Postmodernism was a movement that took place in the arts from the 1930s to the 1980s, which sought not only to act as a continuation of modernism, but to attempt to reform its fashions. , themselves becoming conventional, while moving away from elite high art toward forms of mass culture, such as television, advertising, cartoons, and popular music. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why violent video games should not be banned"? Get the original essay Western morale was threatened by the global economic crisis and political division of the 1930s, and was subsequently exacerbated by the of Nazi totalitarianism, mass extermination and the threat of the atomic bomb. In 1984, Orwell described society's fear of totalitarian rule, as a culture of mass consumption and a centralized economy developed in the post-war period. There was a rejection of old ideals such as Marxism, Freudianism and the Enlightenment project. Literature of the period by authors such as Pynchon, Barthes, and Nabokov mixed genres in order to avoid traditional classification, and this movement was also visible in Warhol's work. pop art, the musical compositions of John Cage and the films of Jean-Luc Godard. The value of the term is debated; some welcome it as a liberation from the hierarchy of high and low cultures, while skeptics see it as a senseless glorification of consumer capitalism and its moral vacuity. Psychoanalytic and feminist approaches are two relatively recent critical responses to literary texts. When applied to DH Lawrence's Son's and Lovers, both can be both insightful and problematic. Theories of psychoanalysis, primarily identified with Sigmund Freud, can be applied to imaginative literature and art in general, in order to study their manifest and latent aspects. content, in the same way that Freud studied dreams. Literature clearly lends itself to such study since, as in dreams, the most significant meaning often lies beneath the conscious narrative surface of a text. Feminist approaches to literature focus on the representation of female characters. Lawrence's depiction of women in his work was admired by many readers for its insight, among them women, and was heavily attacked by others for its biased male perspective. Classical psychoanalytic criticism applied theories either to the author or to his characters. , which were considered internalized images from the author's unconscious. The strong autobiographical content of Sons and Lovers lends itself to this type of study. Furthermore, if works of art are seen as the disguised expression of an infantile desire buried in the unconscious, as Freud suggests, then Sons and Lovers presents a double interest. This is the fundamental infantile desire that all boys experience and represses, according to Freud, Oedipus' wish to kill his father and marry his mother. Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex and its frequent effect of psychic impotence, of which Paul is a classic victim, offers a valuable key to a coherent understanding of the novel and the way in which it is structured. The extent of the bond established between mother and son is most vividly dramatized in the episode where Paul's mother cries at the thought of losing him to Miriam: “I can't stand it. I could leave another woman - but not her. She left me no room, not a little room. “And immediately he bitterly hated Miriam.” And I never - youknow, Paul, I never had a husband - not really." He stroked his mother's hair, and his mouth was on her throat. (Lawrence, 1994, p. 212) Not only does she invite Paul to occupy the instead of her husband, but she accuses Miriam of the same possessive love with which she smothers Paul. At the end of the chapter, Paul echoes Hamlet, another exemplary Oedipal victim, when he tries to persuade his mother not to sleep with his son. father At this point in the novel, the presence of an Oedipus complex in Paul is so obvious that it can hardly be considered a submerged theme. Seen from another angle, one of the major themes of the book is l. Paul's gradual awakening to the deadly effects of his Oedipal fixation on his mother The penultimate chapter, tellingly titled “The Liberation,” shows how Paul manages to reverse the Oedipal desire to kill the father by administering an overdose to her. his mother You could say he finally learned to direct his anger towards its source. A weakness of the psychoanalytic approach is the tendency to be too selective in choosing evidence from texts to support theories. Most interpretations of Sons and Lovers polarize Miriam and Clara as the two sexual objects desired by the psychically impotent Paul. Miriam, in her similarity to Gertrude, represents the woman whom Paul can only love by repressing desire, so why does Lawrence find it necessary to include the episode in which she and Paul become lovers? And if Clara is the mother-prostitute that Paul can take sexual advantage of, what about the introduction of Baxter Dawes? It has been suggested that he acts as a father figure, so that, through adultery, Paul can vicariously experience the Oedipal fantasy. At the same time, his guilt over breaking the incest taboo is strong enough that he almost desires the punishment he receives during his fight with Dawes. The son's lover later arranges the reconciliation of his proxy parents, living out a fantasy in which the incestuous son repairs the harm he has caused to the marital relationship. One of the roles of feminist criticism is that of deconstructing texts written by men, by inverting hierarchies, in order to detect prejudices and distortions beneath the appearance of “natural” behavior. The first feminist critic to attempt this reversal of Sons and Lovers was Kate Millett in Sexual Politics. Despite obvious flaws such as bias and selective treatment of the text, his views permanently altered subsequent readers' responses to the novel. The defects of selectivity and partiality have already been encountered in the failures of a psychoanalytic reading, and they also arise in Millet's interpretation when she accuses Paul of unrepentant cruelty towards Miriam when he tries to teach her the algebra, for example. Her feminist reading acutely revealed an element of sadism in Paul's sexual relationship with Miriam, which may have gone unnoticed, but her reading depends on an extremely partial reading of the text. The novel expresses how Paul repeatedly oscillates between anger and shame at his loss of anger: He was often cruelly ashamed. But once again his anger burst like an overcharged bubble; and yet, when he saw her eager face, silent as blind, he wanted to throw the pencil there; and yet, when he saw her hand trembling and her mouth open in pain, his heart burned with pain for her. (Lawrence, 1994, p. 157) This quote shows that Millett's reading depends on too little of the evidence. Having examined the curious episode where Paul returns Clara to Baxter in terms of the fulfillment of a vicarious Oedipal fantasy (according to psychoanalysis), we can reinterpret it separately via a feminist perspective. Actions