Literary eras summary
We read four poems, one from each of the following literary eras:
A flowering of arts, science, and culture that grew from the ideas of Humanism (an individual might have reason and desire and pleasure and autonomy in relation to society!), and which looked back to classical (i.e. Greek and Roman) ideas while creating intricate new forms.
Shakespeare, Montaigne, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Spenser, Sidney...
DaVinci, Michelangelo, Botticelli, Titian, Caravaggio... (Artemisia Gentileschi)
The authors of this time period stressed reason, clarity, and order, and believed that each thing aspires to an ideal form. There was an optimistic belief in man’s power to improve himself through application of thought and logic, and a proliferation of political writing.
Pope, Swift, Voltaire, Locke, Rousseau, Paine...
(Neoclassicism): Jacques-Louis David (Take a look at An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump by Joseph Wright of Derby).
Romanticism arose in the nineteenth century in reaction against Neoclassicism. It placed an emphasis on imagination, emotion, and individual transformation over the Neoclassical ideals of logic, reason, and societal transformation. Romantics value the exotic, the spiritual, the unique, over the general ideal.
Wordsworth William (and Dorothy!), Coleridge, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Blake...
Turner, Blake, Delacroix
In reaction to industrialization and World War I, a literary movement in which authors expressed disillusion and alienation from conventional forms and easy answers. No neat, pat answers: a deep questioning of why human beings are so isolated and lonely in their essential experience.
Pound, Eliot, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Yeats, Conrad... (take a look at Marianne Moore!)
Picasso, Matisse, Chagall
FIRST...
What does the poem you chose reveal about the poet's attitude towards literary art? Write a page or so, a deep comment, drawing support, particulars, from the poem you're dealing with.
Consider what the poem is saying, of course (its content), but also the way it says it (its form), the artistic choices the poet makes. Think about the question in as many dimensions as you can: What makes good poetry? What is the function of a poem; what is it for? How is art supposed to affect the artist? His/her readers? The world? And so what does that mean about how the world works? How should we approach life?
Then... Present your era:
1. dates and BRIEF historical context (3-5 minutes)
2. description of the literary movement and its most famous authors (5 minutes)
3. representative visual art and what makes it typical (5 minutes)
4. a poem from our anthology that shows us what is particular about this way of making art (30 minutes)
Renaissance: Cliona and Torria
Enlightenment: Kacie
Romanticism: Anna and Geny
Modernism: Georgia and Audrey
Finally... write a paper in which you analyze a work from an era you did not present.
The work must be a poem, short story, or essay from our anthology. It must NOT be a work that was presented in class. Close read the work to illuminate its meaning, and show the ways in which it is representative of its era. Here are the guidelines.