Question

Write an essay on modernism and postmodernism with reference to canadian literature.

Answer 1

In its long history (cf. Schärf 13–37), the essay has always been geared towards the particular and the incomplete, towards openness and philosophical or aesthetic experience. In all its phases and forms, it has avoided systematic closure and conceptual deductions at the expense of individual experience. In most cases, it has preferred the particular and concrete to the general principle. It has nevertheless been open to generalisation and argument: not only in philosophy, but also in literary criticism and in literature itself. In fact, the most fascinating aspect of essayistic writing, one might argue, is its potential for bringing about a spontaneous synthesis between the particular and the general, for bridging the gap between experience and the concept. It is not by chance that modern literary criticism, which deals with increasing ambiguity, indeterminacy and openness, has always professed a penchant for the essay and an ingrained distrust of systematic discourse. For criticism, as defined by a writer like T. S. Eliot or a deconstructionist like Geoffrey H. Hartman, is an art in its own right, is literature about literature. This is what T. S. Eliot means when he points out: “The critical activity finds its highest, its true fulfilment in a kind of union with creation in the labour of the artist.” (Eliot 31) This kind of union cannot possibly be realised in a systematic philosophical treatise or in a sociologicalsystem. Almost half a century after Eliot, Geoffrey H. Hartman considers criticism as a literary genre. He writes about his critical work: “In Criticism in the Wilderness and Saving the Text I try to define the symbiosis or tangled relations of literature and literary commentary.” (Hartman 203) At this stage, it would be tempting to assume that the form of the essay and essayistic writing in general is typical of literary criticism and has had little or no impact on philosophy and the social sciences. This is not the case. Although philosophy is well known for its ambitious systems – from Aristotle to Hegel – it also has an essayistic past highlighted by the works of Michel de Montaigne and David Hume. In his text “On Essay-Writing”, Hume seeks to bridge the gap between what he calls “the learned and the conversible Worlds”, that is between the world of philosophy or science on the one hand and the world of social conversation. The latter is at the same time the world of experience which is frequently lacking in the “learned world” of philosophers and scientists: “And indeed, what cou’d be expected from Men who never consulted Experience in any of their Reasonings, or who never search’d for that Experience, where alone it is to be found, in common Life and Conversation?” As a logical consequence of this criticism, Hume envisages a synthesis between the two worlds, a synthesis that is “essayistic” in character: “’Tis to be hop’d, that this League betwixt the learned and conversible Worlds, which is so happily begun, will be still farther improv’d, to their mutual Advantage; and to that End, I know nothing more advantageous than such Essays as these with which I endeavour to entertain the Public. In this View, I cannot but consider myself as a Kind of Resident or Ambassador from the Dominions of Learning to those of Conversation […].”