te ao hou me te wa o muri
“Don’t let yesterday take up too much of today.”
– Will Rogers
te ao Māori principles
There are five key principals that we, as an English Department, consider important as part of a holistic study at school. Please read through these and know that we will come back to them as we begin looking at texts.
- Mana – The prestige and authority of the writer. Writers can build mana through impactful stories that uplift readers.
- Whanaungatanga – The connections and relationships between characters, writers, and readers. Literature brings people together.
- Kaitiakitanga – Guardianship and protection of stories, language, and knowledge. Writers have a duty to share stories responsibly.
- Wairuatanga – The spirituality and deeper meanings conveyed through literature. Stories can be profound and moving.
- Mauri – The essential life force or vitality of the writer coming through in their work. Writing with purpose and energy.
- Aroha – The empathy, compassion, and love writers show through their words. Literature builds understanding between people.
- Tikanga – The customs, protocols and values upheld through storytelling. Writers adhere to cultural principles.
Key Terms
| Modern | characterised by a self-conscious break with traditional ways of writing in both poetry and prose fiction writing. |
| Postmodern | characterised by the use of metafiction, unreliable narration, self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and which often uses both historical and political issues. |
| Contemporary | a vast group of written works produced from a specific time in history through the current age. |
| Literature | written works, especially those considered of superior or lasting artistic merit. |
| Era | a long and distinct period of history. |
| Period | belonging to or characteristic of a past historical time, especially in style or design. |
| Canon | the list of works considered to be permanently established as being of the highest quality. |
Learning Objectives
- To identify the key conventions of the era.
- To recognise the major literary works attributed to this time frame.
Exercises
Spelling
| unhappy | disagree | repaint | reuse | unable |
| misbehave | unpack | rebuild | dislike | misspell |
| incomplete | illegal | irregular | impossible | inactive |
| disqualify | recheck | unfair | unwrap | disobey |
Summary Builder
Below is a piece of writing that you should attempt to summarise into around 100 words.
The Rise of Esports
Over the past decade, esports has grown from a niche hobby to a mainstream form of entertainment. Esports are organized, multiplayer video game competitions. Some of the most popular esports games include League of Legends, Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Overwatch, and Fortnite. Top esports events like The International and the League of Legends World Championship draw viewership numbers in the millions and offer prize pools in the tens of millions of dollars.
The esports industry has seen massive growth recently. According to market researcher Newzoo, the global esports market will generate revenues of over $1 billion in 2019, a 26.7% growth from the previous year. Newzoo projects the esports economy will grow to $1.8 billion by 2022. This growth can be attributed to various factors like improved broadcasting quality, bigger investments, more merchandise and ticket sales, and growing appeal among advertisers. Game publishers like Riot Games and tournament organizers like ESL and DreamHack are investing heavily in the ecosystem. Even traditional sports teams like the Philadelphia 76ers and soccer clubs like Paris Saint-Germain are buying esports teams to participate in major leagues.
As viewership and revenues continue to rise, esports is cementing itself as a significant sector of interactive entertainment. With its digital nativity and appeal to young demographics, esports offers marketers a unique opportunity to reach millions of engaged millennial and Gen Z consumers. The future looks bright for competitive gaming as an entertainment medium and marketing channel.
Eras of the English Literary Canon
era o te pukapuka reo Ingarihi canon
The Modern Period
(1914-1945 CE)
In Britain, modernist writers include W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, and Wilfred Owen. In America, the modernist period includes Robert Frost and Flannery O’Connor as well as the famous writers of The Lost Generation (also called the writers of The Jazz Age, 1914-1929) such as Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner.
The Harlem Renaissance marks the rise of black writers such as Baldwin and Ellison. Realism is the dominant fashion, but the disillusionment with the World Wars lead to new experimentation.
The key to unraveling the answer lies in the key characteristics of modernism. We’ll define five of them that matter the most:
- individualism;
- experimentation;
- absurdity;
- symbolism;
- formalism.
Below you’ll find a short description of each characteristic, along with examples.
Individualism
Individualism is one of the key elements of modernism. It postulates that an individual’s experiences, opinions, and emotions are more fascinating than the events in a society as a whole.
So, modernism is focused on describing the subjective reality of one person rather than societal changes or historical events on an impersonal scale.
A typical protagonist in modernist literature is just trying to survive and adapt to the changing world. Presented with obstacles, the protagonist sometimes perseveres – but not always. You can find compelling examples of individualism in the works of Ernest Hemingway.
The fascination with subjective reality also led to the development of unreliable narrators in fiction. You can find great examples of the Madman type of unreliable narrator in Franz Kafka’s works.
Experimentation
Literary modernism rejected many of the established writing norms, paving the way for experimentation with the form. Modernist poets best exemplify it: they revolted against the accepted rules of rhyme and rhythm, thus inventing free verse (vers libre) poetry.
Modernism in literature also led to experiments with prose. Combined with individualism as another core characteristic, writers developed a narrative device called ‘stream of consciousness.’
This device is meant to reflect how the characters think, even though it may be inconsistent, chaotic, or illogical. This new technique allowed writers to craft novels that read like the protagonist’s stream of consciousness.
Among authors, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce are the best examples of this characteristic in action. As for poetry, T. S. Eliot’s and Ezra Pound’s bodies of work are a must-read.
Absurdity
During the modernist period, authors watched the world as they knew it crumbled around them. Two World Wars, the rise of capitalism, and fast-paced globalization all undermined authors’ beliefs and opinions about humankind.
This led many of them to consider the world absurd and reflect it in their writing. From the setup to the plot development, modernist works based on this characteristic take surrealist or fantastical turns. They can also be described as bizarre or nonsensical.
The rise of absurdism also led to the invention of the Theatre of the Absurd. Pioneered by European playwrights, it revolves around the idea that human existence has no grand purpose or meaning. Absurdist plays don’t seek to communicate effectively; instead, they include irrational speech.
There’s no better example of absurdity in literary modernism than Franz Kafka’s works, especially The Metamorphosis.
Symbolism
While symbolism in literature existed before the late 19th century, it quickly became one of the central characteristics of modernism in literature. Modernist authors and poets also reimagined symbolism. Where their predecessors left little unsaid, modernists preferred to leave plenty of blanks for the reader’s imagination to fill.
That, however, doesn’t mean there was no attention to details. On the contrary, modernist authors infused every layer of their work of fiction with symbolic details. The difference is that their way of using symbolism in writing allowed for several interpretations, all simultaneously possible and valid.
As a characteristic, symbolism in the modernism literary movement is most prominent in the works of James Joyce and T. S. Eliot.
Formalism
As mentioned above, 20th-century modernism was defined by the search for radically new forms of expression. Creativity fueled this search, paving the way for the emergence of original forms.
In modern period literature, the writing process was no longer perceived as a laborious craft. Modernists treated it as a creative process instead. In some cases, the originality of the form was deemed more important than the substance.
Take the works of E. E. Cummings as an example here. Instead of conventionally putting the poetry on the page, he spread out separate words and phrases on the page as if it were a canvas and his poem – the paint.
Other examples of formalism include the use of invented or foreign words and phrases and unconventional structure – or its absence.
The Post-Modern Period
(1945 – onward)
T. S. Eliot, Morrison, Shaw, Beckett, Stoppard, Fowles, Calvino, Ginsberg, Pynchon, and other modern writers, poets, and playwrights experimented with metafiction and fragmented poetry. Multiculturalism led to an increasing canonization of non-Caucasian writers such as Langston Hughes, Sandra Cisneros, and Zora Neal Hurston.
Magic Realists such as Gabriel García Márquez, Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Günter Grass, and Salman Rushdie flourished with surrealistic writings embroidered in the conventions of realism.
5 Characteristics of Postmodern Literature
Postmodern literature builds on the following core ideas:
- Embrace of randomness. Postmodern works reject the idea of absolute meaning and instead embrace randomness and disorder. Postmodern novels often employ unreliable narrators to further muddy the waters with extreme subjectivity and prevent readers from finding meaning during the story.
- Playfulness. While modernist writers mourned the loss of order, postmodern writers revel in it, often using tools like black humor, wordplay, irony, and other techniques of playfulness to dizzy readers and muddle the story.
- Fragmentation. Postmodernist literature took modernism’s fragmentation and expanded on it, moving literary works more toward collage-style forms, temporal distortion, and significant jumps in character and place.
- Metafiction. Postmodern literature emphasized meaninglessness and play. Postmodern writers began to experiment with more meta elements in their novels and short stories, drawing attention to their work’s artifice and reminding readers that the author isn’t an authority figure.
- Intertextuality. As a form of collage-style writing, many postmodern authors wrote their work overtly in dialogue with other texts. The techniques they employed included pastiche (or imitating other authors’ styles) and the combination of high and low culture (writing that tackles subjects that were previously considered inappropriate for literature).
Ko te reo te tuakiri | Language is my identity.
Ko te reo tōku ahurei | Language is my uniqueness.
Ko te reo te ora. | Language is life.