The Literary Movements Defined

Abstract

Even though you may not teach work any more advanced than an abridged novel in a second-year Spanish class, you are a teacher of Spanish literature. So it is not exclusively the professors of upper division and graduate university courses who should ask themselves whether they have ever thought to arm their students with clear comprehensive definitions of the literary movements. Although the literary historian sometimes tends to regard the literary movements as mere professors' distinctions, still it is basic that the potential Spanish major gain in high school or early in college a working definition of Classicism, Realism, Romanticism, Naturalism, and Modernism. He can find out for himself later how seldom a given work falls entirely into any one category. It may even be wise to introduce early such other -isms as Parnassianism, Symbolism, Surrealism, Existentialism, Cubism, Creationism, Ultraism, Neo-Gongorism, and Futurism. If you are an experienced teacher, probably you have enjoyed a long-standing acquaintance with all these terms, but your students may have to grasp their implications piecemeal-possibly as you did. One does not have to read or understand the label on the bottle of wine to appreciate its flavor, and granted this flavor identifies itself to the connoisseur, yet does one not savor the tang all the more for having classified the wine first? Further, how does one become a connoisseur without acquiring first a system of reference, a knowledge of comparative facts of manufacture? Through my undergraduate Spanish major and three years of graduate work with most worthy professors, nowhere along that academic path were the -isms defined formally. Good wines, but lacking labels. Others must have had the same experience. Understandably the attainment of knowledge in any field is such a vast enterprise that problems of the specific course and given moment often predispose the instructor to make false assumptions. Even authors of most texts and anthologies likewise presume a knowledge of the literary -isms on the part of the reader. If it is only to make the teacher realize that he ought to give his students the facts of literary life before he begins to expound case histories, the attempts at definition to follow will have served their purpose. Art (including sculpture), music, and literature are closely allied as man's three most noble media for achieving the aesthetic ideal. We shall call these the arts. The arts have a common goal, beauty, attained through an appeal to the intellect via the senses. If our intellect is mature, usually it is sensitive to all the arts if it is sensitive to one, for seeing and hearing are but leaf and stem to a common root. The arts must overlap each other: in most music a story or picture exists or is imagined; art too tells a story; all good literature evinces rhythm and equilibrium. Since the arts are so closely related, stylistic approaches to the literary, musical, or pictorial ideal are infectious. Individual stylistic approach often is imitated finally to become stereotyped. When this happens, the resulting group stylistic approach becomes known as a school. In recent centuries, numbers of individuals who have shared the same stylistic ideals have announced publicly their champion or model or set of tenets. The result is a formal school. It may be assumed, then, that the fundamental differences among Clas-