Expressionism in English literature

              

Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Expressionism developed as an Avant Garde style - started before World war I (1914-1918). Later the movement was attributed to literature, theatre, dance, film, music, etc.

               More specifically, Expressionism as a distinct style or movement refers to a number of German artists, Austrian, French and Russian ones, who became active in the years before World war I and remained throughout much of the interwar period. The Expressionism emphasis on individual and subjective perspective has been characterized as a reaction to positivism and other artistic styles such as Naturalism and Impressionism. 

Eg. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

            One major focus of expressionism is on the subjective, or how people are thinking and feeling rather than facts and statistics.

                  Expressionist author uses point of view as well as descriptive elements to show how the world, or at least a particular situation is seen by an individual. In the "Metamorphosis", that individual is "Gregor Samsa",a traveling salesman who wakes up one day as a giant beetle. 

                 The main aim of expressionism is to express inner world subjectivity, emotions rather than the external world and the physical reality. The term refers to an "artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse within a person". Expressionism is the tendency of an artist to distort reality for an emotional effect. This term refers to imitating reproducing or repeating existence. 

                    According to the Expression the current civilization superficially proper's and looks attractive but rotten at he core. With them the focus shifted to the soul of man, his inner expression. In their works, the protagonist is emotional, troubled are abnormal, representing the modern anxiety- ridden man in mechanical society. It deliberate distortion of reality and subjects. 

                   Each writer of the movement has her/his own way to expressing ideas through art. It is also seen as movement against realism and Naturalism. Unlike impressionism,  its goal were not to reproduce the impression suggested by the surrounding world, but to strongly impose the artist's own sensibility to the world's representation. The expressionist artist substitutes to the visual objects reality his own image of this object, which he feels as an accurate representation of its real meaning. The search of hormony and forms is not as important as trying to achieve the highest expression intensity both from the aesthetic point of view and according to idea and human critics. 

            It indicates struggle against bourgeois values and identity. There is boldness, distortion and forceful representation of the emotions. 

Expressionism influenced American theatres, like...

• Eugene O'Neill
• The Hairy Ape
• Emperor Janes

Playwrights influenced by Expressionism, like

• Arthur Miller's Death of Salesman
• Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot
• T. S. Eliot's Waste land

Style:-

◾ Disjointed Syntox

◾ Dynamic use of imagery

◾ Discontinuity of time sequence, masked                        characters

◾ Special effects

◾ Also talk of the evils in the society (communism,        racism, suppression, etc.)

◾ completely self - centred are form

◾The whole cosmos is viewed subjectively

The most famous or well known German expressionists are 

• Max Beckmann,
• Fritz Bleyl, 
• Heinrich Campendonk, 
• Otto Dix, 
• August Macke, Franz Marc,
• Ludwig Meidner,