{"id":399,"date":"2012-02-15T17:33:35","date_gmt":"2012-02-15T15:33:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=399"},"modified":"2012-02-15T17:33:35","modified_gmt":"2012-02-15T15:33:35","slug":"making-sense-of-the-20th-century-or-not-the-matter-of-labels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2012\/02\/15\/making-sense-of-the-20th-century-or-not-the-matter-of-labels\/","title":{"rendered":"MAKING SENSE OF THE 20TH CENTURY (OR NOT…): THE MATTER OF LABELS <\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have started a new edition of our first year subject \u201820th century Literature\u2019 and, as usual, I\u2019m mystified by how untidy the labels used to describe it are. <\/p>\n

Not that Metaphysical or Romantic are particularly tidy, either, which sets me thinking about how and why such a mess has been made of organizing (English) Literature. Of course, with the exception of some avant-gardes few Literary schools or movements bother to choose their own label \u2013which shows how careless writers are… when thinking of marketing themselves and of posterity. We get by as best as we can, using labels pinned on authors by mocking contemporaries, or in hindsight by critics aspiring to wit. Writers seem too immersed in their surroundings to really care… It\u2019s funny to read, for example, how quintessential Modernist Virginia Woolf decides to call fellow Modernists \u201cMr. Forster, Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Strachey, Mr. Joyce, and Mr. Eliot\u201d \u2018the Georgians\u2019 in her famous essay \u201cMr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown\u201d (1924). None uses Georgian at all today to refer to them… Didn\u2019t they know they were Modernists??<\/p>\n

Monarchs have, when it comes to the periodisation of English Literature, an uneven impact. There is an Elizabethan Age but somehow nobody has thought of calling ours \u2018the second Elizabethan Age,\u2019 even though the reign of Elizabeth II (Elizabeth I for the Scots) is now in its 60th year (poor Prince Charles…). Victoria was queen for 64 years (1837-1901… poor Prince Edward) and in her case, there\u2019s no doubt that she provided a very convenient umbrella term for the period. In contrast, checking this morning how the label \u2018Georgian\u2019 is used, I came across more information on the Literature of the Caucasian Republic of Georgia than on that produced in the first decade of High Modernism… And all I found refers to the series of Georgian poetry anthologies that we now tend to connect with WWI poets.<\/p>\n

At any rate, what is clear is that since 1945 English Literature has become very hard to classify, much more so if we think of the present. There are catchy labels like \u2018Angry Young Men\u2019 or \u2018In-yer-face Theatre\u2019, but they are in dispute and, anyway, are not quite useful to describe what was going on outside the English (British?) stage. The case of the label \u2018Post-modernism\u2019 begins to smack, as I see it, of naughty intellectual and critical laziness. How can a period be said to begin in 1945, 1968, 1979 and even 1990? Is it over yet?? Who knows for sure?<\/p>\n

Suppose, for the sake of argumentation, that there is something called Post-WWII Literature and that Post-modernism runs from, say, the emblematic 1968 to the not less emblematic 1989. Let\u2019s say, then, that the year 1989-2001 form a distinct period, for which we have no name (except \u2018Globalisation\u2019) although it might seem that these two historical dates separate very neatly a slice of History in which particular kinds of Literature emerge. On the spur of the moment I told my students yesterday about Berthold Schoene\u2019s proposal that current Literature (the novel, actually) should be called Cosmopolitan, as writers feel quite free to deal with stories anywhere they please and not in their immediate surroundings. Um, appealing… yet the way I see it from 1989 onwards what seems to be happening is actually a heady mixture of the local ethnic, the post-colonial and the cosmopolitan. And, yes, 10 years have gone by since 2001, which my young students couldn\u2019t even recall.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it\u2019s time to celebrate a contest and see who comes up with an interesting label. So many writers claim today that they\u2019re not part of any collective school or movement that perhaps the best label, after all, might be \u2018Individualism\u2019 (or \u2018Self-conscious Literature\u2019?).<\/p>\n

Yes, I know what you\u2019re thinking: why on Earth use labels if they\u2019re so confusing? Well, as I said, to try to make sense of something as vast as the hectic 20th century. Here insert the usual deep sigh…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have started a new edition of our first year subject \u201820th century Literature\u2019 and, as usual, I\u2019m mystified by how untidy the labels used to describe it are. Not that Metaphysical or Romantic are particularly tidy, either, which sets me thinking about how and why such a mess has been made of organizing (English) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}