Essays on Art Movements

‘[T]he modern period […] begins really with the late nineteenth [century], when the sense of the passing of a major phase of English history was already in the air.’ Indeed, when we discuss ‘modern’ in terms of literature this tends to be a reference to...

In his essay ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’, Clement Greenberg claims that avant-garde or modernist art is a tool to prevent the ordinary culture caused by consumerism. Also with in his essay Kitsch gained popularity. The reason of he avant-garde’s arising is to defend aesthetic standards from...

Although she had a “fairly isolated childhood” (Salwak, 3), Anne Tyler’s insights about family are remarkably accurate. In two of Tyler’s books, The Accidental Tourist and Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, she tells the tales of two very different families. However, the believable emotional state...

Coco Fusco and Guillermo G?mez-Pe?a’s Two Undiscovered Amerindians is a bold experiment of a performance whose successes and failures stem from the same aspect of the show: its tendency to blur the lines between the audience and the performers. When Two Undiscovered Amerindians succeeds, its...

In both his poem ‘Kubla Khan’ and its accompanying prologue Samuel Taylor Coleridge presents two ideas: the variable nature of the imagination and the beauty of the foreign and exotic. Many scholars view the story behind the poem’s composition as not only one of the...

William Blake’s “Little Black Boy,” Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” James Joyce’s “The Dead” and Sarah Kane’s Blasted each demonstrate how a writer’s use of language can give us intimate access to the time period that in turn informs the writer’s choices. Made-to-order essay as fast...

“Postmodern Blackness” is one of several essays that bell hooks has written. It is, by its nature, a philosophical essay in which the Afro-American writer mixes what is literary with what is racial. Hence, in it she attempts at evoking the exclusionary role that the...

America: a land of freedom, opportunity, and prosperity; a country that highly advocates the amalgamation of conglomerating cultures. Ironically, however, in Gary Shteyngart’s novel Absurdistan, the Russians transcend Americans in their pursuit for wealth, status, and size. The protagonist, Misha Vainberg, is a 30-year-old Russian...

Japanese culture differs significantly from culture in the Western world. In Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being, these differences are prevalent as Nao visits bathhouses, discovers manga, and witnesses the significance of suicide in her country. But perhaps most importantly, Nao learns...

Introduction The advent of Modernism in the early twentieth century marked a significant departure from established norms in art, literature, and culture. Shaped by a tumultuous period defined by cultural shocks like World War I and World War II, Modernism emerged as a response to...

Nature is an important feature of poetic realism, an offshoot of German realism in the late 19th century. Gottfried Keller, the author of the novel Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe (Romeo and Juliet in the Village), is a Swiss writer who belongs to this...

Ross Murfin defines postmodernism as, “A term referring to certain radically experimental works of literature and art after World War II” (Murfin 397). According to Murfin, postmodernism, like modernism that preceded it, involves separation from dominant literary convention via the “experimentation with new literary devices,...

From the late-eighteenth to the early-nineteenth century, known as the Romantic period, there existed a shift in some cultural and artistic elements that leaned towards a revival of the Gothic. As well as a revival of the Gothic through architectural adaptations in England, writers in...