A study guide for "Smaller Movements and Schools"

By Gale and Cengage

A study guide "Smaller Movements and Schools", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Literary Movements for Students series. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Literary Movements for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: May 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535833387

Book preview

09

Smaller Movements and Schools

Introduction

For each of the major literary movements with which readers are familiar, the huge sweeping epochs such as the Renaissance, Romanticism, and Modernism, there are innumerable smaller movements. New movements continue to spring up, as they always have. Sometimes they emerge when like-minded individuals find each other and determine that they have similar aesthetic principles. Sometimes the writers themselves never actually find each other, and it is up to some third person, likely a discerning literary critic, to recognize similarities and define a movement in the making.

Of these lesser movements, there seem to be two general types. First, there are those historically that occurred as they splintered from major literary movements, forming in reaction to or as an offshoot of the dominant movement. Another type emerged toward the end of the twentieth century, smaller movements that evolved with or in response to new technologies, especially the Internet.

Through the ages, new literary movements have sprung up out of dissatisfaction. Romanticism can be seen as a reaction to the Enlightenment, and Postmodernism can be considered a response to ideas associated with Modernism. Similarly, Postmodernism splintered into smaller movements: some, such as Existentialism, gained broad international recognition, whereas others such as the New York School or Oulipo, remained small, localized phenomena.

Moreover, larger movements subdivide into ethnic categories. A writer's worldview is reflected by the literary movement with which that writer is connected, but that worldview also reflects some aspect of the writer's ethnic identity. Major ethnic movements, such as the Harlem Renaissance and the Irish Literary Renaissance, developed out of a rejection of the dominant white American and British cultures, respectively, and the same pattern follows in minor movements, for example, the Créolités who fought for literature in their own language, the Nuyorican writers who celebrated the experiences of Puerto Ricans who resettled in New York, and the New Poets, who grew out of the 1960s' Black Pride movement and left Rap music in their wake. In each of these cases, writers found that dominant literary tenets did not allow them to say what they had to say, so they created a new style that provided a better fit with their subjects and perspectives.

Beginning roughly in the 1990s and escalating sharply, the Internet has had a profound effect on literary composition and productions, perhaps comparable only to the effect the fifteenth-century invention of the printing press had on writing and book making and dissemination. Of course, technology has traditionally