Flores 1
Antonio Flores
English 2333
Final Essay
May 10th, 2010
Topic #1: Describe some characteristics of literature in the 20th century and illustrate these characteristics using the texts studied in class. Okay let’s start with William Butler Yeats, who was not only the main figure in the
Irish literary renaissance but also the twentieth century’s greatest poet in the English language. Yeats constantly uses allusive imagery and large symbolic structures. Yeats adopted a cyclical model of history which he created a private mythology that allowed him to come to terms with both cultural and personal pain. This model also helped explain the symptoms of the Western civilization’s declining spiral; the plight of contemporary Irish society and the chaos of European culture around World War 1.
Yeats shares with writers like Rilke and T. S. Eliot the quest for larger meaning in a time of trouble and the use of symbolic language to give verbal form to that quest. For many years it is Yeats’s mastery of images that defines his work. From his early use of symbols as private keys, or dramatic metaphors for complex personal emotions, to the immense cosmology of his last work, he continued to create a highly visual poetry whose power derives from the dramatic interweaving of specific images. One of his poems called When You Are Old pleads his love for the beautiful actress and Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, whom he met in 1889 and who repeatedly refused to marry him. From the love poems of his youth to his old age, when The Circus Animals’
Desertion describes her as prey to fanaticism and hate, Yeats returned again and again to examine his feelings for this woman, who personified love, beauty, and Irish
Flores 2 nationalism along with hope, frustration and despair. Another poem called Leda and the
Swan, on one level an erotic retelling of a mythic rape, also foreshadows the Trojan
War—brute force mirroring brute force. Yeats’ poetry is always aware of the physical and emotional roots from which it sprang. His poems are full of passionate feelings, erotic desire and disappointment, delight in sensuous beauty, horror at civil war and anarchy, dismay at degradation and change. T.S. Eliot is widely known as the father of Modernism. In poetry and in literary criticism, T.S. Eliot has a unique position as a writer who not only expressed but helped to define modernist taste and style. He rejected the narrative, moralizing, and frequently noble style of late Victorian poetry. Much of Eliot’s immediate impact on poetry was not merely formal but spiritual and philosophical. The search for meaning that pervades his work created a famous picture of the barrenness of modern culture in The Waste Land, which juxtaposed images of past nobility and present decay, civilizations near and far, and biblical, mythical, and Buddhist allusions to evoke the dilemma of a composite, anxious, and infinitely vulnerable modern soul. In many ways, Eliot’s combination of spiritual insight and technical innovation carries on the tradition of the symbolist poet who was both visionary artist and consummate craftsman. Two countries, England and the United States, claim Elliot as part of their national literature. Bertolt Brecht is a dominant figure in modern drama not only as the author of a half dozen plays that rank as modern classics but as the first master of a powerful new concept of theater. He was dissatisfied with the traditional notion, derived from
Aristotle’s Poetics, that drama should draw its spectators into identification with and sympathy for the characters, and with the realist aesthetic of naturalness and psychological credibility. Brecht’s focus was the community at large and social
Flores 3 responsibility. For Brecht, a political activist, the modern audience must not be allowed to indulge in passive emotional identification at a safe distance or in the subjunctive whirlpool of existential identity crises. His characters are to be seen as members of society, and his audience must be educated and moved to action. Brecht developed the basic ideas of epic theater through his plays, theoretical writings, and dramatic productions into one of the most powerful theatrical styles of the twentieth century. One of his plays called The Good Woman of Setzuan shows how an instinctively good and generous person can survive in this world only by putting on a mask of hardness and calculation. This play is considered one of his greatest works which shows how his characters and situations out of his plays remain emotionally engrossed, in spite of his intentions and frequent revisions. Brecht’s concept of epic theater touches on all aspects of the form: dramatic structure, stage setting, music, and the actor’s performance. The predicament of Franz Kafka’ s writing is, for many, the predicament of modern civilization. Nowhere is the anxiety and alienation of twentieth century society more visible than in his stories of individuals struggling to prevail against a vast meaningless and apparently hostile system. Kafka’s fictional world has long fascinated contemporary writers, who find in it an extraordinary blend of prosaic realism and nightmarish, infinitely interpretable symbolism. Kafka’s stories are not allegories, although many readers have been tempted to find in them an underlying message. The
Metamorphosis, Kafka’s longest complete work published in his lifetime, is first of all a consummate narrative: the question “what happens next?” never disappears from the moment that Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed. R.K. Narayan, India’s foremost contemporary novelist casts a sympathetic but
Flores 4 wryly comic glance on everyday life in his native land. His is a dual, Anglo-Indian sensibility: he uses the fictional techniques of the realistic Western novel, and writes in
English for an international audience, but he describes a society where English is only one of fifteen major languages, and where cultural values are quite different from those of the British Isles. A recurrent topic in Narayan’s work is the quest for identity, a theme found also in Joyce, Proust, Lessing, or Ellison but whose cultural context is radically different from the Indian novelist. As a result, Narayan’s fiction has a characteristically ethical dimension in the midst of its most mundane or comic descriptions. Whether the protagonist is student, English teacher, shady financial expert, tourist guide, vendor of sweets, sign painter, or even tiger, he is seen as a soul in search of spiritual identity.
”Emden” was published in the collection of Malgudi Days. In the introduction, Narayan defines his stories as moments “when a personality passes through a crisis of spirit or circumstances,” or when “a pattern of existence is brought to view.” Such a pattern emerges in the ambiguous experience of old Rao, called “Emden” after the name of a ruthless battleship that shelled Madras during World War 1. Japan’s most famous modern novelist was at home in both Eastern and Western literary traditions. Spokesman for an essentially Japanese culture toward the end of his life, Yukio Mishima was at the same time better acquainted with Western civilization and literature than any of his contemporaries. Mishima’s harshly realistic portrayals, the iconic introspection and often philosophic discourse of his novels, the rich vocabulary and calculated balance and order of all his writing, became vehicles for the expression of a lost purity of Japanese culture that the author wished to revive in a vulgarized modern society. “Patriotism”, one of Mishima’s many explorations of heroic death is based on an actual uprising, the Ni Ni Roku Incident of February 26, 1936. Mishima was
Flores 5 fascinated by this tale of soldierly devotion and death, and felt that the emperor had broken the bond of samurai loyalty by not recognizing the rebels’ devotion. For Mishima, however, both husband and wife have been granted a great gift of committing shinju or double “lovers’ suicide”. Mishima wrote on many occasions about the importance of seizing such an appropriate moment if it came, and about the regret that comes from having missed the right opportunity. The governing theme of Wole Soyinka’s work is the dualism of life and the consciousness in modern Africa. Transition for Soyinka carries more than a historical and social meaning. Soyinka’s work can be read as both meditation on the profound disruptions in the collective psyche produced by this process and as an imaginative effort to repair the collapse of the old order with a new founding myth, a myth derived from his Yoruba inheritance and embodying his vision of a new, distinctively African moral and spiritual awareness. Soyinka’s acute sense of African dualism owes much to his personal life and background. Death and the King’s Horseman, illustrates the function of myth as Soyinka sees it, a function linked to his theory of a tragic human incompleteness that seeks completeness in ritual. Death and the King’s Horseman is
Soyinka’s masterpiece; in it, the verbal resourcefulness and mastery of theatrical effects evident in his earlier plays come together to produce a work whose evocative powers ensures its appeals both as a mode of reconnection to a living tradition and as a n exploration of a universal human dilemma. Although other modernist writers are known for their formal innovations, it is the
Argentinean Jorge Luis Borges who represents, above all, the gamelike or playful aspect of literary creation. Borges’ world is one of pure thought in which abstract fictional games are played out when an initial situation or concept is pushed to its
Flores 6 elegantly logical extreme. Borge’s imaginative world is an immense labyrinth, a “garden of forking paths” in which images of mazes and infinite mirroring, cyclical repetition and recall, illustrate the effort of an elusive narrative voice to understand its own significance and that of the world. The intricate, riddling, mazelike ambiguity of Borges’s earned him international reputation and influence, to the point that a “style like Borges” has become a recognized term. The Garden of Forking Paths begins as a simple spy story purporting to reveal the hidden truth about a German bombing raid during World War 1.
Borges executes his detective story with the traditional planted clues. Novelist, poet, memoirist, and writer of short fiction, Leslie Marmon Silko, within the confines of a single work, can comfortably alternate between prose and poetry in a manner reminiscent of the traditional Native American narrators from whom she descends. Among her primary concerns as an artist are the continuity of native tradition and the power of ancient forces to govern modern life. Silko’s work for all its seriousness and lyricism is marked by a touch of irreverence. She is well acquainted with the proverbial trickster, Coyote, and has demonstrated that she herself is an accomplished live teller of Coyote tales. Storytelling has deep roots. But if a story is to be viable it must be constantly reshaped; and Silko is an unbashed reshaper. Over the years, as Silko’s work has expanded and deepened, one of her shortest and earliest pieces, Yellow Woman, has continued to grow in esteem. In narrative lore, however,
Yellow Woman most frequently appears in tales of abduction, where she is said to have been captured by a strange man at a stream while fetching water.