CRISIS OF CULTURE : Politics and Post World War Literature (original) (raw)

Literature Developed by Mind under the Attack: A Critical Unsealing of War Narratives

Sahityasetu/ UGC CARE LISTED JOURNAL, 2021

This paper will attempt to investigate how World War I caused Modernism and how that abolished textual continuity as in Pound, Eliot, Joyce and Woolf, harmony in music as in Schoenberg is throwing back a fragmented and disillusioned mind which created an art. Special attention is paid to depict how the fragmented society after war led Picasso and Braque to pioneer Cubism in painting. The War time, however, is not confined to a singular significance but would differ across the subjects and hence symbolism created rich suggestive poetry rather than explicit signification which will be explored in the works of W.B. Yeats. Surrealism is excavated by taking up the paintings of Salvador Dali. Freud feels the urge of such historical necessity to come up with his results and I will try to show how psychoanalysis influenced the creations of Joyce and Woolf. The paper will also reinvestigate and prove Beckett's absurdist writings that after World War II the very centre of value judgement in humans had fallen into the abyss of nothingness, bringing us to the postmodern world. Attempts have also been made to show how precisely Adorno and Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School of German Marxist, Derrida and Lyotard gauge the psyche of the postmodern world.

A Comparative Analysis of the Themes of ‘War’, ‘Love’, and ‘Illusion’ in Postmodern Age in A Farewell to Arms and Eye of the Needle

Liberal Arts and Social Sciences International Journal (LASSIJ)

The study attempts to explore and analyze the themes of 'love', 'war' and 'illusion' in the two novels written by two different authors. One is A Farewell to Arms (1929) written by Ernest Hemingway and the other is Eye of the Needle (2015) written by Ken Follet. Hemingway way and Follet both are American novelists who are known for their fondness for writing on the theme of war. Hemingway wrote many novels using the backdrop of the First World War whereas Ken Follet's Eye of the Needle is authored in the backdrop of the Second World War. Hemingway is one of the representative of modern age writers, whereas Ken Follet is one the writers of postmodern age. It has been observed that both writers while writing on the theme of war in the chosen novels involve, consciously or unconsciously, two sub-themes of 'love' and 'illusion' in their fiction. The research analyzes that what are the differences and the similarities between these writers’ app...

Boklakh, D., Hrosevych, T., Tabakova, H., Ieliseienko, A., Chystiak, D. The problem of war and peace in European literature of the 20th century

Amazonia Investiga, 2023

The aim of the article is to identify and arrange the patterns of influence of the consequences of the wars of the 20th century on literature as one of the characteristic manifestations of the socio-cultural activity of the community involved in destructive military actions, and the influence of these literary works on modernity. Methods. The research employed the following methods: collection and analysis of works of war literature, cross-sectional expert rating analysis, content analysis and drawing analytical conclusions. Results. The study was focused on two lists of literary works about the First and Second World Wars. According to the rankings, Erich Maria Remarque - Der Weg zurück (about the First World War) and Anne Frank - Het Achterhuis (about the Second World War) are the leaders. Stylistic dynamics showed a change from generalized moral reflections to personal experiences of military horrors. The results confirmed the impact of military conflicts on literature and its interaction with other sociocultural phenomena. Conclusions. The authors’ appeal in the war literature of World War II to the personal experiences of the potential reader through the mediation of autobiographical literary works contributes to a fundamental revision of the moral and ethical norms of the post-war society. The academic novelty is a comprehensive analysis of the impact of global military conflicts on European literature and their role in the modern world. The results of the study can be used in literary studies, education and cultural studies for a better understanding of the influence of military conflicts on literature and the formation of a humanistic worldview. The prospects for further research direction focus on increasing the sample of empirical data through content analysis of a larger number of master works of war literature. Keywords: autobiography, expert reader analysis, content analysis, global conflicts, literary reaction.

The Post-apocalyptic Sublime: Towards Representing the Totality of the “Condition of Postmodernity” and its Symptomatology in Paul Auster’s In the Country of the Last Things (1987) and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006)

The primary objective of this research is to analyze the post-apocalyptic (as a literary and cinematic genre) in order to investigate its potential political aesthetics. The fundamental theoretical premise upon which all the arguments of the thesis rest concerns the neo-Marxist--Fredric Jameson’s especially—wisdom that “representation” understood as an explanatory model relating the a) the subject, b) the object world and c) the medium of representation is the one necessary precondition for a subject to make sense of their life-world. In “fragmented”, “bricollaged”, “compartmentalized” and complex world like the postmodern times, Jameson wonders, how are the subjects going to make sense of the “totality” of their social life?—The entire thesis, in essence, is an attempted response to this question. Having considered its “sublime” aesthetics, the post-apocalyptic, therefore, is postulated as a postmodern subject’s way of aesthetically representing the “totality” of its lived experience. The Sublimity of the post-apocalyptic—considered in the context of the two sample novels as well as a few examples from the post-apocalyptic cinema—is argued by drawing on its classic Kantian definition; the classic Sublime is reconsidered then in light of a postmodern theory of the sublime as articulated by Jameson in his Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. It should be noted that the thesis is unequivocal in its assuming a neo-Marxist frame of reference and methodology throughout the research: the post-apocalyptic is argued to be a dialectical phenomenon, a byproduct of the condition of postmodernity. Finally, the thesis concludes that the post-apocalyptic, endowed as it is with a particular sublimity (the post-apocalyptic sublime as propose in the thesis), provides an astounding strategy to aesthetically represent the totality of life under a “multinational” capitalism—it is separately argued why capitalism as such has been raised to the dignity and magnitude of a sublime phenomenon. As understandably the final conclusion of the study presumes the prior discussions of a variety of concepts, ranging from “postmodernity”, “Re-enchantment”, “the sublime” etc. the thesis proceeds by elaborating on the aforementioned topics. Thus the reader would appreciate the eclecticism of the present thesis if they viewed all the chapters as an addendum , a pre-requisite to grasp the final chapter :” The Post-apocalyptic Sublime: Towards Transcending unto the Totality of Late Capitalism as a Global System”.

Chapter Four Modernist and Postmodernist Fiction ( s )

2015

The large body of critical work centred on modernism and postmodernism, which has seen the light of day in the twentieth century and the first years of the twentieth first, is simply impressive. What partly accounts for such extensive and ever proliferating critical responses to the two (cultural and aesthetic) movements may be connected, on one level at least, to the lack of consensus and the intense debate carried out among commentators with regard to their meaning and politics. As terms, modernism and postmodernism have infiltrated the professional idioms of a variety of disciplinary fields, from literature, art and philosophy to architecture, film and cultural analysis. They are, however, often interpreted multiply in their various contexts, decoded as they are in ways that address very specific, field-bound issues and problems. What is more, their definitional limits are further stretched by the ongoing revision to which they have been subjected since at least the 1970s, as new...

The impact of World War II on Authors' mind and literature on the concept of absurdity in their works Introduction

Abstract: It is evident that the outbreak of war in 1939, as in 1914, brought to an end an era of great intellectual and creative exuberance. The condition was chaotic and tiresome. Masses were in suspense, isolation, absurdity, social class and identity crisis. Most importantly Individuals were dispersed; The rationing of paper affected the production of magazines and books; and The poem and the short story, convenient forms for men under arms, became the favored means of literary expression.