel for eternity, they would find the same random assortment of books

repeated over and over, revealing to them, finally, “order: the Order”.

The narrator, an old man at the time he is writing, admits to searching for the

“catalogue of catalogues” when he was younger. Even as he approaches death, he hopes

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that The Book-Man, a librarian who has read the catalogue of all other books, exists. He also

says that he has come to conclusion that all of the books in the Library have meaning, even

those the reader may not understand due to the language they are written in. The narrator

concludes the story with the idea that the Library may be infinite, but the number of books is

certainly not, meaning it may be the case that “the Library is unlimited but periodic”. He is

happy about this idea of overarching order.

“The Library of Babel” ends with a footnote at the bottom of the final page of the

story. While one would expect a story to end by tying up the narrative, the story's final

footnote, which reads in part, “. . . the vast Library is pointless; strictly speaking, all that is

required is a single volume . . . that would consist of an infinite number of infinitely thin

pages”. This comes as quite a shock after Borges spends so much of the story detailing the

specifics of the Library's dimensions and history as well as the narrator's personal experience

and views. The footnote causes the reader to question whether they should read the story as

anything more than a thought experiment. Furthermore, it gives the reader a chance to

contemplate whether the extended metaphor of an expansive Library, a single book, or

something else is the most elegant way to examine the infinity of our own universe.

6.5 Some Postmodern Connections

The Library of Babel, one of the best stories in the twentieth-century literatures, evokes

numerous postmodern assumptions and concerns. The story underscores a seminal

postmodernist trait of the impossibility of attaining absolute truth and knowledge. In the story

library is treated as a metaphor for and a conceptual substitute for the universe, emphasizing

an unattainable unity. In this regard, a critic, Gracier Keiser notes aptly:

… the Library embodies the postmodernist conception of language as multiplicity

and dissemination, illustrating Derrida’s concept of “differance.” Its books
disperse and defer meaning endlessly. Ion T. Agheana states that the Library’s
symmetry results from a need “to organise knowledge”. However, this symmetry

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 is misleading for, far from revealing knowledge, the Library’s volumes exhibit
puzzling incoherences. Their enigmatic writing does not yield any meaning… The
distinct separateness of each individual volume, with its 410 pages which contain
40 lines of 80 letters, conceals an interminable web of intertextuality: the infinite
Library comprises the interpolation of every book in all books.

The Library of Babel resists any single categorization. It remains unclear whether the story is

an exploration of human limitations or a contrived intellectual game. This ambiguity

nevertheless exemplifies the postmodernist assumption that literature cannot thoroughly

articulate, interpret, and order human experience. Open-endedness of the text subverts the

supremacy of the author. His story exemplifies Roland Barthes’s notion of a text as consisting

of “not of a line of words releasing a single, theological meaning, the message of the author-

god, but of a multidimensional space in which are married and contested several writings,

none of which is original.”

The above reading of the story in relation to the concepts and theories developed by Derrida

and Barthes, it should be clear that the text (The Library of Babel) has postmodernist

characteristics. Similarly, by depicting the universe as gigantic maze of books, and by

reducing human beings to lost, insignificant ghosts, Borges voices the postmodernist belief in

the supremacy of language. However, Borges does not evoke and share the social and worldly

concerns through the story.

Self-Assessment Questions

1. Do you think the title of the story is a paradoxical one?

2. Does the story make a reference to the Book-Man?

3. Which year was the story written?

6.6 Summary

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In this lesson you had a comprehensive summary of the story The Library of Babel by George

Luis Borges, an influential twentieth century writer from Europe. As you have seen the writer

conceives the universe in the form of vast library. The story writer seems to have underscored

the idea the quest on the part of authors, intellectuals and academicians for certain master

texts to decipher the nature of ultimate truth/ reality and one’s own life in its past, present and

future manifestations inevitably ends in failure and despair. The story’s librarian-narrator

believes in the possible triumph of reason and is haunted too at the same time in the

subversion of all rational pursuits. Whether meaning lies in the physical world or it resides in

our mind, is a difficult question. Borges never intends to draw any clear cut border/distinction

between reality and fiction, the ethos underscored by postmodernism.

6.7 Further Readings

1. Aizenberg, Edna. Borges and His Successors: The Borgesian Impact on Literature and the

Arts, University of Missouri, 1990.

2..Borges, Jorge Luis. The Total Library: Non-Fiction 1922–1986. Allen Lane The Penguin

Press, London, 2000. Pages 214–216. Translated by Eliot Weinberger.

6.8 Model Questions

1. Discuss the significance of Borges as a fiction writer.

2. Discuss the story The Library of Babel as a postmodernist text.

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 Lesson No. 7

“Introduction” to The Empire Writes Back

Structure

7.0 Objectives

7.1 Introduction

7.2 Introduction to Postcolonial Theory

7.2.1 Colonialism
7.2.2 Imperialism
7.2.3 Post-Colonial or Postcolonial: What is the difference?
7.2.4 What is Postcolonialism and Postcolonial Theory?

7.3 Summary and Critical Analysis of the “Introduction”

7.3.1 Post-Colonial Literatures
7.3.2 Post-colonial Literatures and English Studies
7.3.3 Development of Post-Colonial Literatures
7.3.4 Hegemony
7.3.5 Language
7.3.6 Place and Displacement
7.3.7 Post-Coloniality and Theory

7.4 Summary

7.5 Glossary

7.6 References

7.7 Further Readings

7.8 Model Questions

7.0 Objectives

The objective of the lesson is to:

● give you some idea of the wide field known as Postcolonial Theory

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 ● introduce to you the terms Colonialism, Imperialism, Postcolonial

● make you understand the term Postcolonial Literature

● study the relationship between Postcolonial Literature and English Studies

● study the development of Postcolonial Literatures

● elaborate the term Hegemony

● elaborate the term Language

● elaborate the term Place and Displacement

7.1 Introduction
The Empire Writes Back is a text which deals with the writings from the countries having the
history of colonisation; in other words, it examines the counter-discourse put forward by the
writers from the colonised countries. And they have done it through representing or re-
writing the history, myths, gender, genre or diasporic spaces of their colonial experience.
Such writers challenge the idea of ‘centre’ and propose that there is no centre. The literature
written for this purpose is called post-colonial literature as it deals with the effects and
upshots of decolonisation. The term ‘empire writes back’ refers to assaulting the coloniser
back in their own language. Moreover, it is an attempt to advocate for their native land by the
countries with experience of colonisation. In the “Introduction” to The Empire Writes Back
the authors Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin have dealt with various terms
related to post-colonial theory and literature such as language, hegemony, place and
displacement. A reading of the prescribed text will enable you to understand post-colonial
literature and its significance for the postcolonial societies.

7.2 Introduction to Postcolonial Theory

To understand the term postcolonialism let us first discuss the term colonialism:

7.2.1 Colonialism
Colonialism is defined by the Oxford English dictionary as “an alleged policy of exploitation
of backward or weak people by a large power”. In postcolonial studies it refers to oppression,
inequality, racism, and exploitation of the colonised people. However, it does not merely
indicate the political control of Asian, African or South American continents. On the other
hand, it indicates the destruction or modification of non-European cultures and knowledge by
colonial rulers. Parmod K Nayar defines it,

Colonialism cannot be seen merely as a political or economic condition: it was a

powerful cultural and epistemological conquest of the native populations. The
Europeans acquired knowledge over native cultures through translations,

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 commentaries, and academic study before either destroying it or modifying native
systems of thinking. (Postcolonial Literature 3)

For instance, the colonial administrators first studied Indian languages like Sanskrit and
Persian and then translated them into English. In the next stage, they announced that these
texts and cultures are primitive and irrelevant and therefore cannot help India progress. As a
result, they substituted English as a language and medium of instruction and knowledge.
Their argument was that only English and European culture can ensure equality, liberty,
development, and modernisation.

In this way, you can see that colonisation was not only a political control but was also a way
to control, destroy and modify the culture and literature of the colonised countries.

7.2.2 Imperialism
The term imperialism is often used as a synonym for colonialism. So it becomes important to
understand it and also to distinguish it from colonialism. Imperialism refers to practice of
governance through ‘remote’ control which is the basic difference between the two terms as
colonialism refers to the direct control of people or actual settlement in non-European spaces.
To put it more simply, colonialism refers to random settlement and governance and
imperialism means deliberate, ideology driven control. Therefore, imperialism may be
referred to as a ‘concept’ and colonialism as the ‘practice’ of this concept. We have seen the
term post-colonial but not post-imperialism which means that economically the nominally
free nations-states are still controlled by the European power (USA also known as World
Power asserts control over many Asian countries).

7.2.3 Post-Colonial or Postcolonial: What is the difference?

The term postcolonial refers to the different forms of representation, reading practices and
values. On the other hand the hyphenated term post-colonial denotes only a particular
historical period, such as after-independence, after-colonialism, or after the end of the
Empire. A number of post-colonial critics like John McLeod and Leela Gandhi subscribe to
this view. Leela Gandhi argues that postcolonial condition is inaugurated with the onset
rather than the end of colonial occupations. She prefers the term “postcolonialism” as it is
more sensitive to the long history of the colonial experience and its consequences as
postcolonialism is not contained by the categories of historical periods although it remains
firmly bound up with the historical experiences.

7.2.4 What is Postcolonialism and Postcolonial Theory?

Postcolonialism is the mode of reading, political analysis, and cultural resistance or
intervention that deals with the history of colonialism and also with the present neo-colonial
structures. In Parmod K Nayar’s words, “it is mix of rigorous epistemological and theoretical
analysis of texts and a political praxis of resistance to neocolonial conditions” (17). He also
calls it a ‘critique’ as postcolonialism invokes ideas such as social justice, emancipation and
democracy in order to oppose oppressive structures of racism, discrimination and
exploitation. It asserts formerly colonised subject’s agency by virtue of which he/she is able
to affect his/her present condition, in case of continuing oppression.

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In this way, postcolonialism and postcolonial theory serve as methods of reading and
discussion in context of postcolonial experience. Therefore, postcolonialism can be
understood as a strategy to resist not colonialism but colonizing – the practice to oppress or
exploit. In a way, it is a resistance towards a system of domination by any power. Moreover,
postcolonialism pays attention to differences among the native people which is a sharp
contrast to ‘homogenisation of cultures’ or people by the colonisers. Besides, it tries to
explore and understand how oppression, resistance and adaptation occurred during colonial
rule. Leela Gandhi argues that postcolonialism “can be seen as a theoretical resistance to the
mystifying amnesia of the colonial aftermath. It is disciplinary project devoted to the
academic task of revisiting, remembering, and, crucially, interrogating the colonial past”
(Postcolonial Theory 4).

Most importantly, while analysing injustice and oppression in colonial period,

postcolonialism also interrogates the postcolonial or post-independence oppression or
injustice too. It studies how in the guise of national stability certain decolonised nations
replicated and extended the oppressive structures like class, gender and caste. The
postcolonial critics argue that it is the same technique as that of colonialism as it perpetuated
oppression of the marginalised like women, lower classes and castes. Therefore, postcolonial
theory explores “how colonial ideology, strategies of representation and racial prejudices are
coded into literary texts and how these informed concrete political, military and social
operations in colonialism” (Nayar 18).

7.3 Summary and Critical Analysis of the “Introduction”

After reading the interpretation of terms related to postcolonial theory, it will be easy for you
to understand the prescribed text i.e. “Introduction” to the book titled The Empire Writes
Back. The text elaborates and explains the term post-colonial literature. It seeks to elaborate
the relation between post-colonial literature and English studies. Moreover, it traces the
development of post-colonial literatures through several stages. It also explains and
elaborates terms basic to understand post-colonial literature such as hegemony, language and
space and displacement.

7.3.1 Post-Colonial Literatures

Let us first discuss the term ‘Post-Colonial Literatures’ which is the first idea proposed by the
authors. It refers to the writings by people who were formerly colonised by Britain. However,
this literature serves the interests of those countries as well that were colonised by other
European countries, if they want to understand how their lives are shaped by the experience
of colonialism. The writers argue that the term post-colonial is usually employed when
referring to particular time in history i.e. before independence or after independence. It is also
used to suggest comparative studies between various stages in history and to construct
national literary history. Therefore, the term colonial is used to refer to the period before
independence and the term such as modern or recent are used to refer to the period after
independence like ‘modern Indian literature’ or recent West Indian literature.

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On the contrary, the author use the term ‘post-colonial’ to “cover all the literature affected by
the imperial process from the moment of colonisation to the present day” (“Introduction” 2).
That is to say, the literature that articulates the experience of colonisation during and after the
end of colonisation is included in this category. If a work is created after independence but it
talks about the effects of colonisation on the people of that country, it can be called post-
colonial text. To put it simply, it is a study of culture affected by imperialism; the text may be
created during colonisation or after independence. Therefore, the literature of African
countries, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Caribbean countries, Malaysia, Malta, New
Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, South Pacific Island countries, and Sri Lanka are all post-
colonial literatures. Although the literature from all these countries is different because of
their distinct regional characteristics and cultures, there is one common factor i.e. experience
of colonisation which brings them together under one category called post-colonial
literatures. Moreover, these literatures have attempted to foreground the tension between the
colonised and coloniser countries and consequently have provided a counter-narrative to the
discourse of the imperial power. The above mentioned may be considered as basic
characteristics of the post-colonial literature.

What each of these literatures has in common beyond their special and distinctive
regional characteristics is that they emerged in their present form out of the
experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with
the imperial power, and by emphasizing their di‐erences from the assumptions of the
imperial centre. It is this which makes them distinctively post-colonial. (2)

7.3.2 Post-colonial Literatures and English Studies

As most of the post-colonial literature is written in English which is known as the language of
the colonisers, it becomes important to understand the relation between Post-colonial
Literatures and English Studies.

The author suggests that English Studies, when it was introduced in the colonised countries,
was not merely a subject but a practice which had both political and cultural motivations
behind it. It was a tool for the colonisers to spread the narrative of superiority of their culture
so that they can maintain their political control over the colonised people. In this context,
Parmod K Nayar writes, “Language and empires have always gone together. Colonization,
requiring legal, social, and political control, is also an archivation project, to document,
disseminate, and formulate rules, information, and policies. Often, colonialism’s drive to
generate its own vocabulary and command and evacuate non-European languages of
signification in official transactions means that the natives were forced to speak the language
of the colonizer” (245).

In India, the study of English was introduced in the guise of ‘liberal education.’ The authors
argue that growth of empire and the study of English are intrinsically bound with each other
as the development of one leads to the growth of the other. A single ideology works behind
both i.e. spreading the agenda of colonisers in the guise of teaching values such as
civilisation, humanity, democracy and equality. The statements like ‘white man’s burden’
were propagated through this kind of education which conversely established the binaries

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such savage/civilised, native/foreigner, or primitive/modern etc. Let us take an example, in a
short-story by R.K. Narayan entitled “The M.C.C.” we find that the protagonist Swami and
his three friends struggle to write in a letter in English to a firm that makes sports goods.
Through this story, the writer highlights the privilege that the English language used to hold
in the times of colonisation. Even students who were able to take education through
missionary schools were considered more intelligent and civilised than others. For instance,
the act of choosing equipment and writing to the company serves as an important act of self-
determination for the boys. They are excited to have a chance to choose their own name and
do not feel concerned about the team’s ties to British culture. This lack of worry illustrates
the paradoxical point that colonized people like Swami and his friends can and sometimes
must adapt to the culture of the colonizer and even embrace aspects of it in order to lead
normal, enjoyable lives. The point is that in Asian countries the ability to speak and write in
English is prized above the ability to work well with any other language.

In this way, introducing English studies helped the colonisers in establishing themselves in
the foreign lands. In this process of establishing English literature and study in English,
English studies was given a position of the centre. Consequently, the culture and the literature
of the colonised states was considered and defined as secondary, marginal and peripheral. But
when the colonisers felt a threat from the colonised, they started various projects in order to
find some kind of acceptance among the colonised. In this context, Edward Said’s statement
is relevant, when he says that the act of incorporating the Other or the colonised, was a
process of “conscious affiliation proceeding under the guise of filiation.” It led to the
mimicry of the colonisers by the ruled people which was an effort not only to be accepted as
‘whites’ but also to get adopted and absorbed by the white culture and people. In a way, it
was their effort to be ‘more English than the English’ denying their own culture and roots of
origin. It was an effort of the colonisers to make the natives agree with such images as
superior westerner/ primitive native, and colonialism as a development project and so on.
Consequently, the natives sought to model themselves after their white
benefactor/protector/patron.

One can find numerous examples of mimicry in post-colonial literature. In Rudyard Kipling’s
Kim, Huree Chunder Mukherjee is an appropriate example of the native Indian posing
himself as a white man. Hari Kumar in Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet tries to pass himself off
as a white man. V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Man is also based on this idea of mimicry, one of
the significant features of post-colonial writings.

The Mimic Men is an autobiographical novel by V. S. Naipaul. The novel traces the
reflections of a political exile in London and chronicles the conflict and growth experienced
by the characters in this setting of cultural turmoil. The novel explores the themes of societal
and personal chaos and turmoil caused by colonization.

Ranjit Ralph Singh is the protagonist of the novel. He suffers from disillusionment with the
political/cultural climate in which he finds himself. He expresses jealousy and frustration
with his inability as a person of Caribbean descent to climb the socio-economic ladder as
quickly and as high as he would like. Throughout the novel, Singh employs a contrast

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between Great Britain and his fictitious home island of Isabella to communicate a sense of
isolation and of being shipwrecked. He never identifies with the native people of Isabella,
whom he blames for killing a valued racehorse, nor does he identify with the Londoners of
his day. Singh’s world is a life full of flaws, failures, and unfulfilled expectations which he
has come to accept.

The relevance of post-colonial studies lies in questioning and challenging many of the
assumptions on which the study of English was based. Many post-colonial societies realised
the complicity between language, education and culture and tried to break the link between
language and literary study. Therefore, they divided English departments in universities into
separate schools of linguistics and literature.

7.3.3 Development of Post-Colonial Literatures

The first stage of post-colonial literature included literature written by the ‘representatives’ of
the imperial power because only the literate elite could write in the language of the
colonisers. Therefore, their primary identification was with the imperial power. Such writers
were either settlers in that particular colony about which they were writing or they were
travellers or sightseers. That is why, Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin argue that texts written by
such writers cannot form the basis of indigenous culture or the culture that existed before
colonisation as it was written from the colonisers’ perspective. They write:

Despite their detailed reportage of landscape, custom, and language, they inevitably
privilege the centre, emphasizing the ‘home’ over the ‘native’, the ‘metropolitan’ over
the ‘provincial’ or ‘colonial’, and so forth. At a deeper level their claim to objectivity
simply serves to hide the imperial discourse within which they are created.
(“Introduction” 5)

In the second stage of post-colonial literature, such literature which was written by English
educated natives is included. This kind of literature was produced under ‘imperial licence’
that is to say, if colonial administrators allowed or permitted the natives. Since this literature
was produced under the lens of colonisers in the language of dominant culture, it lacked the
quality of resistance that modern post-colonial literature exhibits. Writing and producing a
literary work was not easy and accessible to everyone; it was under strict control of the
colonisers. only those works could be published and distributed that were patronised by them.

The institution of ‘Literature’ in the colony is under the direct control of the imperial
ruling class who alone license the acceptable form and permit the publication and
distribution of the resulting work. So, texts of this kind come into being within the
constraints of a discourse and the institutional practice of a patronage system which
limits and undercuts their assertion of a di‐erent perspective. (“Introduction” 5)

The end of colonial rule resulted in the development of independent literatures. The modern
colonial writers appropriated the use of language of the colonisers and produced literary
works that had distinctive regional touch. In this context, the works by Raja Rao may be

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referred. This kind of appropriation is clearly the most significant feature in the emergence of
modern post-colonial literatures.

7.3.4 Hegemony
The authors raise an important concern in this part. They argue that even after the political
independence of the post-colonial societies, why the issue of ‘coloniality’ is still so relevant?
Why is the need to write back to the empire? It is argued that despite the end of direct
political control of post-colonial societies, Britain still manages to remain relevant through
the literary canon and RS-English. The British literary texts are considered touchstone of
taste and value, and in this way, Britain dominates cultural production in much of the post-
colonial world. It maintains a cultural hegemony through canonical assumptions about
literary activity and this kind of attitude towards literature produced in English in the post-
colonial countries relegates them to the marginal status.

7.3.5 Language
Another important argument made in this text is that language is the tool through which
imperial power maintained its control over any colonised society. Through education system,
as discussed earlier, the colonial rulers established a particular language as ‘standard’ and
marginalised all other variants. It is through language only that hierarchical structure of
power is perpetuated. About the complicity of language and culture and the havoc it has
played with the Indian culture, Mahatama Gandhi in Hind Swaraj writes, “to give millions a
knowledge of English is to enslave them. The foundation that Macaulay laid of education has
enslaved us…It is we, the English-knowing men, that have enslaved India. The curse of the
nation will rest not upon the English but upon us” (104).

However, an ‘effective post-colonial voice’ rejects such power of dominant English

language. As most of the post-colonial literature is written in English, it becomes important to
understand and ponder at the relationship between language and post-colonial literature. For
this reason, postcolonial writers across the world have had an uneasy relationship with the
language of the colonial master. Even writers like Ngugi Wa Thiong wrote in English before
switching to his native language Gikuyu. Chinua Achebe puts forward a defence for his use
of English language (though he writes in his native language too):

My reason for choosing English [in Things Fall Apart] were pragmatic: to
communicate, to tell a story. You do not tell a story to your ethnic group alone. There
is a larger Africa beyond this world. (Public Lecture)

However, the English used by post-colonial writers in not the English which is used by the
colonisers, rather it is transformed and subverted into several distinctive varieties throughout
the world. The authors of The Empire Writes Back use the term ‘English’ for the language of
imperial culture and ‘english’ to refer to the various ways in which language is employed by
various linguistic communities in the post-colonial world. It is argued that there is no
‘standard’ English used by the postcolonial writers. Rather, “English has been multiplied,
fragmented, hybridized, and indigenized by the authors and cultures across former colonies”
(Nayar 251). Indigenized use of English language also marks a process of postcolonial

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resistance through rejection and adaptation of standard language. For instance, through use of
names such as waterfall Venkamma’ or corner-house Murthy’ in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura or
numerous proverbs in Achebe’s fiction, and songs in Caribbean writing, local colour to
English language is provided.

Let us take an example of how local colour is provided to English language.

You must have read the poem “Goodbye Party for Miss Pushpa T.S.” This poem is an
appropriate example of use of Indian English. Though the poet Nissim Ezekiel seems to
mock at the excessive use of ‘ing’ and incorrect English sentences by the speaker, but it also
provides a picture of postcolonial Indian society where people try to imitate the style,
mannerism and language of English people. Let us read a few lines from the poem:

You are all knowing, friends,

What sweetness is in Miss Pushpa.
I don't mean only external sweetness
but internal sweetness.
Miss Pushpa is smiling and smiling
even for no reason but simply because
she is feeling.

It is argued in this part that to understand the postcolonial literature is imperative to explore
the use of English language by postcolonial writers. The authors of the text expose the
politics of English language and also deliberate upon how it is rejected and subverted by the
other local varieties of ‘english’ in the post-colonial societies.

7.3.6 Place and Displacement

The dialectics of place and displacement is an important feature of post-colonial societies.
Therefore, all post-colonial literatures in ‘english’ concerns themselves with the ideas of
place, displacement and myths of identity irrespective of their different historical and cultural
context. Let us first understand the term, displacement here: it refers to dislocation or the
change of location/place of a person due to migration, enslavement (as happened with
African slaves who were shifted to America), transportation or voluntary removal for
indentured labour. The displacement of a person from his native place leads to crisis of
identity which is a recurring theme in postcolonial literature.

In other words, an active sense of identity is eroded due to migration to other place or is
destroyed by ‘cultural denigration’ which means the conscious or unconscious oppression of
indigenous/native personality by a supposedly superior ‘racial or cultural model’. For
instance, the colonisers through forcing English language and culture on indigenous people
did destroy the native cultures. The natives who have experienced colonisation are not be
able to write about their place adequately as they have experienced social and linguistic
alienation. For example, Indian writers like Raja Rao did not experience geographical
displacement but experienced linguistic displacement of the pre-colonial language by
English. So the colonisation has widened the gap between the ‘experience of a place’ and the

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‘language’ available to describe it. Ashcroft et al provide three conditions where the gap
between language and experience exists and persists:

This gap occurs for those whose language seems inadequate to describe a new place,
for those whose language is systematically destroyed by enslavement, and for those
whose language has been rendered unprivileged by the imposition of the language of
a colonizing power. (10)

It is argued in the text that this gap will exist and a sense of alienation will persist until
colonising language (English) is replaced or appropriated as ‘english’. Yet it does not mean
that English language inherently incapable of accounting for post-colonial experience, though
it needs to develop an appropriate usage in order to do so by becoming a distinct and unique
form of English (this argument is elaborated in the previous section on “Language”).

However, an important argument made in the text is that displacement should not be
understood only in these limited categories such as master/slave, free/bonded, ruler/ruled
referring to ‘overtly oppressive’ forms of colonisation. An adequate account of this practice
must go beyond such categories. That is to say, one should also take into account alienation
experienced by a ‘free settler’ who is formally unconstrained and theoretically ‘free’ to
continue in the ‘possession’ and practice of ‘Englishness’ (“Introduction” 9).

7.3.7 Post-Coloniality and Theory

In this part of the text, the authors differentiate between post-colonial theory and other
European theories. Besides, it deals with the significance and objectives of post-colonial
theory. They argue that the idea of post-colonial literary theory emerges from the inability of
European theory to deal with complexities and varied cultural attributions of post-colonial
writings. European theories incidentally emerge from European cultural traditions and
endorse a false notion of ‘universal’. Post-colonial theory does not endorese the idea of
universal, it rather advocates the presence of multiple varieties of cultures and languages
where no language or culture is considered superior or inferior to each other. It challenges the
idea of the centre and the margin. Moreover, European theories of style and genre, and its
assumptions about universal features of language, epistemologies, and value systems are all
radically questioned by the post-colonial theory. The philosophical traditions and system of
representation that European theories endorse are the reason behind the political and cultural
monocentrism of the colonial empire.

Self-Assessment Questions

What do the writers mean by the expression “empire writes back”?

On the basis your reading of the text, discuss the key concerns of the post-colonial literature.

Explain the following:

Hegemony, Displacement, Place, Language

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7.4 Summary
After reading this lesson, you have learnt about the various features of post-colonial theory. It
introduced you to various terms related to post-colonial criticism. The authors of the
prescribed text argued that colonisation led to social and cultural marginalisation of the native
culture. It led to alienation of the colonised subject. The authors suggest that English Studies,
when it was introduced in the colonised countries, was not merely a subject but a practice
which had both political and cultural motivations behind it. It was a tool for the colonisers to
spread the narrative of superiority of their culture so that they can maintain their political
control over the colonised people. Another important argument made in this text is that
language is the tool through which imperial power maintained its control over the colonised
society. Through education system the colonial rulers established a particular language as
‘standard’ and marginalised all other variants. The point is that post-colonial theory questions
domination of the superior/white culture by providing a counter-narrative to such discourse.

7.5 Glossary
Neo-colonialism- Neo-colonialism is the continued exercise of political or economic
influence over a society in the absence of formal political control

Decolonisation- Decolonization is defined as the act of getting rid of colonization, or freeing

a country from being dependent on another country. An example of decolonization is India
becoming independent from England after World War II.

Epistemological- Epistemology is the study of knowledge. The term “epistemology” comes

from the Greek words “episteme” and “logos”. “Episteme” can be translated as “knowledge”
or “understanding” or “acquaintance”, while “logos” can be translated as “account” or
“argument” or “reason”. Just as each of these different translations captures some facet of the
meaning of these Greek terms, so too does each translation capture a different facet of
epistemology itself. In different parts of its extensive history, different facets of epistemology
have attracted attention. Plato’s epistemology was an attempt to understand what it was to
know, and how knowledge (unlike mere true opinion) is good for the knower. Locke’s
epistemology was an attempt to understand the operations of human understanding, Kant’s
epistemology was an attempt to understand the conditions of the possibility of human
understanding, and Russell’s epistemology was an attempt to understand how modern science
could be justified by appeal to sensory experience.

Homogenisation- Homogenisation is the process of making things uniform or similar. In

post-colonial theory the term refers to the discourse of colonial power where all the native
culture were marked as marginal, periphery and natives were defined as uncultured,
uncivilised. All cultures of the colonised countries were clubbed into one category of
uncivilised. Their different cultural and social practices were not taken into consideration.

Filiation- Affiliation by Said: While filiation refers to lines of descent in nature, affiliation
refers to a process of identification through culture. Said suggests that patterns of
‘filiation’(heritage or descent) which had acted as a cohering force in traditional society
became increasingly difficult to maintain in the complexity of contemporary civilisation and

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were replaced by patterns of ‘affiliation’. For him, an affiliative reading allows the critic to
see the literary work as a phenomenon in the world, located in network of non-literary, non-
canonical and non-traditional affiliations. In this sense, affiliation is seen positively, as the
basis of a new kind of criticism in which recognition of the affiliative process within texts
may free criticism from its narrow basis in the European canon.

Hegemony- Hegemony derives from a Greek term that translates simply as “dominance
over” and that was used to describe relations between city-states. Its use in political analysis
was somewhat limited until its intensive discussion by the Italian politician and philosopher
Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci’s discussion of hegemony followed from his attempts to
understand the survival of the capitalist state in the most-advanced Western countries. As a
follower of Karl Marx, Gramsci understood the predominant mode of rule as class rule and
was interested in explaining the ways in which concrete institutional forms and material
relations of production came to prominence. The supremacy of a class and thus the
reproduction of its associated mode of production could be obtained by brute domination or
coercion. Yet, Gramsci’s key observation was that in advanced capitalist societies the
perpetuation of class rule was achieved through largely consensual means—through
intellectual and moral leadership. Gramsci’s analysis of hegemony thus involves an analysis
of the ways in which such capitalist ideas are disseminated and accepted as commonsensical
and normal. A hegemonic class is one that is able to attain the consent of other social forces,
and the retention of this consent is an on-going project. To secure this consent requires a
group to understand its own interests in relation to the mode of production, as well as the
motivations, aspirations, and interests of other groups. Under capitalism, Gramsci observed
the relentless contribution of civil society institutions to the shaping of mass cognitions. Via
his concept of the national-popular, he also showed how hegemony required the articulation
and distribution of popular ideas beyond narrow class interests.

7.6 References
1. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Empire Writes Back:
Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989.
2. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-colonial Studies
Reader. London: Routledge, 1995.
3. Ashcroft, Bill, Ranjini Mendis, Julie McGonegal, Arun Mukherjee, and Henry A.
Giroux, eds. Literature for Our Times: Postcolonial Studies in the Twenty-first
Century. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012
4. Mongia, Padmini. Contemporay Postcolonial Theory. A Reader. London: Arnold,
1996.
5. Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. New York: Columbia
UP, 1998.

7.7 Further Readings

Benson, Eugene. Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English. London: Routledge,
1994.

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Childs, Peter, and Patrick Williams, eds. Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory. New York:
Prentice-Hall, 1997.

_____. Post-Colonial Theory and English Literature: a Reader. Edinburgh : Edinburgh

University Press, 1999.

Chrisman, Laura, and Benita Perry, eds. Postcolonial Theory and Criticism. Cambridge, UK:
D.S. Brewer, 2000.

Das, Bijay Kumar. Critical Essays on Post-Colonial Literature. New Delhi, India: Atlantic
Publishers, 1999.

Fludernik, Monika, ed. Hybridity and Postcolonialism: Twentieth-Century Indian Literature.

Tubingen, Ger.: Stauffenburg, 1998.

Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1995.

Barker, Francis, and Peter Hulme. Colonial Discourse, Postcolonial Theory. New York:
Manchester UP, 1994.

7.8 Model Questions

1. What do you mean by the expression “empire writes back”? Discuss the political
implications of writing back.

2. What are the salient features of post-colonial theory?

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 L.NO. 8

The Language of African Literature by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o

Structure

8.0 Objectives

8.1 Introduction

8.2 A Brief Summary of the Text

8.3 Critical Analysis of the Text

8.3.1 Colonising the Minds

8.3.2 Psychological Violence in the Classroom

8.3.3 Relationship between Language, Culture and Human perception of Reality

8.3.4 African Languages Refused to Die

8.4 Summary

8.5 References

8.6 Further Readings

8.7 Model Questions

8.0 Objectives

The objective of the lesson is to make you understand:

• highlight the idea of cultural imperialism

• the relationship between language and imperialism

• the underlying politics of African languages

• Ngugi’s critique of African Literature in English

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• Ngugi's idea of the relationship between language and culture
• Ngugi’s description of three possible bases to promote native African languages

8.1 Introduction

Dear students, in the previous lesson you have learned about colonialism and how it has
affected and destroyed the culture of the colonized countries. You have also learned about the
terms such as hegemony and language and displacement that will be useful in understanding
the present text, "The Language of African Literature" written by Ngugi wa Thiong’o. He is a
Kenyan writer who argues that African writers should write in their mother language and
banish the old colonial languages such as English, French, and Portuguese. Interestingly, he
also started writing in English, but later wrote mostly in Gikuyu, his mother tongue.

In this text, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o urges African writers to write literature in their
native/mother languages. He also purposes that African literature should be connected to the
revolutionary struggles of African people for liberation from their (neo) colonial contexts.
However, he addresses the threat that writers writing in native language may invite from
those in power, as when writers begin to speak to native people in native language about anti-
imperial agendas. The text is divided into nine sections, where Ngugi discusses the power of
writing in African languages. He also condemns the crippling nature of continuing to write in
Euro-American languages that may be called Afro-European literature, not African literature.
He takes recourse to a mixture of personal memoir and theoretical treatise while trying to
decolonize the African mind from the cultural imperialism established by European
colonization.

8.2 A Brief Summary of the Text

In this text, Ngugi emphasises on the significance of cultural practices and language to shape
a national identity. He is of the view that the neglect of the African language by African
writers leads to the destruction of African culture. Thus he bids farewell to English in
Decolonizing the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature (1986). He
considers English as a neo-colonial tool of dominance that will efface and erase authentic
African tradition. Even in his later essays, such as Moving the Centre: the Struggle for
Cultural Freedom (1993), he remains committed to the preservation and re-establishment
of Kenyan cultural and linguistic heritage.

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The text is divided into nine sections, in which Ngugi discusses the power of writing in
African languages and also the crippling effects of continuing to write in European
languages. Through sharing incidents from his personal life as well as providing theoretical
treatise for his argument, Ngugi makes way for the decolonization of African or so to say any
colonized mind.

In the first section, Ngugi discusses African Literature and in the context of imperialism and
resistance to imperialism, decolonization, and self-determination. He argues that even after
independence, imperialism continues to control the economy, politics, and culture of Africa
and that has devastating effects on the culture of Africa. Therefore, the people of Africa are
trying to take ‘real’ control of the means of communal self-definition and self-determination.
In this context, he argues that the choice of language and the use in which it is put to is
central to people’s definition of themselves. In the second section, Ngugi takes recourse to his
personal experience where he remembers and recalls his meeting with African Writers who
wrote in English at Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda. In this section, he
raises some questions about what is African Literature: is it literature written by Africans; or
the literature written about Africa; or it is writing written by an African no matter where he
lives. He also ponders on the question of what if a European writes about Europe in an
African language. In the third section, Ngugi reminiscences his early childhood days and how
acquired his native language at home and in his village and then the English language in
school and college education. He contrasts the education he acquired through his village
lessons via stories and fables about animals, African heroes and African cultural values in his
native tongue, Gikuyu. He describes his mother tongue as magical, powerful and musical. He
also recounts his experience in the missionary school where a pyramid hierarchy was created
and perpetuated based on a students' efficiency in the English language. He establishes that
this kind of experience created a sense of inferiority among the Africans about their language
and culture.

In section four, Ngugi delves into a theoretical discussion about the “relationship of language
to human experience, human culture, and the human perception of reality.” According to
Ngugi, language serves two purposes: it is a means of communication and a carrier of one’s
culture. In the fifth section, Ngugi also discusses that earlier an African child used to speak
his native language at home and also at the school. But now that harmony between spoken

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and written language is broke as the child has to speak and write in English in the school.
Now the language of his personal experience and the language of acquiring knowledge
through education are different. And it has dominated the mental universe of the people and
how they perceive themselves. So the imperialists are seeking to dominate the language of
real life, “to control people’s wealth.”

In the next sections, Ngugi goes on to explain that a section of African people still
communicates through the indigenous African language. Moreover, he challenges the idea
that propagated by some African writers only, that English is a language that provides unity
to the entire Africa and world. He criticizes this idea vehemently that African’s cannot do
without European languages. He also shares about his journey from writing in the English
language to that of his mother-tongue Gikuyu after seventeen years of writing in the Afro-
European tradition.

8.3 Critical analysis of the Text

8.3.1 Colonising the Minds

“The Language of African Literature” makes a compelling argument against the elimination
of African languages from the African literary landscape. Ngugi addresses the issue of the
need to talk about the language of African literature. He argues that due to imperialism and
its agenda to spread their culture and values through teaching of the English language, the
African economy, culture and also politics are determined by the European forces even after
independence from the colonial rule. Discussing the process of colonization of the minds of
the colonized people, Fanon observes:

Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the
native’s brain of all forms and content. By making use of a kind of perverted logic, it
turns to the past of the oppressed people and distorts, disfigures and destroys it (169)

For Fanon, the result of colonialism means not just the political and economic change but the
psychological change too. Fanon argues:

The first step for the colonized people in finding a voice and identity is to reclaim
their past which had been devalued by the European colonizing power. If the first step
towards a postcolonial perspective is to reclaim one's past, then the second is to begin

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 to erode the colonialist ideology by which past had been devalued (Beginning Theory:
An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory 193)

Thereafter, Ngugi takes recourse to his memoir to bring forth the idea of colonization of the
African mind. Through his experience of attending a conference of “African Writers of
English Expression”, Ngugi raises debate over the issue of the language of African literature.
The questions such as: Were it literature about Africa or African experience? Was it literature
written by Africans? What if non-African writes about Africa? What if an African writes
about a European country? Out of all these categories what kind of literature can be called
African literature, he questions. However, the major writers of African writing in English,
like Chinua Achebe, have argued in defence of the use of the English language. In this way, a
foreign language is considered with “a capacity to unite African peoples against divisive
tendencies inherent in the multiplicity of African languages within the same geographical
state” by such writers.

Ngugi also mentions a book Contes d’Amadou Koumba by Birago Diop where Diop is
appreciated and complimented by Sedar Senghor for using French to save the spirit and style
of old African fables and tales. But that is not all while rendering them he 'renews' them.
Ngugi ironically comments in this context that foreign languages like French, English, and
Portuguese have come to rescue African language and that ‘we’ the African people have
accepted this gift with gratitude. Additionally, Ngugi criticizes Achebe's stand for the African
language by citing his speech in this regard. Achebe says that it is right that one should not
abandon one's mother language and prefer a foreign language but he has no choice. So he
'intends' to use it. Ngugi questions “how best to make the borrowed tongues carry the weight
of our African experience by making them (foreign languages) prey on African proverbs and
other peculiarities of African speech and folklore”. He argues that most African writers are
obsessed with learning the English language and expressing their experiences in it. But why
don't they enrich their language and create literary wonders in it, to his surprise and
resentment?

Besides, Ngugi ponders over this possibility of creating a 'new language' which was
suggested by Achebe and Gabriel Okara. Achebe writes that the English language will be
able to carry the weight of ‘his’ African experience but it will have to be a new English,

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altered to suit new African surroundings. In a similar vein, Okara writes, "Why shouldn't
there be a Nigerian or West African English which we can use to express our ideas, thinking
and philosophy in our own way?" Ngugi calls it “the fatalistic logic of the unassailable
position of English” in African literature where English is accepted as a natural replacement
to their mother languages by some writers and intellectuals.

8.3.2 Psychological Violence in the Classroom

After rejecting and criticizing the tall claims made by some writers in defence of using the
English language for African experience, Ngugi starts addressing the ‘psychological
violence’ that was inflicted on the young students in Africa. Through some references about
the Education System of Africa during colonization, Ngugi tries to trace the roots of
colonization of African minds. Ngugi provides a very poignant description of the process of
colonization of minds by saying that 'bullet was the means of the physical subjugation and
language was the means of the spiritual subjugation'. Thereafter, he embarks on this journey
where he recalls his own student life and education. While remembering his childhood he
also gives some details about his family and village life. He mentions that family gatherings
and story-telling were used to be the first school to young children in which mostly animals
were the mains characters. These stories were always told in his mother tongue Gikuyu.
These stories about animals, their struggle with nature and amongst themselves, prepared the
children for real-life struggles Ngugi argues. In most of the stories ‘co-operation’ was the
common theme.

Ngugi also mentions that there were good and bad story-tellers but one thing that
differentiated all of them was that they used different words, images and inflexion of voice to
effect different tones. This practice in this way taught them the value of words and the
nuances of their language. During the games that they played with words; children learned
through riddles, proverbs, and transpositions of syllables. In this way, home and fields were
their pre-primary schools where they learned about their heroes and the musicality of their
languages.

However, with the emergence of the colonial education system, this harmony between
language and culture and also education broke. This idea is reinforced through Ngugi's
description of a colonial school and the treatment of students in such schools. In the colonial
schools, English was the language of instruction and if somebody was caught speaking

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Gikuyu, it was a matter of humiliation. Such students, whom Ngugi ironically refers to as
‘culprits’, were given corporal punishment: “three to five strokes of the cane on the bare
buttocks”. They were also made to carry metal plate around their neck with inscriptions such
as “I am Stupid or I am donkey”. Such incidents are mentioned by the writer to show the
stigma that was attached to the use of mother tongues by the colonizers. He calls it a visibly
gentle and subtle kind of colonization.

On the other hand, if a student performed better in English language paper, he was rewarded
with prizes, prestige, and applause. In this way, English became the measure of intelligence
and ability in all academic disciplines. Secondly, literary education was also dominated by
the English language and it also became a vehicle through which dominance of English was
reinforced. The author mourns over the loss of their heroes such as hare, leopard, and lion as
they were replaced by Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, and Tom Brown, etc. Ngugi comments
in this context, “Thus language and literature were taking us further and further from
ourselves to other selves, from our world to other worlds" (12). This process led to the
“systematic suppression” of African languages according to the author. Thus by displacing
the power that mother languages held in a child’s understanding of the world is not only
detrimental to his performance capabilities but also disastrous as it sows the seeds of hatred
in the young minds for their own culture.

In this way, the English language carried with it the cultural assumptions of the imperial
power and also encouraged a total rupture between the domestic and agrarian world of the
African child and his school environment, eventually divorcing the English-educated African
writer from his roots and his countrymen.

8.3.3 Relationship between Language, Culture and Human perception of Reality

According to Ngugi, a language has dual character as it is both a ‘means of communication’

and a ‘carrier of culture’. For instance, English is a medium of communication for the British
people and also a transmitter of their culture and history. On the other hand, in many
countries like India, Sweden and Denmark, English is used for communication but it is not a
vehicle to carry-forward their culture. Ngugi takes up the example of Swahili language
which is a channel of communication and a carrier of the culture of Zanzibar in Africa. In this
way, language is closely associated with culture as both the language and culture are the
blueprints of identity and value for a nation or a people. Therefore, Ngugi declares that

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“language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people's experience in history”
(1986, 15).

Language for Ngugi is not merely a way of communication and a method of preserving
culture but it is also responsible for a conception of national cultural integrity. He considers
language as the foundation of a people’s material and cultural life and also a treasury of
historical memory. Moreover, he refers to national languages, as “emblems of nation-ness”
and also as something with a vital “capacity for generating imagined communities, building
in effect particular solidarities” (Benedict Anderson 133). Therefore, for Ngugi, language
is an ‘undiluted cultural essence and the taproot to the past’, as well as a ‘tool for solidarity
and resistance’.
According to Ngugi, culture has three important aspects. The first aspect is the language of
real life; which is the reason and outcome of the relations people enter into in the labour
process. Second aspect is speech or verbal signs and third aspect is written signs. For the first
element of language, Ngugi says, “production is co-operation, is communication, is language,
is expression of a relation between human beings and it is especially human”. Secondly, the
next element of language i.e. speech is the imitation of first aspect of language. It helps to aid
the relations established between human beings. It helps in the production of means of life.
The verbal signs are as important to the human relations as hands. In most of the socities
written and verbal signs represent each other. However, this communication between human
beings is also the basis and process of evolving culture. Therefore, this is the focus of the
present text.

As culture reflects history and in this process it forms images which in a way help people
in their conception of themselves as individuals and a community. Thus language as
culture can be understood as mediating between an individual and his own self, between
his self and others, and between him and nature. So the third aspect of language as
culture is that culture transmits these images of the world through the verbal and
visuals or spoken and written signs. Written and oral literature are the main sources
through which a particular language transmits the images of the world contained in the
culture it carries.

To put it briefly, communication creates culture and culture is a means of communication.

Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through oral-literature and
literature, the entire body of values by which one perceives oneself and his place in

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the world such as; how people understand themselves affects how they look at their
culture, at their politics, at the social production of wealth, at their relationship to
nature or to other beings. Therefore, language is an inseparable part of an individual just as
a community of human beings with a specific form and character and a specific history.

In this context, it will be easy to understand the impact of colonisation on one’s culture.
Colonisation involves the destruction or the deliberate undervaluing of native people's
culture, art, religion, history, geography, education, and literature. It also targets at the
conscious promotion of the language of the colonizer. Thus Ngugi’s argument in favour of
the language of the natives and against the language of colonisers. The colonizing language
could never properly reflect or present the real life of the native community. Since the
imposed European language could never completely change the native language as
spoken, its most reflective area of domination was written language. In this context Ngugi
observes:

The real aim of colonialism was to control people’s wealth and this was imposed
through military conquest and subsequent political dictatorship. But its most
important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonized, the control
through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the
world. Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without
mental control. To control people’s culture is to control their tools of self-definition in
relation to others (16)

Ngugi finds two aspects in the process of colonialism:

The destruction or deliberate undervaluing of a people’s culture, their art, dances,

religions, history, geography, education, oration and literature and the conscious
elevation of the language of the colonizer. The domination of a people’s language by
the languages of the colonising nations was crucial to the domination of the mental
universe of the colonised (16)

Consequently an individual is instigated into the use of colonial language right from
his childhood through missionary education. This has resulted in the imprisoning of the
African thought in foreign or colonial language. More worse, the use of foreign language
has to the distancing and alienation of the most radical and revolutionary African
thought and literature from the indigenous majority who had unfortunately little

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or no education and knowledge in the colonial language. Through such arguments,
Ngugi proposes that an African writer should use the native language to which common
people who are in majority have access. Ngugi himself confessed in an interview, “Writing
in an African language enables me to reach a certain social stratum that was always
bypassed by my works in English,” (Jussawala, 28). He uses the expression “the final
triumph of a system of domination when the dominated starts singing its virtues” to criticise
such African writers who defended use of European languages for writing African literature.

8.3.4 “African Languages Refused to Die”

Ngugi calls African literature in English as the literature of petty-bourgeoisie who are
products of colonial schools and universities. It also led to the dominance of this class in
political and economic sectors as well. As this literature was written in a foreign language it
could not connect with the masses. He also argues that had it been in the hands of the petty-
bourgeoisie class, the African languages would have ceased to exist. However, it was not the
case, and so African language continued to exist. Ngugi gives the entire credit to the
peasantry class. This class happily used its native language and also supported any leader
who would take anti-imperialist stand. Unlike the bourgeoisie, the peasantry had no complex
about their native language or culture. Moreover, when they were forced to use colonial
language they made it their own and ‘Africanised’ it, for instance, Krio in Sierra Leone or
Pidgin in Nigeria. In these new languages syntax and rhythm of African languages was used.

All these languages were kept alive in the daily speech, in the ceremonies, in political
struggles, above all in the rich store of orature- proverbs, stories, poems, and riddles.

Ngugi refers to a number of writers who kept on writing in African language despite the trend
of writing in colonial language. He also mentions some from bourgeoisie class who changed
their mind and started writing in native languages. One such writer is Obi Wali who in one
his articles despises African writers writing in English. He argues that African culture and
language can only be saved if African literature is produced in its native languages.
Otherwise, all the writers are perusing a dead end.

Further, Ngugi equates a politician to a writer. He argues that a writing expressing in

colonial language is as much to blame for imperialism as a politician who argues in the
favour of imperialism. The literature produced in European language in Africa is termed as
“Afro-European” by Ngugi where he finally settles the matter that he had started in the

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beginning. “Their work belong to an Afro-European literary tradition which is likely to last
for as long as Africa is under this rule of European capital in a neo-colonial set-up” he argues.
Much like Wordsworth, Ngugi claims that African literature is only that which is written in
the language of labour class and peasantry of Africa.

In the end, the writer again delves into his personal experinces with colonial and natve
languages. He shares that he had also started writing in English. But later, he chose to write in
Gikuyu which is his mother tongue. He also accepts that by writing in Gikuyu his is in a way
participating in the anti-imperialist struggle of Kenyan and African people. By doing this, he
is also contributing towards the restoration of the harmony between all aspects and divisions
of language so as to restore Kenyan child to his environment. Lastly, he contends that African
writers should do for African languages what Shakespeare, Spencer or Milton did for English
language. And more importantly;

African languages should reconnect themselves to the revolutionary traditions of an

organised peasantry and working class in Africa in their struggle to defeat imperialism
and create a higher system of democracy and socialism in alliance with all the other
peoples of the world.

SELF-ASSESSMENT QUESTIONS
1. Comment on the relationship between language, culture and human perception of
reality.
2. Why and how did African languages refused to die?
3. How did Ngugi describe the impact of colonial education on young minds?

8.4 Summary

In “The Language of African Literature,” Ngũgĩ explains how the choice of language has
become a matter of contention in Africa. His most important argument in the text is that the
language is a carrier of the culture so it is important to return to African languages to preserve
African culture and history. He discusses the mal-effects of education in a foreign language
by citing the case of African schoolchildren who are forced and forbidden to write in their
native languages. Due to this process of colonization of the mind, the common people, as
well as intellectuals, fall out of harmony with their world and environment. However, the

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peasantry class usually referred to as illiterate and uncultured in European literature and also
to some extent in African literature in English, remains connected to their original languages.
Ngugi is of the view that by revoking their connection with European languages and
reconnecting with the revolutionary tradition of African peasantry and workers, African
writers can explore and discover new, more democratic and subversive forms of literature.

8.5 References

Achebe, Chinua, The African writer and the English Language, Transition, 4, 18, 1965, 27-
30.

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-colonial Studies Reader.
London: Routledge, 1995.

Ashcroft, Bill, Ranjini Mendis, Julie McGonegal, Arun Mukherjee, and Henry A. Giroux,
eds. Literature for Our Times: Postcolonial Studies in the Twenty-first Century. Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2012

Mongia, Padmini. Contemporay Postcolonial Theory. A Reader. London: Arnold, 1996.

Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. New York: Columbia UP, 1998.

8.6 Further Readings

Amuta, Chidi. The Theory of African Literature: Implications for Practical Criticism.
London. Zed Books, 1989.

Bennett, George. Kenya: A Political History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963.

Chinweizu, et al. Towards the Decolonization of African Literature. London: KPI, 1980.

Cook David. African Literature: A Critical View. Harlow: Longman, 1977.

Emenyonu, Ernest and C.D.Narasimhaiah., eds. African Literature Comes of Age. Mysore:
Dhvanyaloka, 1988.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.

Finnegan, Rooth. Oral Literature in Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Jones, Eldred. “The Decolonization of African Literature,” The Writer in Modern Africa, ed.
Perwastberg. Uppsala: SIAS, 1968, 71.

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8.7 Model Questions

1. Does writing in a native tongue decolonize mind?

2. Do you agree with Ngugi’s statement, “To control people’s culture is to control their tools
of self-definition in relation to others”?

3. What does Ngugi mean by the term decolonisation the African minds?

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 Lesson No. 9

“The Disciplinary Rationale for Periodization, and a forgotten Challenge to It”

(1886-1930)

Structure

9.0 Objectives
9.1 Introduction to the Essay
9.2 Theoretical Ambitions of Comparative Literature
9.3 Contributions of H.M. Posnett, Alastair Mackenzie, G.S.Santayana and Irving Babbitt
9.3.1 Contribution of Alastair Mackenzie
9.3.2 Contribution of Santayana and Irving Babbitt
9.4 Early Journey of Comparative Literature-A turn towards Theory and Evolution of
Literature
9.5 The Rene-Wellek Lovejoy Debate
9.6 Reasons for Comparative Literature’s Failure to Dislodge Periodisation
9.7 Summary
9.8 References
9.9 Suggested Reading
9.10 Model Questions

9.0 Objectives
After reading the prescribed fourth chapter from the book Why Literary periods
Mattered:Historical Contrast And the Prestige of English Studies(Stanford and California:
Stanford University Press, 2013), you will achieve the following objectives:

i) Trace the history of Comparative Literature in the early and last decades of the twentieth
century

ii)Understand the scope and function of this Discipline

iii)Analyse how Comparative Literature became synonymous with Literary Theory

iv)Understand and evaluate the Lovejoy- Rene Wellek Debate

v) Examine reasons for Comparative Literature failing to dislodge Periodisation

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9.1 Introduction to the Essay
The above mentioned essay underscores the continuing importance of the organising grid of
period and nationality in the teaching of English Literature. Although literary history has
been marked by struggles posed by the underlying principles of New Criticism and later by
post-structuralism, yet literature continues to be taught by its division into chronological
periods and the movements associated with them. The study of a poet entails the study of the
chronological period to which s/he belongs and also the movement associated with that
period (e.g. the rule of Queen Elizabeth from 1558-1603 and hence the Elizabethan
movement). New Criticism with its focus on the autonomy of the text did not wish to pay any
attention to history and even deconstruction in its approach to a literary text strictly avoided
the principles of period and nationality. However literature continued to be taught along
traditional grids or organising systems revealing the gaps that are there between theory and
practise. The writer of this essay affirms that though there have been alternative curricular
models like that of Comparative Literature, yet such institutional challenges failed to displace
periodisation in a significant manner. In the essay, the writer takes the period (1886-1949) to
analyse and investigate the reasons for Comparative Literature not succeeding in posing a
challenge to the organising model of periodisation. Let us now briefly understand the scope
and function of Comparative Literature before reading a detailed summary of the essay.

9.2 Theoretical Ambitions of Comparative Literature

Comparative Literature is an academic field dealing with the study of Literature, language
and culture across linguistic, national and disciplinary boundaries. It cultivates reading across
linguistic boundaries in order to highlight all those things that an exclusive focus on a
national literature does not. The conventional study of literature involved the selection of a
department that reflected the nation state on a basically European model. Comparative
Literature encouraged readers to step out of the boundaries of one national language as well
as Literature and look for the influences from other languages as well as the literature of other
nations. It compares European literature with other literatures of the world and explains the
processes of literary change without any restriction on boundaries. This study thus becomes
transnational. Secondly literary forms like the epic, dramatic and lyrical modes had various
forms in countries different from European culture. Its mission of explaining continuous
processes of development with regard to various genres across borders makes it international
in outlook. National contexts and movements associated with these changes were
disregarded. It was a challenge to periodization which organised literature into various
periods like Victorian or Elizabethan in terms of chronology and also dealt with the national
contexts associated with them. The focus in the entire chapter is on the period (1886 -1930)
when comparative literature made its mark and while contributing to the evolution of literary
theory, became synonymous with it. Its focus on the processes of development of literature
from folklore and myth to its present forms made it highly descriptive in character. The
article while tracing the genealogy of Comparative Literature shows how it grew closer to
other forms of literary study for its survival and several independent departments of it were
absorbed into “English and Comparative Literature.”

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The focus of literary scholars like H.M. Posnett and Alastair Mackenzie in Comparative
Literature was on the various stages of literary development. Literary history was sought to
be related to cultural change with the aim of integrating literary experience with other cultural
phenomena. Comparatists were dedicated to the study of continuity across borders and also
the influences upon this continuity. Literary scholars in this discipline also focused on the re-
emergence of literary types in various lands and at different points of time contributing to the
immortality of literature.

While tracing the history of Comparative Literature, the writer acknowledges that scholars
prefer to trace back their genealogy to well-known figures like Rene Wellek or Eric
Auerbach. Comparative Literature departments existed in the first decade of the twentieth
century at Harvard, at Columbia and the University of Chicago. Comparative Literature was
not as Spivak puts it, a result of, European intellectuals fleeing “totalitarian” or absolute
regimes as it too in its pursuit of literature and history focussed practically on the study of
individual literature alone. Spivak is obviously referring to the hegemony of European or
Western Literature. However, the discipline did mark a significant conceptual shift as it had
the theoretical ambition of aspiring to explain processes of literary change or development
without taking into account national and linguistic boundaries. The comparative mission of
explaining continuous processes of development (e.g. the development of any genre) made its
scope international. National contexts like ‘Elizabethan ‘or ‘Victorian’ Literatures were not
taken into account and even the movements associated with these literatures were
disregarded. It was the theoretical character of the Comparative project and its emphasis on
evolution or continuity which challenged periodization by undermining the national context
and the organisation of literary history into movements. It was the emphasis on how literature
evolved to its present form from earliest times that was the thrust of theory. The writer
focuses on the period (1886-1930) when literary theory, general theory and Comparative
Literature became synonymous. The article revisits the early twentieth century discipline to
understand its scope and function before it was overrun by critics. The chapter dwells on the
scholarly and pedagogical developments between 1886 and 1930.

9.3 Contributions of H.M. Posnett, Alastair Mackenzie, G.S. Santayana and Irving
Babbitt

Posnett’s book “Comparative Literature” called for new courses of study to be established in
universities but by the 1920’s several freestanding departments disappeared or were absorbed
into “English and Comparative Literature” as at Columbia. Thus after the second world war,
Comparative Literature had grown closer to other forms of literary study and had started
accepting periodisation as a fundamental principle. The period taken by the writer, Ted
Underwood is the most ambitious as Comparative Literature tried to frame a general theory
of literary development in it.

H.M. Posnett’s book “Comparative Literature” proposed to apply historical science to

Literature and subject it to a thoroughgoing historical relativism. This could imply the
relative nature of European versus other literatures of the world or even in a single literature
such as American or Australian, the vernaculars could be relative to the main or the

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hegemonic one. Posnett’s contention was that social forms or groups like the clan, the city
commonwealth and the nation or even a religious community produce their characteristic
mode of expression; implying different personalities and different relationships to physical
nature. Posnett further claims that the epic, dramatic and lyric modes have different forms in
countries widely removed or different from European culture. Literary forms can and should
be studied across national boundaries. However Posnett tacitly implies that European
“national literature” continued to be the most advanced form of expression. Posnett in
keeping with the comparatists’ goal of professed relativism and also of various social
categories producing different literatures; fails to escape from the universalism of European
Literature he warns against. Without explicit expression, he does acknowledge the supremacy
of European literature. Posnett’s work however did not include any questions on
periodization as his objective was to explain the evolution of the concept of literature itself,
from pre-literate folklore to the present. The book does contain categories of development but
these are explanatory categories organised by social principles and not the study of periods
organised by chronology.

9.3.1 Contribution of Alastair Mackenzie

Mackenzie in his comparative project of 1911 traced continuities between literature, folklore
and myth. While tracing the various phases of development, literature departments were
moving in the direction of ‘theory’ and at the beginning of the twentieth century,
Comparative Literature moving in a theoretical direction became synonymous with literary
theory. Literary scholarship with its description of the various stages of literary development
from the “primitive” to the “democratic” moved towards a theory of the evolution of
Literature and acquired a descriptive character. Mackenzie in his scientific approach
proposed “provisional laws” of literary evolution and even tried to rename literary study as
“literatology” on the model of anthropology (scientific study of humans, human behaviour
and societies in the past and present). The comparatists even tried to develop literary history
into a theory of cultural phenomena.

9.3.2 Contribution of Santayana and Irving Babbitt

Santayana’s interest was in tracing large patterns of cultural development and in his book
“Three Philosophical Poets”, he discusses Lucretius, the materialist, Dante, the
supernaturalist and Goethe, the romanticist; who sum up the chief phases of European
philosophy – naturalism, supernaturalism and romanticism. Irving Babbitt in his book “The
New Laokoon” too presents himself as a comparatist and articulates a sweeping theory of
cultural change. Babbitt advised the students of comparative literature to not simply treat it as
a ‘mere university fad’ or a craze and limit it to an endless study of sources, influences and
minute relationships. Babbitt was actually trying to suggest that defining periods and
movements was not yet a primary concern of the Comparatists. According to the popular
version of Comparative Literature, literary historians and students of Comparative Literature
by stepping out of the boundaries of one national language expanded the horizons of their
reading by looking for the influences from other languages as well as Literatures. The
Comparatists claim that this established the explanatory force in literary studies. Babbitt

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wanted to go a step further by asking scholars to go beyond “patiently accumulating evidence
of particular causal connections” to meet the discipline’s goal of literary development. He
seemed to understand the early twentieth century enthusiasm for Comparative Literature as
an impulse to make literary study a discipline with an explanatory force and thus scientific in
character. Babbitt’s disapproving tone of Comparative Literature’s aspiration to frame an
international definition of movements like “classicism” and “romanticism” was there because
such attempts “...make literature seem one-sided and ill-informed”. The search for sources
and influences on various Literatures was a comparative fad according to Babbitt as it failed
to yield practical results of comparing and contrasting movements; thus what was promised
in theory was not achieved in practise.( as the comparison and contrast between various
forms of Classicism or any other movement was never achieved.)

9.4 Early Journey of Comparative Literature-A turn towards Theory and Evolution of
Literature

Most scholars contributed to Comparative Literature by gathering evidence of particular

causal connections and this contributed to the explanatory force in literary history. Scholars
and students of Comparative Literature explored the connections of Literature with history,
philosophy, politics and Literary Theory. In the pursuit of tracing connections between a text
and the various influences on it, they were able to trace the causal connections as well. The
Comparatists were also particularly dedicated to the study of continuity across national,
linguistic or temporal boundaries. Development with reference to definite time-frames was
not considered. They were engaged in the study of the development of Literature as a
continuous whole and were thus inclined towards theory. The idea was clarified in the
Catalog copy of Chicago’s department of “General Literature'':

“Particular Literary motives pass on from land to land, gathering a vigorous individual life.
Literary types crystallize and reappear, fortified or limited by reminiscence.”

Comparative Literature traced the growth of literary types such as epic or any other poetic
form across national borders and Languages. Literary styles too made their occurrence again
and again. The comparative project of reminiscence (the act of remembering events and
experiences from the past) and re-birth constituted a kind of immortality of Literature.
Comparative Literature reaffirmed the idea that certain literary motives and ideas reoccurred
across boundaries thus establishing the immortality of literature. The scope of this discipline
was extended to writers who knew nothing of one another and were from different
nationalities and yet revealed similarities and differences. For example, a poem by Stephane
Mallarme and a poem by Emily Dickinson reveal similarities. Despite the tall claims of
Comparative Literature, the question is how successful were early twentieth century
Comparatists at giving their project a curricular embodiment? Harvard was one of the first
schools to embrace the new discipline and it hired Arthur Richmond Marsh as an “Assistant
Professor of Comparative Literature” in 1891. Names of departments were changed with the
phrase Comparative Literature added to English. There was a great demand for literature
courses in translation at the University of Chicago. The department of Literature in English
also taught other literatures in translation and soon became a department of General

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Literature that embraced literary theory and Comparative Literature as central parts of its
mission. The demand for Comparative Literature increased as the demand for literature in
translation courses grew and also as the interest of the faculty in more than one language also
grew. Many courses on Comparative Literature were framed from existing courses which
were on European national Literature.

Despite its popularity in the early decades of the twentieth century, Comparative Literature
could not dislodge the period survey course around which the literary curriculum was already
organised. Comparative literature while gaining entry into the curriculum had to adapt itself
to a periodised structure by a reorientation of its approach to literary history. Courses in
University departments were reframed around transitions or in between periods that could
pose historical questions. Courses like “Augustan Literature” were changed to “The
Transition from the Seventeenth to the Eighteenth Century” making the title more
explanatory than descriptive. Many of the course descriptions in Literature departments
shifted to a theoretical explanatory turn and in this shift periodisation was not erased but
slightly decentred. The thought of reframing courses around development questions was to
steer the new project of Comparative Literature towards theory by the literary historians.

The ultimate aim of the problem centred course descriptions was to present literary history
as a whole regardless of linguistic and national boundaries. Theoretically, the consequence
was the fusion of all departments in that of Comparative Literature. The study of national
literature and the history of movements and periods were subordinate to the comprehensive
aim of having an organic history according to comparatists and this seemed ideal and far
from fulfilment. While studying the evolution of Literature, what got missed out or lost were
questions of worth or value ... praise or blame. The inference, as pointed out by Foerster, is
that literary history needed to be reconnected to critical judgement but the critic is unable to
explain how judgement and historical specificity can be mutually supportive principles. It
was Rene Wellek, the famous new critical theorist, who explained that literary history and
critical judgement could fuse even for projects like Comparative Literature. Thus it was Rene
Wellek who could provide the clearest and the most satisfactory answer to the question “Why
didn’t comparative literature successfully displace periodization in the first half of the 20th
century?”

9.5 The Rene-Wellek Lovejoy Debate

The Wellek – Loveyoy debate on Romanticism and its nature is best able to provide an
answer. Lovejoy envisioned the historian’s task as being compatible with early-twentieth
century comparative literature – the transmission of influences and motifs (study of
influences on various works). Lovejoy’s book “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms”,
dissolves “Romanticism” into a collection of “ideas and aesthetic susceptibilities”. He
clarifies that the traits characterized as romantic, like looking back nostalgically to the past
and on the contrary ignoring the past in favour of the future – have no essential connection
with each other. Lovejoy affirms that no cultural movement is a unified entity and while
tracing processes of development; national traditions and competing schools of thought can
be dissolved into their “units ideas” which might separate and recombine with each other.

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That is why he refers to “romanticisms” in the plural as it is a combination of diverse ideas.
This was similar to literary historian’s preoccupation with the transmission of influences and
motifs while discriminating between variants of the same concept and thus the term
‘Romanticisms’.

Wellek’s response was of reaffirming the unity of European Romanticism and the
perspectives of Wellek and Lovejoy are in fact two successive approaches to literary history.
Lovejoy’s attempt to explain cultural change by breaking movements into their component
parts or units was in harmony with the goals of literary scholarship around 1924 which was a
contribution to theory. In his challenge to Lovejoy, Wellek was asserting the place of
criticism as the status of history in literary study was becoming uncertain. Wellek was
insisting on critical evaluation as he understood periods alone to possess evaluative categories
and the critic could best understand which norms in a given period successfully guided
practice. Ted Underwood in the fourth chapter of his book affirms that it is important to
evaluate a situation in which older norms still prevailed numerically while new conventions
were being used by writers of greatest artistic importance. For example, the Romantic period
included unromantic elements which varied from one nation to the next. In your study of
literary movements in the last semester, you have read about periodization and Wellek rightly
points out that periods alone could provide an organising context where evaluation and
history could work together.

The New critic Rene Wellek insists on period concepts because characterising or describing
periods turns out to be the only way to write an “intrinsic” literary history. In the essay
“Literary Scholarship, its Aims and Methods' '(1941), Wellek first spelt out his thoughts on
the distinction between “extrinsic” and “intrinsic” literary history. Extrinsic history is
organised by philosophical concepts or social forces (events that occur in society). Intrinsic
literary history is the description of events organised by literary categories such as classical
and romantic which are associated with periods and movements. The 1949 version of the
same essay asks whether it is even possible to write literary history, that is to write that which
will be both literary and a history. Often histories that are absolutely literary tend to be a
discontinuous series of essays on individual authors and are not historical. Attempts to write
real narrative connections make them social histories and not literary histories. Wellek
affirms that in their attempt to link events and explain changes, a historian’s convincing
account turns out to be social rather than intellectual as history is at bottom a social process.
Unless the historical process is related to a value or norm historical processes or events will
dissolve into a meaningless sequence of events. Thus events in literary history can only be
given meaning if they are organised around a series of periods or epochs, each representing a
new and incommensurable (having no common standard) system of values. In order to judge
events in literary history, their evaluative context or periods, each having its own individual
norms, must be taken into account. Literary history cannot be organised around social
categories “extraneous” to literature. Thus period concepts have to be drawn around scales of
value that are drawn from literature itself. While writing literary history, it definitely makes
sense to contrast periods, case studies or ideal types. Wellek’s argument can be summed up
as literary periods being necessary for disciplinary autonomy.

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Foucault like the New Critics took a firm stand against “continuous history” and read it as a
symptom of scholars’ investment in the stability and permanence of subjectivity. The
renowned critic was also of the view that uninterrupted continuities take away from our
consciousness the inert practices, unconscious processes and material determinations of
history. Foucault was in fact pointing to the factors which make history interesting and those
which are not in the limelight. Thus it is the covert and the lesser known aspects of events
which actually need to be brought to the forefront. Foucault’s critique of continuity
specifically echoed Wellek’s influential attack on the tracing of sources and influences in pre-
New -Critical historicism. That was the period when history was given importance as the
background study of all texts and authors. The properly cultural character of literary study
can be preserved only through division into periods with their respective undefined norms.
“Without periodisation” literature will be inevitably reduced to a province of some other
discipline and culture will be reduced to mere historical explanation.

9.6 Reasons for Comparative Literature’s Failure to Dislodge Periodisation

Recent debates about periodisation have tended to rehearse the terms of the Lovejoy Wellek
dispute. It was Wellek who revived American Comparative Literature and also founded the
first American journal on the subject. His 1959 essay on “The Crisis in Comparative
Literature” condemns those parts that have clung to ‘factual relations’ sources and influences.
Comparative Literature should become a term “for any study of literature transcending the
limits of one national literature”. This is the only primary aspiration of the term we still
remember but as Wellek puts it negatively, in the period 1886-1930 Comparative Literature
never achieved more than a slight effect on the literary curriculum. The curriculum was not
reorganised to trace the transmission of motifs or to explain the social evolution of literature.
The movements and periods continued to be described as discontinuous wholes. The critique
of historical continuity launched by writers like Foerster and Wellek was a belated
justification for abandoning the discipline which failed to institutionalise itself. The only
effect Comparative literature had on the curriculum was the rephrasing of titles to emphasise
transition or development.

Historical explanation, as offered by the proponents of Comparative Literature was rejected

as a mission for literary scholarship. It failed to advance the discipline’s educational, cultural
mission. Periodization was able to persist as it allowed literary scholars to avoid reliance on
other disciplines and focus on contrasted systems of purely critical norms.

Periodisation persisted in the first half of the century but beyond 1950, it had begun to lose
its grip on the curriculum. In the first half, it endured as it was bound up with the cultural
authority of literary study. Nominalistic approaches were not accepted as they undermined
the discipline’s cultural authority. Periodisation endured in Curriculums as it helped in
explaining change over great stretches of time and did not draw one away from literature into
the problems associated with social history. Periodisation meant substituting discontinuous
contrast for explanation and it played a justifiable role both in scholarship and in the literary
curriculum.

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Foucault, like the New Critics took a firm stand against “Continuous history” and read it as a
symptom of scholars investment in the stability and permanence of subjectivity. Foucault in
fact was of the belief that uninterrupted continuities take away from our consciousness the
inert practices, unconscious processes and material determinations. Foucault’s critique of
continuity specifically echoed Wellek’s influential attack on the tracing of sources and
influences in pre-New-Critical historicism. Before the advent of New Criticism, it was the
historical context which was assigned a primary significance and the same was the case with
Comparative Literature before the 1950’s. It was the preoccupation with the history of
influences or sources of literary and cultural works. Ted Underwood puts it in rather clear and
unambiguous terms, “Comparative Literature was virtually synonymous with “literary
theory” when it first hit American Universities around the year 1900, and at that time,
“literary theory” meant an ambitious anthropological historicism.” The inference is to the
description of the evolution of Literature and its development from the pre-literate forms to
the contemporary ones. The history of Comparative literature failed to make an impact
because of the mid-century victory of New Criticism which nearly erased the whole
institutional history preceding it. Late-twentieth century histories of literary study were
actually histories “of literary criticism”, largely ignoring the institutional history of the
University curriculum. There are signs that literary study might rehearse the same conflicts of
the early twentieth century debates-- the threat of “scientism” versus evaluation.

Self-Assessment Questions

1) Posnett’s book “Comparative Literature” dealt with ---(a)------ categories of

development which were organised by—(b)-- principles.

2) Alaistair Mackenenzie traced continuities between Literature, ---(a)----- and---(b)---.

3) Description of the various stages of literary development made Comparative

Literature acquire a -------character.

4) The Comparatists were dedicated to the study of --- (a) ----across national, ---(b)--- or
temporal boundaries.

5) The increasing demand for literature courses in----------added to the growing

popularity of the discipline.

9.7 Summary

In this Script you have read about the literary curriculum being organised around the grids
of nationality and literary periods. There were challenges posed to this design of framing
the curriculum in university departments. A significant challenge was that of Comparative
Literature but it failed to endure beyond the early decades of the twentieth century. The

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 Lovejoy-Rene wellek debates continue to rehearse and reoccur around the question-what
are the successive approaches to Literary History? In the early twentieth century,
comparative Literature became synonymous with literary theory and literary history
because it traced the evolution of literature from the preliterate to the contemporary times.
However its descriptive character was not appreciated by the literary critics who felt that
literary history ought to be evaluative and the study of literary history in terms of periods
alone provided an evaluative context. The organisation of the curriculum in terms of
periods helped in explaining change over great stretches of time and does not draw one
away from literature into the problems associated with social history. Periodisation meant
substituting discontinuous contrast for explanation as encouraged by the Comparatists and
it played a justifiable role both in scholarship and in the literary curriculum. Ted
Underwood thus offers a disciplinary rationale for periodisation.

9.8 References

1) https://read.dukepress.edu/comparative literature
2) https//complit.chicago.edu/
3) https://www.bu.edu/wll/home/
4) gsas.harvard.edu › programs-of-study ›

Answers to self-assessment questions

1) a)-explanatory, b)social 2)a)folklore b)myth 3)descriptive 4)a)continuity,

b)linguistic 5)translation

9.9 Suggested Reading

https://criticalmargins.com/review-why-literary-periods-mattered-by-ted-underwood-
d830d91f00d0

https://noggs.typepad.com/tre/literary-periods.html

https://ericweiskott.com/2019/03/07/on-literary-periodization/

9.10 Model Questions

1) Why did comparative Literature not replace the period survey course as the mode of
curriculum in the period 1886-1930?

2) Describe the contribution of Posnett, Mackenzie and Irving Babbitt to the cause of
Comparative Literature.

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3) Critically evaluate the Lovejoy- Rene Wellek debate highlighting their diverse
perspectives on history.

4) How does the organisation of the Curriculum into periods help in the study of literary
history?

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 Lesson No. 10

Against Periodisation: or on Institutional Time

Structure

10.0 Objectives

10.1 Introduction

10.2 A Detailed Summary of the Essay

10.3 Summarizing the key Points

10.4 References

10.5 Further Reading

10.6 Model Questions

10.0 Objectives
After reading this essay, you will be able to achieve the following objectives:

● Understand how the curriculum of literary education has institutionalized historical

context for its study
● Become acutely conscious of all study and research being carried out in contexts of
different periods
● How the institutionalization of periods is sustained by temporalities of university
systems
● Critically evaluate the negative effects of periodization
● Understand how institutionalization of historical context leads to foreshortening of
historical perspective
● The urgency to design alternative periods--arbitrary or conceptual
● Need to design alternative curriculums or unconventional contexts for literary study
10.1 Introduction
The essay revolves around the idea that the entire curriculum of literary education and also
the job market associated with it has institutionalised the period or the study of literary
history in terms of various periods as its central historical concept. This institutionalization
of historical context or slicing the pie of literary history in terms of various periods is
sustained by the temporalities of the university system. It is the length of academic terms like
the division of the undergraduate course into semesters of a certain duration that determines
the daily operations of teaching and learning.The writer is critical of the institutionalisation of
the semester system which forces the faculty and the students to bend their teaching and

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learning methods to the calendar. Departments with little or no innovation in the framing and
teaching of new courses institutionalise a series of scholarly norms that never receive any
serious attention. The end result is producing generations of scholars whose work and later
on their teaching is constrained by the periodising model institutionalized in our curriculum.
The essay suggests one alternative model offered by Penn university which prompts students
to think beyond the semester as the basic unit of graduate-level knowledge. Students of
Comparative Literature take a two-year sequence of five-week-long courses. These twelve
courses are organised into two year-long structures which are run alternatively in odd and
even years. This is one idea which has been institutionalized and the writer regrets that we
are unwilling to institutionalize other alternatives which affect the manner in which we teach,
think,publish and hire. The essay persuades the readers to rethink about the pedagogical
methods adopted in the teaching and learning of literature especially in the U.S. system where
everything is taught in “semester-long chunks”.

10.2 A Detailed Summary of the Essay

The second essay prescribed for you in the fifth unit revolves around the idea of the near-
total dominance of the concept of periodisation in literary studies. By now you understand
that the study of literary history and the curriculum for literary studies have been designed in
terms of periods or movements which because of overuse have been institutionalised in
colleges and in the form of university departments. The writer regrets that this reflects a
collective failure of imagination and will-power on the part of the literary profession. The
essay underscores the argument that the entire curriculum of literary education and also the
job market associated with it has institutionalised the period or the study of literary history in
terms of various periods as its central historical concept. Periodisation deals with the most
basic context,i.e., the historical for the production of literary criticism today. Whatever is
being studied and researched by the literary student today is done in terms of the contexts of
different periods such as Victorian, Neoclassical, Romantic etc. It is this institutionalisation
of historical context which exerts a determining effect on the ways we think and work.

The division of the academic calendar into semesters is yet another form of
institutionalisation of the historical and contextual norms through which literature is studied
today. The writer is in fact referring to the division of the syllabi in terms of chronological
periods studied in succession in terms of various semesters. This overemphasis on historical
context has witnessed very few challenges to periodisation and as a result periodising norms
have become more prominent in the period (2000-2011), according to Eric Hayot. The
literary profession has failed to institutionalise a range of competing concepts that would
lessen the obvious limitations of periodisation as a method of study and research. Secondly
the profession has failed to formalise in institutional form transconceptual categories calling
attention to boundaries created within the historical field of literature. You may now recall
that in the previous essay, you studied that the study of genre cuts across national or temporal
boundaries. The study of literatures in translation done under the umbrella of Comparative
literature aims to investigate the parallel study of cultures and languages. This crossing of
national, linguistic and cultural boundaries in the study of literature can be encouraged to
counter the effects of periodisation and the primacy of the historical context.
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 This desire to remain institutionally inside periods is illustrated by the tendency to
extend rather than cross periods. The writer gives the example of the eighteenth century
which seems to have become longer than ever or modernism which seems to be stretching
nearly into the present. The boundaries created by periods are inadequate as they can be
marked by conflicting tendencies and they are inadequate frames for the questions posed by
critics and researchers. The writer is deeply concerned about the sway of periodisation which
is so immense that the vast job opportunities in literature irrespective of the national field are
defined in periodising terms. Thus the period has been institutionalised at every level of the
profession, “...from the job market to the undergraduate curriculum, the journals to the
professional societies, the conferences to the comprehensive exams.” The writer does not
deny that certain periods such as the Golden or what is better known as the Elizabethan Age
should be overlooked but to base the entire system of literary education from the first-year
undergraduate survey to the forms of judgement governing publication, promotion , and
tenure on the period as its central historical concept is to limit our thinking and understanding
of literature.

Hayott does agree to conceptual changes being there as a challenge to the

institutionalised forms of periodisation but the fact remains that they have had little or hardly
any institutional effect. The New Historicist approaches to literature were promising in the
1980s and the early 1990s as they were not rigid disciplinary practices and dismissed the
determinism of history. According to their conception, history was shaped from the influence
of both non-literary as well as literary texts. New Historicism as a credo was an
amalgamation of a set of critical theories and hence interdisciplinary. Hayott’s contention is
that New Historicism is no longer valuable as a forceful school it promised to be in its
objectives and although “... everyone now thinks ‘new historically’, but no one is really a
New Historicist anymore.”The writer is in fact pointing to the institutionalisation of periods
or the historical context which requires an intense study of the expanded material of every
period as it means the understanding of a period as a self-contained whole. This the writer
regrets leads to the gradual foreshortening of the historical perspective as students and
researchers limit themselves to the study of certain specific periods rather than having a long
historical view or a survey of literary history from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf as in the case
of British Literature. This over-emphasis on periodisation reflects badly on the very ideas
regulating our institutional and scholarly behaviour. The essay is a pointer to the debate
which should take place over the value of the period as a concept and the desire to
institutionalise a variety of competing concepts for the study of literary history. The writer
earnestly wishes that these concepts would themselves become objects of debate in the due
course of time thus generating transconceptual approaches which would prevent the
institutionalisation of certain concepts as epistemological categories.

The writer then goes on to elaborate some viable nonperiodizing concepts which
include a focus on genre such as drama, novel, poetry or new media. Also he mentions that
the Modern Language Association does advertise a small number of jobs which focus on
subgenres such as science fiction,children’s literature or on social fields such as ethnic studies
and women’s studies. He clarifies that the professional expectation in these fields requires an

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understanding of a far longer history or survey and also a broader geographical knowledge
than most periods require. A person teaching ethnic studies or a scholar of black literature
must possess knowledge that extends transnationally across several countries such as an
increasing awareness of the slave trades, the plantation economy, the Civil War and the
migrations that followed it. The point being emphasised is that moving beyond periods is to
move beyond the boundaries of nations, specific time-frames and also languages. Hayott
wishes to add some alternatives proposed by Franco Moretti and Wai Chee Dimock who have
paid scholarly attention to the newly described or invented features of rhetoric, narrative or
form. Moretti is an Italian literary historian and theorist who is famous for his data-centric
approach to novels which he graphs, maps and charts. His work has helped to make
computational criticism and the digital humanities into a real intellectual movement. In his
book “Graphs, Maps and Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History”, he has used
computer-generated visualisations to map the emergence of new genres. Moretti is also
famous for his concept of Distant Reading which is a threat to the concept of close reading.
Dimock traces novel connections across the spaces and times of the history of the human
imagination. The emergence of these new concepts could justify non-period-based-categories
but the near-total dominance of the period at all levels of the literary profession suggests how
deeply it has been institutionalised as the ground of the possibility of literary scholarship.
Thus all possibilities of literary scholarship continue to be based on the historical period.

The writer then goes on to describe some of the limitations of periodisation. It is the
codification of literary history in terms of periodisation that has actually led to a canonical set
of periods. Thus Victorian literature is read almost exclusively within the framework of its
period-concept, i.e.,1830-1900 or within the history of that period concept. An imaginary
scholar, for example of the time period 1850-1950 (a variation from the normal
categorisation), would not know what to study and how to make that category part of their
comprehensive exams. Thus to imagine another group of periods would inculcate a radically
different historical order. The end result is that the current configuration of periods
constitutes “... on the inside of the concept a canon of appropriate use.”

Periods theorise the logic of a chronological whole but they also presume geographic
limits as in the case of Victorian literature, the reference is inevitably to Great Britain and not
French or Spanish literature. The actual dominance of periodisation in the literary academy
justifies a strong bias towards national limits though geographic limits in themselves are not
bad. The writer then takes up the argument that periods are the product of a set of central
characteristics and deviations and no matter how extensive the deviations, the central concept
or inner essence remains the same and firmly in place. Any period theorises an entire
apparatus or background against which its own essence emerges thus allowing us to grasp the
dually totalising nature of periodisation. This theorisation operates inwardly as a typology of
wholeness or essentiality meaning thereby that it directs us to a classification of the texts of
the period and outwardly it controls at regular intervals the texts to be included in its
wholeness.Despite their dialectics, the inner essence or characteristics of periods remain the
same. Even the logics of totality involved in periodisation fail to satisfy Hayot. Their reliance
on a narrative of origins, development, peaks, decline and sometimes the return of the period

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in an ironic,revolutionary or nostalgic mode after a long time is rather unsophisticated
according to the writer. While observing how periods work in historical time, the writer
makes the statement that they get shorter as we get closer to the present and contrarily expand
as we move backwards. A scholar researching on Jurassic Park , a 1990 science fiction novel
is surely closer to the historical present than a scholar of the eighteenth century period who
while moving backwards from the present historical time has a lot to read. However it is our
love for specific timeframes which accounts for the decreasing size of periods and the
foreshortening of the historical perspective. With a narrow perspective of literary history, the
study of large periods and regions -world history, the British survey, introduction to the
literature of the Americas is undertaken by students who are new and inexperienced in this
field. Literary history being limited to periodisation thus results in microscopism whose
effect is to discourage graduate students to ask questions about large historical periods. This
in turn leads to an odd effect on the journey of literary and scholarly careers which take a
rather long time to approach large historical or transperiodizing categories. For a long time,
they continue to be limited to the study of specified time frames or periods. Addressing large
historical periods or transperiodizing categories is done only by a minority of the literary
profession, for instance those who are involved in writing three or more books. Only these
handful of professionals access large historical periods or a sense of the historical
development of their analytic categories like black literature or any other category like ethnic
literature. In such cases, as already mentioned the professional expectation requires an
awareness of a far longer history and a broader geography than most periods.

The writer then goes on to suggest viable alternatives to the rigid structures we have
in the form of periods. He suggests four ways to create new periods which do not make it
necessary to abandon periods altogether. The curriculum designers should conceive periods
organised around time frames which are either arbitrary (1850--1950) or conceptual like the
Enlightenment. The new periods should cross or combine our existing ones. Periods should
be specifically designed to cross national boundaries and borrow from some nonnational
principle or cultural coherence like the literature of various economic formations (capitalism,
feudalism, industrialism). Chronology centred periods should be lessened to discourage
‘chronocentrism’. On the contrary, there should be support for periods using telescopic
models that lead from the small to the large, rather than the reverse. The writer of the essay in
fact desires that only suitable pedagogical and critical mechanisms should be designed which
aim at training the students to think. For attaining this objective,we need to become more
open to experimental forms of scholarship which should come from graduate students and
junior faculty who are the site for the articulation of the profession’s most conformist
institutionalizations. Literary history would then be studied in new and equally interesting
ways. It would then be reorganised with new juxtapositions, separations and proximities.
Periods which are presently proximal could provide useful contrasts. The new models of
literary history would encourage not just one but many approaches to the handling of history
inside the period concept.

The writer then goes on to talk of the equally desirable forms that did not use
periodization as their basic model. There is the Annales School of history which necessitated

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a broad understanding of the complex factors which contributed to historical change--
psychological, cultural, economic and environmental factors. This school also brought about
an important change in the manner in which historians conceived of historical time and
periodisation. Chronological time and its limits were expanded to evaluate phenomena and
processes from the perspective of longer term changes which transcended individual
consciousness. Profound change in human societies was traced to a concern with economic
history and long-term cycles identifiable from the serial study of economic data. The main
concern of these historians was with quantitative data which was seen as the key to unlocking
of all of social history. Besides this school, the Marxist Dialectic studies history in terms of
economics and Derrida’s hauntology is in consonance with his deconstructive method in
which the origin of identity or history is dependent on an always -already existing set of
linguistic conditions. The term in fact refers to the return or persistence of elements from the
past as in the manner of a ghost. The argument being underscored by Hayott in all these
references is that they do not require the one thing after another that governs the current
institutionalisation of periods.

The essay wishes to drive home the point that there should be a variety of approaches
to history rather than just the periodisation model and that would necessitate a change in
how faculty and students teach, learn and write. In order to introduce new methods, the need
is to modify our curricula or to produce new knowledge within the framework of existing
curricular structures. The ultimate aim is to produce original scholarship and to train graduate
students to think in terms of transperiodizing concepts like the modern rather than the
traditional period-based models. If for example the students are to be trained in Longue
Duree methods as pioneered by the Annales school of historians like Fernand Braudel, then
they should not limit themselves to the mastery of a restricted, period-oriented canon of
works. It is important to set clear pedagogical goals for the teaching of undergraduates as the
pressures of the job market make them as well as the junior faculty the appropriate site for the
articulation of the profession’s most conformist institutionalizations. The writer ponders over
the possibility of a literary studies department having some of its students and faculty trained
in new periods or transperiodizing concepts and others in the traditional period-based models.
In the meeting or the confluence of imaginative objectives and actual practices, the critique of
periodization intersects with institutional time. As we critique the institutionalization of
periods, we need to also relook at the manner in which it is sustained by the temporalities of
the university system itself. The length of academic terms and all the cycles that determine
the daily operations of teaching and learning serve as a second- order context for literary
study and as a praxis of the relation between history, institutionality and scholarship. Our
teaching and research is limited by these temporal boundaries. The writer cites the example
of a graduate course called Prose Fiction which prompted students to ask not the usual kind
of questions but simpler ones about the plot , the protagonists or other elements which are a
part of the fictional world. The answers extended beyond the single text to a collection of
them, persuading students to compare works that would normally never have been discussed
together. The longer comparative view allowed students to ask questions on the history of
prose, on narrative and the conceptualisation of world literature. This was a strong contrast to
the usual close readings of a few prescribed texts. The writer is critical of the

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institutionalisation of the semester system which forces the faculty and the students to bend
their methods to the calendar. Departments with little or no innovation in the framing and
teaching of new courses institutionalise a series of scholarly norms that never receive any
serious attention. The end result in the interplay of institutional time (i.e. the semester
system) and the professional norms is producing generations of scholars whose work and
later on their teaching is constrained by the periodising model institutionalized in our
curriculum. By restricting their intellectual life to the necessities of a farming-based
institutional time like in the U.S., the consequence is again the lack of creative thinking in the
graduates produced and also depression due to a collective lack of imagination. Thus the need
of the hour is to alter the practices of academic scholarship.

Towards the end of the essay the writer cites the example of Penn ( i.e.Pennsylvania)
State University which revised its curriculum with the intention of thinking beyond the
semester as the basic unit of graduate-level knowledge. Graduate-level students in
Comparative literature were required to take twelve courses organised into two-year long
structures which are run alternately in odd and even years. In the odd year, students would
study courses on the discipline such as “Close Reading”, “Idea of World Literature” and
“History of Comparative Literature”. In the second year they would take the yearlong
sequence in theory and criticism. This sequence which includes “Topics in Classical Theory”
and “(Blank) Today” could even be opted by students of Comparative Literature in their later
years.The latter course is deliberately left as blank as it is replaced with a new object each
time and it aims to make connections between classical and modern forms of philosophy and
theory. It can be on subjects such as “Allegory Today” or even “Plato Today”. The breaking
up of the usual semester-or year-long theory course allows to de-emphasise or shift the focus
from the institutional unit or the semester as the unit of official mastery. The structure
adopted generates modes of learning that are longer than the traditional semester i.e., two
years. The courses are taught by different faculty members keeping the entire faculty in touch
with the graduate students. There are other positive effects of the course such as the theory
year making no claim to canonical comprehensiveness and indicating that knowing theory
happens best from multiple and sometimes contradictory perspectives. The course is
beneficial for graduate students in other programmes too as any student interested in any of
the particular subjects simply enrolls in that smaller course and gets one credit for it. The
alternative model offered by Penn university is one idea which has been institutionalized and
the writer regrets that we are unwilling to institutionalize other alternatives which affect the
manner in which we teach, think,publish and hire.

The essay ends on a note directing professionally competent individuals to

denaturalize or to adopt unconventional contexts for literary study. During the course of the
essay you must have now understood that the dominance of periodisation and its imbrications
with the semester system has had its effects on the way students think, research, publish and
also get employed. This is attributed to our inability to institutionalize transformation and
change that would lessen the necessary negations of the ideals cherished by the promoters of
periodization. Those desiring and wishing to execute change should produce work that
creates models for the kinds of literary historical work to be institutionalized at the graduate

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level. Students writing dissertations must have examples of experimental work before them.
Advertising and hiring exclusively in period-based categories must come to an end and
measures to reshape undergraduate and graduate curricula must be undertaken to undermine
periodisation as the only natural model for literary study.

10.3 Summarising the Key Points

. By now you understand that Eric Hayott is critical of the institutionalization of
the period at every level of the literary profession ranging from the undergraduate curriculum
to the journals brought out by the professional societies and the demands of the job market.
Alongwith the institutionalization of historical context there is also the university calendar
dividing the syllabi into semesters which to a large extent determine the methods of teaching
and learning. Thus the critique of periodization intersects with institutional time or the time
frames around which institutions organise their daily operations of teaching and learning. We
usually limit our institutional frameworks for literary investigation to temporal boundaries as
the course is divided into semesters along chronological boundaries. The writer is dismayed
at the effects of chronocentrism and desires to lessen its effects. He regrets that the profession
has failed to institutionalize competing concepts and transconceptual categories calling
attention to boundaries created by earmarked categories or periods. The writer desires that
period concepts should be taken over by other competing concepts which should not become
rigid and institutionalised in their turn. He does see a ray of hope in the jobs which focus on
subgenres as science fiction, children’s literature or social fields as women’s studies. The aim
of the graduate student should be to access historical knowledge which extends beyond
national boundaries. However the canonical set of periods make it very difficult to imagine
an alternative set which is arbitrary or conceptual. This then would mean a radically different
historical order but it would definitely train students to think in nonconformist ways.
Throughout the essay the writer is trying to drive home the point that history ought to be
studied in new and interesting ways. For achieving this objective, the need is to modify our
curricula or produce new knowledge within the framework of existing curricular structures.
For this the writer cites the example of Penn state university which provides one
unconventional context for literary study. We should institutionalize other alternatives which
affect the manner in which our students and faculty think,teach, publish and hire.

10.4 References
1) Eric Weiskott “On Literary Periodisation”
" https://www.google.com/amp/s/ericweiskott.com/2019/03/07/on-literary-
periodization/amp/

2) Approaches and Methods of Periodization in Literary History

https://doaj.org/article/193bad1b38754d9b9dcba15fecf456b4

3) Robert Rehder, "Periodization and the Theory of Literary History. "

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http://www.robertrehder.com/site/Essays/Periodization_1.html

4) Micah Mattix, "Periodization and Difference. ", New Literary History, vol. 35, no. 4,
Autumn 2004

10.5 Further Reading

1) Mark Milne, editor. Literary Movements for Students. 2009.

2) Peter Widdowson. Literature. 1999.

3) Edward Albert. A History of English Literature. 1979.

4) Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle. An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory.
1995.

10.6 Model Questions

1) What are the limitations involved in the institutionalisation of the period as the
fundamental mode of literary study at every level of the literary profession? Critically
elaborate.
2) How is the institutionalization of periodization sustained by the temporalities of the
university system? Discuss.
3) What are the alternatives to the institutionalization of historical context? Support your
answer with examples.
4) How can history be taught in new and interesting ways?
5) Describe a few institutionally viable nonperiodizing concepts? What good effects are
yielded by them?
6) What are the advantages of addressing large historical categories instead of the
mastery of a restricted, period-oriented canon of works? Critically analyse.

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