Name : Nidhi P. Jethava
Paper : The History of English Literature: 1900 to 2000
Roll No. : 13
Enrollment Number : 306920200009
Email ID : jethavanidhi8@gmail.com
Batch : 20-22( MA SEM- 2 )
Submitted to : S. B. Gardi Department of English, Maharaja KrishnaKumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Q. Discuss Expressionism vs Absurd Theatre.
Answer:-
Expressionism
Expressionism:- A theory or practice in art of seeing to depict the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse in the artist.
Definition:
Expressionism, artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse within a person.
A German movement in literature and the other arts which was at its height between 1910 to 1925 that is the period just before during and after world war I.
Its chief precursors were artists and writers who had in various ways departed from realistic depictions of line and the world by incorporating their arts visionary and powerfully emotional states of mind that are expressed and transmitted by means of distorted representations of the outer world. Among these precursors in painting were Vincent Van Goege , Paul Gauguin and the Nouvegian Edward Munch. Prominent among the literature precursors of the movement in the 19th century were the french poets Charles Boudlair and Arther Rimbaud, the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevisky, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzche and above all the swedish dramatist August Strindberg.
The term [ probably used by vauxcelles after a series of painting by Julien August Herve in 1901 under the title expressionism ] refers to a movement in Germany very early in the 20th c. in which a number of painters sought to avoid the representation of external reality and instead, to project themselves and a highly personal vision of the world. Briefly summarized, the main principle involved is that expression determines from and therefore imagery, punctuation, syntax and so forth. Indeed any of the formal rules and elements of writing can be bent or designed to suit the purpose.
The Theories of expressionism had considerable influence in Germany and Scandinavia. In fact, expressionism dominated the theater for a time in the 1920s. Theatrically it was a reaction against realism and aimed to show inner psychological realities. The origins of this are probably to be found in Strindberg’s ‘ A Dream Play(1907)’ and ‘ The Ghost Sonata’ (1907).
By the mid-1920s expressionism in the theatre was nearly extinct [ no longer active ] and it did not catch on much outside Germany nor was it much understood.
In France the influence has been negligible.
In England and America the drametist are really [ without question or doubt ] the only writer to have been affected; particularly Eugene O'Neill, Elmer Rice and Thronton Wilder, T. S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood.
Expressionistic theories have also had some effects on writers like Wyndham Lewis and Virginia woolf as they certainly had upon Kafka, Schickele and Edschmi. The more involved and exaggerated prose experiments of James Joyce, William Faulken and Samuel Beckett also bear signs of it.
Expressionism itself is never a concerted [ done in a planned and deliberate way usually by several or many people] or well-defined movement.
It can be said, however, that its central feature is a personal vision-of human life and human society.
Often the work implies that what is depicted or described represents the experience of an industrial, technological and urban society which is disintegrating into chaos.
Expressionist painters tended to jagged lines to depict consorted objects and forms as well as to substitute arbitrary, often lurid colors, for natural hues; among these painters were Emil Nolde, Frank Marc, Oskar Kokoschka and Wassily Kandinsky.
Drama was a prominent and widely influenced form of expressionist writing. Among the better known German playwrights were Georg Kaiser, Ernst began to be flagged by the Nazis in the early 1930s, but it has continued to exert influence on English and American, as well as European, art and literature.
We recognize its effects direct or indirect, on the writing and staging of such plays as
Throaty Wilder's ‘ The Skin of Our Teeth ‘
Arthur Miller’s ‘ Death of a Salesman ‘
As well as the theatre of the absurd, on the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and other Beat writers and a number of films.
Expressionism, or: Art seen from Within
The laconic title of Wolfgang Pehnt’s book, published in a carefully edited and excellent French translation, is Architecture expressionist. The author, an architectural historian, offers a genealogy that is at once richly documented and generously illustrated. The effective organization of the layout—chronological, with name entries of the period’s major architects—, the ample notes and bibliography and, last but not least, the inclusion of two indexes—the first for names, the second for buildings and projects—all clearly point to the author’s declared aim, which is to make this second edition, which has been revised and enlarged in comparison with the 1973 edition, a work of reference for the subject, and one that is straightforward to consult. The fact is that the concept of “Expressionist architecture” may now have been admitted in Germany, but the same cannot be said for France, where specialists who are on the whole prepared to acknowledge “Expressionist trends'' in a certain number of projects and works by German architects, most of them occurring in the 1920s, are, conversely, very reluctant when it comes to a concept invented by criticism, the use of which—often regarded as improper or exorbitant—anyway lacks any adequate foundation in architectural terms. In 1913, when the art historian and critique Adolf Behne contrasted “Impressionist architecture” with “Expressionist architecture” or Bruno Taut’s architecture, which was created “from within”, he actually merely borrowed for his own purposes an antithesis—albeit a fairly handy one—that had been used since 1910 to talk about the emergent new painting. This, as W. Paint reminds us, was made all the easier because the German architects of the 1910s and 1920s, who are very well represented in his book, belonged to the same groups and featured in the same magazines and journals as those German artists and writers who were explicitly qualified as “Expressionists'' from 1914 on.
Whatever the case may be, and for the non-specialist at least, the reproductions of drawings and paintings by architects, produced around 1920, in fact enable us to make a certain number of comparisons with works produced in this same period by Expressionist painters and poets: all showed the same glorification of sensation and feeling over rational construction, the same tendency to destroy points of reference and fixed landmarks, the same rejection of spatial and chromatic codes and conventions, and the same rejection of harmony and naturalism. Last of all, they also showed the same desire to bring together things that had ended up separated, the same desire to do away with the contrast between void and solid, and the boundaries between exterior and interior.
Voix, regard, espace dans l’art expressionniste, by the aesthetician and Germanist Georges Bloess, deals with the innermost nature of the creative process. It bypasses any history of Expressionist art, other than a history that is reconstructed between the lines, linked with the names of painters and poets referred to in the text. German Expressionists, therefore, but not exclusively. For there is also discussion of the Romantics, the Pre-Raphaelites, the Symbolists, Giacometti, Matisse, Derain, and Peter Handke, not forgetting Paul Celan, who, as it were, introduces and concludes Georges Bloess’s essay, as if suggesting a circularity akin to the circular pattern of art.
A kind of family is accordingly formed, encompassing German artists and, over and beyond these boundaries, painters and poets who are linked together by a creative kinship.
The author has compiled a large number of excerpts from private diaries, letters and, above all, poems, where the rhythms and motions of the creative process are expressed with impressive force. The reader accordingly discovers or re-discovers—reproduced in the original tongue—valuable and exciting material which shows the extent to which the real and genuine subject of art lies at the root of art itself, and the limits to which artists often push their mental adventure.
Otto Dix tended to be more reticent, in his neo-objective period, about what Georges Bloess elsewhere calls the “powers of subjectivity”. He allowed himself to be gradually circumscribed by the controlled painting which he had espoused in the mid-1920s, before reverting to the more spontaneous art of his early days. Rainer Beck, the eminent specialist on this painter, and author, in the catalogue accompanying the major Otto Dix exhibition recently organized at the Maeght Foundation, of an article titled “The Post-1933 Years'', quotes the artist who himself commented on the far-reaching change that had occurred in his painting in the early 1940s: “(...) The spatiality of form gives way to the spatiality of colour and colours start to produce ‘sounds’. (...) I paint ‘unbridled'’”. These were Otto Dix’s very words and it is very much to the credit of a book such as Georges Bloess’s that it allows them to be properly heard. It must nevertheless be admitted that the author of Voix, regard, espace dans l’art expressionniste is more at home with poetry than with painting. So when he has discussed “The Poets’ eye” and “poetic writing being subordinate to vision”, which, as he himself writes, may well call into question “the age-old hierarchy of the arts'' (?)Georges Bloess does indeed focus on “The writing of painters”, with an almost exclusive interest in their writings properly so-called and that habit they have of ‘signing their works’, and this takes us back somewhat. For, in the end of the day, is not the writing of painters and of Expressionist painters in particular, also and above all the fretwork of touches, the apparently pell-mell inscriptions which nevertheless generate a pictorial space, which differs from perspectival space, is the mark of mental space, and lies altogether within the creative act? If you have any doubts about this, all you need to do is read, hear and see once more the polyphonic works of Paul Klee.
Absurd Literature : -
Definition:
In philosophy, "the Absurd" refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life, and the human inability to find these with any certainty. The universe and the human mind do not each separately cause the Absurd; rather, the Absurd arises by the contradictory nature of the two existing simultaneously.
The term is applied to a number of works in drama and prose fiction which have in common the view that the human condition is essentially absurd,and that this condition can be adequately represented only in works of literature that are themselves absurd. Both the mood and dramaturgy of absurdity were anticipated as early as 1896 in Alfred Jarry’s French play Ubu roi (Ubu the King). The literature has its roots also in the movements of Expressionism and Surrealism, as well as in the fiction, written in the 1920s, of Franz Kafka (The Trial, Metamorphosis). The current movement, however, emerged in France after the horrors of World War II (1939–45) as a rebellion against basic beliefs and values in traditional culture and literature. This tradition had included the assumptions that human beings are fairly rational creatures who live in an at least partially intelligible universe, that they are part of an ordered social structure, and that they may be capable of heroism and dignity even in defeat. After the 1940s, however, there was a widespread tendency, especially prominent in the existential philosophy of men of letters such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, to view a human being as an isolated existent who is cast into an alien universe; to conceive the human world as possessing no inherent truth, value, or meaning; and to represent human life—in its fruitless search for purpose and significance, as it moves from the nothingness whence it came toward the nothingness where it must end—as an existence which is both anguished and absurd. As Camus said in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942),
In a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. His is
an irremediable exile…. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting,
truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity.
Or as Eugène Ionesco, French author of The Bald Soprano (1949), The Lesson (1951), and other plays in the theater of the absurd, has put it: "Cut off from his religious, metaphysical, and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless." Ionesco also said, in commenting on the mixture of moods in the literature of the absurd: "People drowning in meaninglessness can only be grotesque, their sufferings can only appear tragic by derision."
Samuel Beckett (1906-89), the most eminent and influential writer in this mode, both in drama and in prose fiction, was an Irishman living in Paris who often wrote in French and then translated his works into English. His plays, such as Waiting for Godot (1954) and Endgame (1958), project the irrationalism, helplessness, and absurdity of life in dramatic forms that reject realistic settings, logical reasoning, or a coherently evolving plot. Waiting for Godot presents two tramps in a waste place, fruitlessly and all but hopelessly waiting for an unidentified person, Godot, who may or may not exist and with whom they sometimes think they remember that they may have an appointment; as one of them remarks, "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful." Like most works in this mode, the play is absurd in the double sense that it is grotesquely comic and also irrational and nonconsequential; it is a parody not only of the traditional assumptions of Western culture, but of the conventions and generic forms of traditional drama, and even of its own inescapable participation in the dramatic medium. The lucid but eddying and pointless dialogue is often funny, and pratfalls and other modes of slapstick are used to project the alienation and tragic anguish of human existence. Beckett's prose fiction, such as Malone Dies (1958) and The Unnamable (1960), present an antihero who plays out the absurd moves of the end game of civilization in a nonwork which tends to undermine the coherence of its medium, language itself. But typically Beckett's characters carry on, even if in a life without purpose, trying to make sense of the senseless and to communicate the incommunicable.
Another French playwright of the absurd was Jean Genet (who combined absurdism and diabolism); some of the early dramatic works of the Englishman Harold Pinter and the American Edward Albee are in a similar mode. The plays of Tom Stoppard, such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) and Travesties (1974), exploit the devices of absurdist theater more for comic than philosophical ends. There are also affinities with this movement in the numerous recent works which exploit black comedy or black humor: baleful, naive, or inept characters in a fantastic or nightmarish modern world play out their roles in what Ionesco called a "tragic farce," in which the events are often simultaneously comic, horrifying, and absurd. Examples are Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961), Thomas Pynchon's V (1963), John Irving's The World According to Garp (1978), and some of the novels by the German Günter Grass and the Americans Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and John Barth. Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove is an example of black comedy in the cinema. More recently, some playwrights living in totalitarian regimes have used absurdist techniques to register social and political protest. See, for example, Largo Desolato (1987) by the Czech Vaclav Havel and The Island (1973), a collaboration by the South African writers Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona
See wit, humor, and the comic, and refer to: Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (rev., 1968); David Grossvogel, The Blasphemers: The Theatre of Brecht, Ionesco, Beckett, Genet (1965); Arnold P. Hinchliffe, The Absurd (1969); Max F. Schultz, Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties (1980); and Enoch Brater and Ruby Cohn, eds., Around the Absurd: Essays on Modern and Postmodern Drama(1990).
The significance of the play lies in how Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot who will never come, even though they seem to know he will not come. The characters will wait because there is nothing else to do and whatever they will meet is inevitable and therefore their actions do not matter. The setting of the play is bleak, not specific to a geographic location, date or time and has been coined a post-apocalyptic picture of existence. Beckett captured a sense of complete isolation and powerlessness in respect to the individual’s role in the world at large.
Waiting for Godot continues to be relevant in the Post-Modern age. Martin Esslin, a theater critic wrote at the time of the production of Waiting for Godot:
Today when death and old age are increasingly concealed behind euphemisms and comforting baby talk and life is threatened with being smothered in the mass consumption of hypnotic mechanized vulgarity, the need to confront man with the reality of his situation is greater than ever. For the dignity of man lies in his ability to face reality in all its senselessness: to accept it freely, without fear, without illusions- and to laugh at it (Esslin 316).
Esslin’s idea is that man finds solace in the ability to face and rationalize the irrationality and ambiguity of existence through creating art to depict and comment upon the disingenuous state of existence. The political and social context of the postmodern world lends itself to analysis through inspecting the presence of absurdity. The contemporary writer, Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, looks at post-911 American society through the eyes of a young boy entertaining his own existential crisis and quest to reconcile history.
Thank you...
Citation:-
Appignanesi, Richard, and Oscar Zarate. Introducing Existentialism. New York: Totem Books, 2006.
Bair, D. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. London: Vintage, 1990.
Bird, Kai and Sherwin, Martin J. "The Myths of Hiroshima." Los Angeles Times. 5 Aug 2005.
Bloess, Georges. Voix, regard, espace dans l’art expressionniste, Paris : L’Harmattan, 1998, (Esthétiques)
Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of The Absurd. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1961
Ferrier, Jean-Louis. Paul Klee, Paris : Terrail, 1998
Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company Trade & Reference Division, 2005.
Jacobson, Josephine, and William R. Mueller. The Testament of Samuel Beckett. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1964.
Hall, Peter. Production History. The Guardian, 4 January 2003.
Harpham, M.H. Abrams and Geoffery Galt. A Glossary of Literary Terms . USA : Lyn Uhl , n.d.
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