Introduction to Literary Theories and Criticisms (Enla 422), 2011
Download 333 Kb.
|
1.2.3 Neoclassicism (1660–1798)After the Renaissance came a reaction in the direction of order and restraint. Generally speaking, this reaction developed in France in the mid 17th century and in England thirty years later; and it dominated European literature until the last part of the 18th century. Writers turned from inventing new words to regularizing vocabulary and grammar. Complex, boldly metaphorical language, such as Shakespeare used in his major tragedies, is clarified and simplified--using fewer and more conventional figures of speech. Mystery and obscurity are considered symptoms of incompetence rather than signs of grandeur. The ideal style is lucid, polished, and precisely appropriate to the genre of a work and the social position of its characters. Tragedy and high comedy, for example, use the language of cultivated people and maintain a well-bred tone. The crude humor of the gravediggers in Hamlet or the pulling out of Gloucester's eyes in King Lear would no longer be admitted in tragedy. Structure, like tone, becomes more simple and unified. In contrast to Shakespeare's plays, those of neoclassical playwrights such as Racine and Moliere develop a single plot line and are strictly limited in time and place (often, like Moliere's The Misanthrope and Tartuffe, to a single setting and a single day's time). The period is called neoclassical because its writers looked back to the ideals and art forms of classical times, emphasizing even more than their Renaissance predecessors the classical ideals of order and rational control. Neoclassical thinkers could use the past as a guide for the present because they assumed that human nature was constant--essentially the same regardless of time and place. Art, they believed, should express this essential nature: "Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature" (Samuel Johnson). An individual character was valuable for what he or she revealed of universal human nature. Neoclassical writers saw themselves, as well as their readers and characters, above all as members of society. Reason had traditionally been assumed to be the highest mental faculty, but in this period many thinkers considered it a sufficient guide in all areas. Both religious belief and morality were grounded on reason: revelation and grace were de-emphasized, and morality consisted of acting rightly to one's fellow beings on this earth. John Locke, the most influential philosopher of the age, analyzed logically how our minds function (1690), argued for religious toleration (1689), and maintained that government is justified not by divine right but by a "social contract" that is broken if the people's natural rights are not respected. According to Abrams (1999), the following list of ideas and characteristics that were shared, between 1660 and the late 1700s, by authors such as John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, and Edmund Burke, may serve as an introductory sketch of some prominent features of neoclassic literature: (1) These authors exhibited a strong traditionalism, which was often joined to a distrust of radical innovation and was evidenced above all in their great respect for classical writers—that is, the writers of ancient Greece and Rome—who were thought to have achieved excellence, and established the enduring models, in all the major literary genres. (2) Literature was conceived to be primarily an "art"; that is, a set of skills which, though it requires innate talents, must be perfected by long study and practice and consists mainly in the deliberate adaptation of known and tested means to the achievement of foreseen ends upon the audience of readers. (3) Human beings as an integral part of a social organization were regarded as the primary subject matter of literature. Poetry was held to be an imitation of human life—in a common phrase, "a mirror held up to nature." (4) Both in the subject matter and the appeal of art, emphasis was placed on what human beings possess in common—representative characteristics and widely shared experiences, thoughts, feelings, and tastes. (5) Neoclassic writers like the major philosophers of the time, viewed human beings as limited agents who ought to set themselves only accessible goals. Many of the great works of the period, satiric and didactic, attack human "pride," or presumption beyond the natural limits of the species, and enforce the lesson of the golden mean (the avoidance of extremes) and of humanity's need to submit to its restricted position in the cosmic order—an order sometimes envisioned as a natural hierarchy, or Great Chain of Being. In art, as in life, what were for the most part praised were the law of measure and the acceptance of limits upon one's freedom. Download 333 Kb. Share with your friends:
|