English Literature Since 1965
This is a short summary of some of the major currents in English Literature since 1965. The difficulty in making such a summary is that the language rather than nationality has now become the main identifier for the creative use of English. But the language itself has become more varied. Take this passage from the 2020 book Shuggie Bann by queer Scottish/American author Douglas Stuart:
“Ah have been lonely fur years now. Lonely long afore ma wife died. Don't get us wrong. She was a guid wummin, a guid wummin just like our Colleen, but we were jist stuck in our wee routine. When ye think about it, ah've been under the ground most of ma life. There wasn't much in me for sharing at the end of a day. After twenty years, what do you talk about? But she was a guid wummin. She used to make me these big hot dinners, with meat and gravy, the plate scalding hot cos she'd warm it up all day in the oven. We ate big hot dinners because we had nothing left to say. Nothing worthwhile anyway. Ah'm forty-three. That's four years older than when ma father died, so I should've been done. I should've been retiring from the pits, living the rest of ma days out with her and with nothing to say. When I saw ye I wasn't looking. I didn't know of you then, hadn't heard our Colleen lift your name. That's wummin's stuff, isn't it? They don't talk to the men about that. Gossip. Telling tales. Chapel. That's their club. All I know is when I saw you sat behind that glass, I saw someone lonely too, and I hoped we might have something to say to each other. I realised then. Ah don't want to be done.”― Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain
This is one of the more recent examples of how 'English' has become a many sided language, a world language that is no longer just tied to one nation or people. The English it is written in could be called dialect, but it is more than that as it is no longer about high and low but more about culture. At the same time authors and creators of English Literature are no longer just male, or just writing on paper, or just speaking about a idealised or imaginary world that reproduces or reflects the values of dominant and powerful groups and interests (usually middle class white males). Literature has escaped from the high castle it once occupied and has become something that is more free but that is also much more difficult to explain.
Post-modernism
Postmodernism is a broad movement that developed in the mid-to-late 20th century across philosophy, the arts, architecture, and criticism, marking a departure from modernism. The term has been more generally applied to describe a historical era said to follow after modernity and the tendencies of this era.
As is the case with all the eras or movements we have discussed in this course, and generally, postmodernism is a way of organising knowledge. Whenever we speak of a type of thought, or a time in philosophy, we are doing so 'after the fact'. Postmodernism has its roots in modernism, as post-colonialism is also dependent upon colonialism. But the exact definition and when it starts and stops is not so easy to determine.
Postmodernism questions the idea of progress, the modernist belief that things will get better with more technology, better education, more scientific discoveries or better relationships between nations began to be questioned. Philosophers, authors, poets, artists and musicians all worked with new ideas, many of which came out of France beginning in the 1960s. The primary features of postmodernism typically include the ironic play with styles, citations and narrative levels, a metaphysical skepticism or nihilism towards a "grand narrative" of Western culture, and a preference for the virtual at the expense of the Real (or more accurately, a fundamental questioning of what 'the real' constitutes).
Since the late 1990s, there has been a growing sentiment in popular culture and in academia that postmodernism "has gone out of fashion". Others argue that postmodernism is dead in the context of current cultural production. More recently metamodernism, post-postmodernism and the "death of postmodernism" have been widely debated: in 2007 Andrew Hoberek noted in his introduction to a special issue of the journal Twentieth Century Literature titled "After Postmodernism" that "declarations of postmodernism's demise have become a critical commonplace". A small group of critics has put forth a range of theories that aim to describe culture or society in the alleged aftermath of postmodernism.The exhibition Postmodernism – Style and Subversion 1970–1990 at the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, 24 September 2011 – 15 January 2012) was billed as the first show to document postmodernism as a historical movement.
Feminist Literature
Fuelled by the feminist movement of the early twentieth century, many women authors began to explore new modes of expression, focusing increasingly on issues that were central to their existence as women and as artists. By the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, with the rise of the second wave feminist movement, women artists began expanding their repertoire of creative expression to openly include, and even celebrate their power and experiences as women.
The Handmaid's Tale is a novel by Margaret Atwood published in 1985. It is one of many novels published since the 1960s by women who have won the respect and admiration of the English speaking world for their writing. In the 1930s and later, the writer Virginia Woolf gave lectures where she reflected upon the challenge she and her fellow female artists faced at the beginning of the century—Woolf noted that although women had been writing for centuries, the subjects they had written about and even the style in which they wrote was often dictated not by their own creative vision, but by standards imposed upon women by male dominated society. Advances in women's issues, such as the right to vote, the fight for reproductive rights, and the opportunities women gained during the first half of the century in the arena of work outside the home were major developments. Despite these changes, women artists during these years continued to feel restricted by imposed standards of creativity.
Prior to the mid-1960s, women writers who ventured beyond the established feminine stereotypes were regularly characterized as "outcasts," denounced as vulgar or, in the case of Simone de Beauvoir, even "frigid." Nonetheless, many of them persisted in exploring new ways of expression, and poets such as Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and others continued to write works articulating the struggle they faced as authors who could choose to "write badly and be patronized or to write well and be attacked," (Bomarito & Hunter p. 4:446).
Another aspect of this struggle by women to gain respect as independent artists was the fight between women who felt compelled to "transcend" their femininity, opting to write as androgynous artists—Woolf chief among them—and others, including Erica Jong, who felt strongly that unless women could find the means to express themselves openly and clearly, they might as well not write at all. Eventually, many women writers in the 1960s and later broke through the stereotypical and restrictive paradigm of female authorship, creating and publishing works that celebrated and explored issues that were central to identity as a woman.
In the 1970s feminist literature looked both back and forward. It was a time of critical analysis and examination of how women had been maginalised, ignored, exploited and abused through the disempowerment that plagued previous generations. But it also looked forward, with feminist science fiction, books about feminist utopias (many of which were inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness published in 1969), manifestos and philosophical works that examined the possibilities for feminist liberation and all the implications that came with it. In 1970 Germaine Greer published The Female Eunuch that became an international bestseller and an important text in the feminist movement. The British magazine Spare Rib was an active part of the emerging Women’s Liberation Movement in the late 20th century. Running from 1972-93, this now iconic magazine challenged the stereotyping and exploitation of women, while supporting collective, realistic solutions to the hurdles women faced.
The Second Wave of Feminism is seen by many as ending in the western English speaking world in the early1980s. Difference feminism was developed at this time, in part as a reaction to popular liberal feminism (also known as "equality feminism"), which emphasizes the similarities between women and men in order to argue for equal treatment for women. Difference feminism, although it is still aimed at equality between men and women, emphasizes the differences between men and women and argues that identicality or sameness are not necessary in order for men and women, and masculine and feminine values, to be treated equally. Liberal feminism aims to make society and law gender-neutral, since it sees recognition of gender difference as a barrier to rights and participation within liberal democracy, while difference feminism holds that gender-neutrality harms women "whether by impelling them to imitate men, by depriving society of their distinctive contributions, or by letting them participate in society only on terms that favor men" (Grande Jensen p. 3). Third Wave Feminism would begin to rise in the early 1990s. It began in the United States and continued until the rise of the fourth wave in the 2010s. Grounded by members of Generation X and in the civil-rights advances of the second wave, third-wave feminists embraced individualism in women and diversity and sought to redefine what it meant to be a feminist.
Feminist literature is fiction, nonfiction, drama, or poetry, which supports the feminist goals of defining, establishing, and defending equal civil, political, economic, and social rights for women. It often identifies women's roles as unequal to those of men – particularly as regarding status, privilege, and power – and generally portrays the consequences to women, men, families, communities, and societies as undesirable.
Post-colonial Literature
The colonial empire of Britain was coming to an end by the 1950s. Many countries had already gained their independence. The Commonwealth of Nations dates back to the first half of the 20th century with the decolonisation of the British Empire through increased self-governance of its territories. It was originally created as the British Commonwealth of Nations through the Balfour Declaration at the 1926 Imperial Conference, and formalised by the United Kingdom through the Statute of Westminster in 1931. The Declaration accepted the growing political and diplomatic independence of the Dominions in the years after World War I. It also recommended that the governors-general, the representatives of the King who acted for the Crown as de facto head of state in each dominion, should no longer also serve automatically as the representative of the British government in diplomatic relations between the countries (this role would eventually be taken over by ambassadors). The current Commonwealth of Nations was formally constituted by the London Declaration in 1949, which modernised the community and established the member states as "free and equal".
But all was not simple when it came to decolonisation. By the 1950s many writers and intellectuals had begun to examine what colonialism had done to their lands that had once been part of the empire. These writers had often been education within the colonial system, but had quickly understood that they were not equal to those people who were educating them. The effects and results of colonialism had not gone away with the granting of independence and post-colonial literature deals with the many results, impacts and lasting influences of the colonial period. Of course one of these is migration. Migrant literature and post-colonial literature show some considerable overlap. However, not all migration takes place in a colonial setting, and not all post-colonial literature deals with migration.
Post-colonial literature continues today but it began with a sense of identification with a nation, or nationalism, fueled anti-colonial movements seeking to gain independence from colonial rule. Language and literature were factors in consolidating this sense of national identity to resist the impact of colonialism. With the advent of the printing press, newspapers and magazines helped people across geographical barriers identify with a shared national community. This idea of the nation as a homogeneous imagined community connected across geographical barriers through the medium of language became the model for the modern nation. Postcolonial literature not only helped consolidate national identity in anti-colonial struggles but also critiqued the European colonial pedigree of nationalism. As depicted in Salman Rushdie's novels for example, the homogeneous nation was built on European models by the exclusion of marginalized voices. They were made up of religious or ethnic elites who spoke on behalf of the entire nation, silencing minority groups.
Postcolonial feminism emerged as a response to the Eurocentric focus of feminism. It accounts for the way that racism and the long-lasting political, economic, and cultural effects of colonialism affect non-white, non-Western women in the postcolonial world. Postcolonial feminism is not simply a subset of postcolonial studies or another variety of feminism. Rather, it seeks to act as an intervention that changes the assumptions of both postcolonial and feminist studies. Audre Lorde's foundational essay, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House", uses the metaphor of the master's tools and master's house to explain that western feminism fails to make positive change for third world women because it uses the same tools as the patriarchy.
Queer Literature
Along with the other movements after 1965 which I have already briefly described there has been a freeing up of the discussion, depiction and representation of sexualities and gender that exist outside the norm. This is broadly termed Queer. Queer literature is writing that questions dominant or accepted definitions of gender and sexuality. Queer literature can be understood according to the queer theory.
"Queer theory is a term that emerged in the late 1980s for a body of criticism on issues of gender, sexuality, and subjectivity that came out of gay and lesbian scholarship in such fields as literary criticism, politics, sociology, and history. Queer theory rejects essentialism in favor of social construction; it breaks down binary oppositions such as 'gay' or 'straight'; while it follows those postmodernists who declared the death of the self, it simultaneously attempts to rehabilitate a subjectivity that allows for sexual and political agency. Some of the most significant authors associated with queer theory include Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Michael Warner, and Wayne Koestenbaum" - Tobin, R. (2001) From the Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, in Credo Reference.
Queer theory is the lens used to explore and challenge how scholars, activists, artistic texts, and the media perpetrate gender- and sex-based binaries, and its goal is to undo hierarchies and fight against social inequalities. Due to controversy about the definition of queer, including whether the word should even be defined at all or should be left deliberately open-ended, there are many disagreements and often contradictions within queer theory.
Queer literature is a growing genre filled with a diverse array of novels that are pushing the literary envelope. These works of fiction challenge readers to explore worlds beyond conventional definitions and understandings of sexuality and gender identity/expression.
One of the first films I remember that addressed queer identities in a mainstream film was My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), with the screenplay written by Hanif Kureishi. The film is intersectional in its multidimensional depiction of minorities, generations and sexualities.
Set in South London in the 1980s, it concerns a second-generation British Pakistani man, Omar, renovating the Churchill Laundrette (a name clearly chosen by Kureishi for its nationalist associations) with the help of a white British childhood friend, Johnny. Partly by intercepting a drug deal, Omar draws in customers by equipping the laundrette with games machines and piped music. Though Johnny has at one point had connections to the racist National Front, his friendship with Omar develops into a sexual affair, despite the violence and prejudice they are surrounded by.
In 2021 many of the ideas and concepts I have mentioned here are still relevant and powerful for culture and literature. But in recent years other concepts and concerns have joined them to influence and form culture. Post-humanism, the anthropcocene are two more recent systems of thought for understanding society, culture and our work as well as those concept put forward by thinkers such as Raoul Eshelman (performatism), Gilles Lipovetsky (hypermodernity), Nicolas Bourriaud (altermodern), and Alan Kirby (digimodernism, formerly called pseudo-modernism). None of these new theories or labels have so far gained very widespread acceptance. Sociocultural anthropologist Nina Müller-Schwarze offers neo-structuralism as a possible direction.
Sources
Jessica Bomarito, Jeffrey W. Hunter, Feminism in Literature: A Gale Critical Companion 2004
Grande Jensen, Pamela. Finding a New Feminism: Rethinking the Woman Question for Liberal Democracy. Rowman & Littlefield 1996.
Tobin, R. (2001). Queer Theory. In V. E. Taylor, & C. E. Winquist (Eds.), Encyclopedia of postmodernism. London, UK: Routledge.
Question Everything!
Comments
Post a Comment