Neo- Classicism

The term neo-classicism is sometimes honored but often lamented. The century’s keen interest in ancient civilization and its attempt to resurrect and apply classical ideas in to life and letters is clearly seen in this period. The Latin poets and critics of this period were considered as the best models and ultimate standards of literary taste. The earlier 18^th century poets and critics of English literature felt honour in being able to copy these poets and critics. Hence they were called Neo-classicists.

The period was also called Augustan age, which came from the self-conscious imitation of the original Augustan writers Virgil and Horace by many writers. They flattered themselves that with them English life and literature had reached a culminating period of civilization, corresponding to that which existed at Rome under the emperor Augustus.

18^th century was more educated than the centuries before. Education was no more an upper-class phenomenon. Contribution to literature, science, philosophy etc. came from all parts of the United Kingdom. It was an age of Enlightenment.

In reality the neo-classicist writers largely misunderstood the classical spirit and thinking and produced only a pseudo, superficial imitation of the classical age. The majority of the writers belonged to the upper social stratum. They over emphasized the artificial conventions of the upper-class, looked the other classes with contempt. They professed that great ancient writers like Homer and Virgil had already discovered the fundamental laws of the nature. If the modern writers followed the paths of the ancient writers, they could express the external world, including the world of human action.

The following are the important changes that happened in literature during the eighteenth century.

ü  Rapid development of the novel

ü  An explosion in satire

ü  The mutation of drama from political satire into melodrama  

ü  Evolution towards poetry of personal exploration

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Characteristics of neo-classical literature

The neo-classicists followed the conventional uniformity in manners and speech. Reason and regularity was their guiding stars. They had little appreciation for the external nature or any beauty other than formalized art. This had resulted in the emergence of artificiality in place of naturalism

In poetry importance was given to abstractness of thought and expression, resulting in artificiality & superficiality. Suppression of passion and emotion are visible in neo-classical literature. It was a literature of intelligence not a literature of passion or creative genius. The language of poetry was artificial and mannered; the humbler aspects of life and literature were ignored.

•              Closed Heroic Couplet:

Poetry was written in closed heroic couplet. Unlike the poets of Elizabethan and restoration, the neo-classicist barely tried other forms

Moving from the renaissance period to the period of neo-classicism is a climbing down. Narrowed creative vision from cosmic vision to social view, from a heroic nature of man to a smaller issue in life is the other characteristics of this period. 

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Characteristics of Renaissance Literature

Humanism

     

     Renaissance art was driven by a new notion of humanism. Man began to take interest in his own world rather than the other world. View of literature was predominantly ethical. The moral teaching was secular, not religious. Man began to perceive the positive aspects, his dignity and value rather than the dark and sinful side.

The spirit of discovery and adventure

     The influence of the spirit of discovery and adventure runs through the Renaissance literature. In Shakespeare’s England ocean became the highway of national progress. The spirit of adventure is clearly seen in the renaissance drama. Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Pericles, Merchant of Venice Marlow’s Dr. Faustus, and Tamburlaine etc. are some examples. This spirit helped to create a general tendency to explore all aspects of nature and the world.

The Revival of Classical Learning

     Plato and Aristotle lend immense influence on the renaissance. The revival of classical works and authors influenced to mold and shift the style and technique of literature. Thomas More’s Utopia and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis have introduced new plot and theme to literature.

Scientific Outlook

     The scientific spirit got changed with the publication of Copernicus’ “On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres” in 1543. The Copernican system replaced astrology with astronomy. Science and art were intermingled in the early renaissance with artists like Da Vinci entering the field of medicine, aerodynamics, anatomy etc. The previously held truths were questioned and new results were sought in this period of scientific advancement

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The Renaissance

Renaissance: the Beginning

The term Renaissance means revival or rebirth. It was originated in Italy and then spread to Germany, France and England. The renaissance revived almost all the spheres of human life including science, education, politics, religion; philosophy literature etc. this era bridged the gap between the medieval age and the modern age. The middle age was believed to be a dark age. 15^th century in English literature was a barren period. Renaissance was thus a coming out of the dark and barren period.

The period

It was a process of change, which made its appearance around the middle of the 14^th century, prospered during the 15^th & 16^th. By the century, it became part of the larger tradition and ceased to be a new force.

The historical reason

Various theories have been proposed for the origin of the renaissance in Italy. The fall of the Constantinople is the prominent among them. Constantinople was captured by an invading army of the Ottoman Empire in 1453. The attacks saw a large scale sacking and destruction the Byzantine centers of learning. Several Greek & other intellectuals fled the city during the 53 day siege along with their valuable libraries. They were sheltered in Florence by such wealthy families like the Medici.

The romans and Italians used this opportunity to know the work of Homer, Aristotle etc. at first hand. The young scholars & university students flocked to these sources of new learning, with every one eager to learn Greek language. This rediscovery of classics enlarged the spectrum of ideas, styles and genres.

The Reformation

The publication of Martin Luther’s “95 Theses” precipitated the reformation. It was a call to purify the Church and a belief that the Bible not tradition should be the sole source of spiritual authority. They skillfully used the power of the printing press. The reformist Christians, the Protestants, believed in the authority of the Bible, translated the Bible from Latin to various languages and distributed

Impact of Petrarch

Petrarch can be seen as the epitome of the renaissance literary theorists and practitioners.  He was deeply involved in the campaign to rediscover ancient Greek and Latin writers and their values. His sonnets Canzoniere had a lasting impact on the renaissance. Thomas Wyatt & Earl of Surrey took this form to England. Shakespeare, Sidney, Spencer, Milton etc popularized it. They all are indebted to Petrarch.
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Harmony of mind, body and spirit in Sri Aurobindo’s “Is India Civilized”

Sri Aurobindo ranks high among the greatest personalities of modern India. He was a multifaceted genius, being a politician, social critic, educationalist, philosopher, man of letters etc. The essay “Is India Civilized” was originally serialized in the quarterly Arya from December 1918 to February 1919. It was basically a response to the attack of William Archer, a British critic, on Indian civilization.

Aurobindo begins by stating unequivocally how a culture or civilization may be evaluated. The true happiness in this world is the terrestrial aim of man, and true happiness lies in the finding and maintenance of a natural harmony of spirit, mind and body. According to Aurobindo happiness is the main goal of human life.

          In Aurobindo’s scheme of things, a human being possesses at least three levels of being – the physical, the mental and the spiritual. And what is more important, without a natural harmony between these three levels, we can never be really happy.

It also means that any country or society, which caters only to the body and the mind but leaves out the spirit, cannot achieve true happiness. A society which nourishes the spirit may attain very high levels of material prosperity. Our very nature is such that we cannot be truly happy until we have the opportunity to strive for perfection.

Pointing the western progress, he says a progress, targeting only on material element is not true progress. Only through the harmony of mind, body and spirit a person or a society can really achieve progress and happiness.

Ecriture Feminine: Helene Cixous

     

     In ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1976) Helene Cixous introduces a new ways of thinking and writing about women and literature.  It is called Ecriture feminine (feminine writing). A feminine text is designed to smash and shatter all the frame work of institutions created by the male authority.

     Feminine writing acknowledges its rootedness in the body. She urges the women saying, “Write yourself, your body must be heard”. Since it is the female body, it has been repressed historically by male theology, philosophy and social system. Theology openly repressed the body advocating the negation of body and desires and in particular the female body, which is regarded as a source of temptation and often as unclean. Writing with the body implies a return of the repressed. It expresses the individuality of the self. This new writing expressing the new woman will resist the myths and language introduced by men

     This new insurgent writing will cause a break in the history of woman at two levels

• It will affect a return of woman to her body, whereby she can realize ‘decensored’ relation to her sexuality
• When she seizes the occasion to speak, this will mark her “shattering entry into history”. It will confirm a place for her other than that is reserved by the male institution and history

The Laugh of the Medusa: Helene Cixous

     ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1976) is a seminal essay by the French writer and feminist Helene Cixous. Her peculiar contribution to literature, Ecriture feminine (feminine writing) is expressed in this work. The work is structured like a poem as a refusal to the conventional rhetoric formats of argumentation. The ‘arguments’ of this text is based on the materiality of language, the texture of words and effects of word combination etc. The work is not circling around any central metaphor, since according to Cixous the very notion of centrality is transitory.

     Cixous charges that “Men have riveted us between two horrifying myths: between the Medusa and the abyss”. The ‘Abyss’ refers to the connotation of Freud’s designation of women as a ‘dark continent’ – difficult to analyze and understand. She denies this myth.

     Medusa was traditionally portrayed as a monster; with snakes in place of her hair. She was once renowned for her loveliness. Her hair was attractive. Poseidon (God of the Sea) robbed her of her virginity and punished her by changing her hair into revolting snakes and made her face so terrible.

     The myth of Medusa represents the repression of female sexuality and beauty. Cixous concentrate on the Medusa prior to the repression of her sexuality, prior to her changing into a monster. For Cixous laughter is a symbolic mode of refusing the male concept of history and truth as defined by masculine traditions of thought. She adds that A feminine text is designed to smash and shatter all the frame work of institutions, to blow up the truth and break up the ‘truth’ with laughter

     Cixous urges for the breaking of myths related to women. to redeem woman from the degraded status in the history of male mythology she has to demolish all such myths and start writing. She urges the women saying, “Write yourself, your body must be heard”

Dissociation of Sensibility

The phrase Dissociation of Sensibility appeared in Eliots essay on ‘The Metaphysical Poets’. A good poetry is the result of the fusion of thought and feeling. Such fusion is called ‘Unification of Sensibility’. It is the opposite of dissociation of sensibility. Metaphysical poets have strictly followed this unification, but according to Eliot this fusion of thought and feeling characteristic had been progressively lost in the 17^th century. It is a loss from which we have never recovered. Eliot complained that the influence of Milton and Dryden caused this dissociation of sensibility. Bad poetry is the result of this dissociation of sensibility, lack of fusion between thought and feeling.

By ‘sensibility’ Eliot means a synthetic faculty which can amalgamate and unite thought and feeling, the sensuous and the intellectual. The acceptance of the Elizabethans is due to the unified sensibility that they possessed. This capacity is visible in the works of John Donne. After Donne and Herbert poets lost this power of unification, they could either think or they could feel. The 18^th century poets were intellectuals, they though hardly felt. The Romantics felt but did not think.

For Eliot if the poets of the 20^th century are willing to imitate the metaphysical poets this breach might be healed. 

Objective Correlative

     Objective Correlative is one of the most important critical concepts of T.S.Eliot. Eliot’s idea of poetic impersonality finds its formulation in this concept. Eliot described this concept in his famous essay “Hamlet and his Problems”. He believed that the poet is unable to transfer his/her emotions and ideas directly to the reader. Thus there must be some sort of mediation. Eliot says “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”

     

     Through this objective correlative the transaction between the author and the reader takes place. Thus what the author has to say is objectified. These objects can be a situation, certain inanimate objects, and characters etc. The external actions or objects are representing the internal emotions of the characters. The sleep waking scene, candle, comments relating to the perfumes of Arabia, smell of blood etc. in Macbeth gives us the picture of Lady Macbeth’s emotional and mental state.

     Shakespeare has failed to find suitable objective correlative in his drama Hamlet. Hamlet’s suffering is not conveyed properly by any character or any action in the play. Thus for Eliot Shakespeare’s Hamlet is an artistic failure. Eliot admired Dante’s poetry and its visual imagination because Dante did not lose his grasp over the objective correlative.

     The worldwide loss of vision in José Saramago’s Blindness, the car in Stephen King’s Christine, Boo Radley in To Kill A Mockingbird etc. are examples of objective correlatives.  

Pathetic Fallacy

A literary device wherein something nonhuman found in nature like animals, plants, natural forces etc. functions as if from human feeling or motivation or thought. The term was coined by John Ruskin in his book Modern Painters. The description will be imaginary and fanciful. The term pathetic here uses in a derogatory senses- as imparting emotions to something else. In literature inanimate objects found in the nature are often being used to mirror the mood of a person. E.g. angry tides, smiling stars etc. Victorian writers and Gothic novelists abundantly used this technique in their works. 

Examples

Wordsworth uses the image of cloud to picture the feeling of loneliness.

 I wandered lonely as a child

 That floats on high o’er vales and hills

Mary Shelley in her Frankenstein has used the pathetic fallacy effectively. 

 The desert mountains and dreary glaciers are my refuge. I have  wandered here many days; the caves of ice, which I only do not  fear, are  a dwelling to me, and the only one which man does  not grudge

The creature tells his pathetic and desolate life to his creator, Frankenstein. The desolate glaciers and desert mountains explains his status to the reader.

Touchstone Method. Matthew Arnold

To find which poetry is the best, Arnold suggests a method known as touchstone method. This method was introduced into literature by Matthew Arnold in his work “The Study of Poetry”. Touchstone is a stone on which gold is rubbed to test its quality. In a metaphorical usage Arnold says that the great masters of the past are suitable touchstones to test the quality of the poems of the coming generations. Some model lines from Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton will be used as touchstones to test new poems. It uses the method of comparing and evaluating. The lines may be different but there is one thing common in them, “the very highest poetic quality”.

He quotes, from Homer: “In his will is our peace”. From Shakespeare, “If though didst ever held me in thy heart/Absent thee from felicity awhile, /And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain/To tell my story….. :(Dying words of Hamlet to Horatio) and from Milton, “And the courage never to submit or yield/And what is else not to be overcome….” (Paradise Lost Book,) etc.

These few lines can guide us properly to judge our own and others poems properly. From these great masters we can understand how they beautifully express the meaning in fine structure and diction.

Thus according to this method Chaucer, Dryden, Pope and Shelley fall short of the best, because they lack high seriousness. Arnold’s ideal poets are Homer and Sophocles in the ancient world, Dante and Milton and among moderns Goethe and Wordsworth. He puts Wordsworth in the front rank not for his poetry but for his criticism of life.

Four Humors of the Body

The four bodily humors were part of Shakespearean cosmology attributed from the Ancient Greek Philosophers Aristotle, Hippocrates etc. they are formed around the four elements of earth water, air, fire and earth, the four qualities of cold, hot, moist and dry and the four humors. These physical qualities determine the behavior of all created thing. The different personality types of the characters are also arranged in accordance with these humors.

Humors	Element	Season	Qualities
Melancholic	Earth	Winter	Cold & Dry
Phlegmatic	Water	Autumn	Cold & Moist
Choleric	Fire	Summer	Hot & Dry
Sanguine	Air	Spring	Hot & Moist

The Jacobean's thought of themselves as especially prone to Melancholy

Willing Suspension of Disbelief

The idea is proposed by Coleridge as a formula for justifying the use of fantastic or non-realistic elements in literature. To believe the supernatural and unbelievable, the spectator or reader suspends his critical faculties. In other words it’s a Sacrifice of realism and logic for the sake of enjoyment.

Coleridge suggested that if a writer could infuse a "human interest and a semblance of truth" into a fantastic tale, the reader would suspend judgment concerning the implausibility of the narrative”

Examples

Life of Pi: Pi Patel has two stories to offer about what happened at the Pacific Ocean. The first story tells of a boy named Pi Patel, who survives on a life boat at Pacific Ocean with a Bengal Tiger, called Richard Parker. In the second story he replaces all the animals with humans, including his mother. The first story is a better story, but the second is the reasonable. The very structure of the story itself is designed to force the reader or viewer to subconsciously choose whether they are prepared to walk away from the “reasonable” to accept the better story.  If the reader or the audience is ready to suspend their ‘disbelieve’ the first story can be taken into account.

Superman: The storyteller tells the audience that, in this story, a man can fly and he comes from a distant planet called Krypton.  The audience suspends their disbelief and prepares themselves to enjoy the story.

Dante Alighieri's Four Senses of Allegory

Allegory is a figure of speech in which abstract ideas and principles are described in terms of a story, picture or a poem.

E.g. Shakespeare’s The Tempest: a fight between good and evil on a deserted island

Orwell- Animal Farm: Pigs stand for political figures of the Russian revolution

Allegory is integral to the work of Dante. In his work The Banquet (1306-1309) he states that allegory has four senses, which he explains as follows:

1. Literal: this is the sense that doesn’t go beyond the surface of the letter, as in the fables of the poets.
2.   Allegorical: this is the one that is hidden beneath the literal meaning of a fable. It expresses the hidden truth behind a story. As an example for this Dante offers Ovid’s account of Orpheus taming the wild beasts. The allegorical meaning of this, according to Dante, is the wise man makes cruel heart grow tender and humble.
3.  Moral: moral sense is illustrated by the Gospel account of Christ’s ascending the mountain to be transfigured.  Among the 12 disciples he chose only three to accompany him. The moral idea is that in matter of great secrecy we should have few companions.
4. Anagogical: ie. Beyond the sense. This occurs when a scripture is expounded in a spiritual sense more than its literal sense. Dante recalls Psalm 114 (the Bible) which states when the people of Israel left Egypt “Judea was made whole and free”. It means, for Dante, when the soul departs from sin it is made whole and free in its power. Egypt is seen as ‘sin’ or ‘evil’ and the Israel people is the soul’

Dante insisted that the literal meaning always comes first. He pictures the literal meaning as being on the outside, enclosing the other senses, which are within. By insisting on allegory and its senses Dante was partly reacting against the definition of allegory and metaphor by classical rhetoricians as just a mere substitution of one set of terms for another. He inculcate that allegory is a powerful tool to express the ‘dark’ subjects otherwise forbidden especially concerning God and eternity.