Romanticism

Literature is the aesthetic manifestation of language. It is ‘as old as human language and as new as tomorrow’s sunrise.’ This paper explores the interrelationships between language and literature from 600 AD to the present day. The grammar of present-day English is closely related to that of Old English with the same tense formation and word orders. The verse unit is a single line and its organizing device is ‘alliteration’. The range of Chaucer’s English did much to establish English as a national language. The writers of the Elizabethan period reshaped the literary language by borrowing foreign words and by coining new expressions and figures of speech. Shakespeare’s language and modern English have enough in common so that historians consider that they both belong to the same stage in the history of English. Milton attempted to reinvent the English language through his Paradise Lost. The writers of the seventeenth century developed a prose style that could bear the weight of the most serious and complex ideas. Then, the writers of the eighteenth century devoted themselves to developing out a formal, polished, and “correct” style of expression. Wordsworth and Coleridge intended to purify and renew the literary language and make it closer to the everyday speech of the ordinary people. Modernism tried to articulate a representation of the world and the way of seeing it through complexities of mind using the spoken rather than the formal language.

The age of enlightenment is a turning point in the movements of Neo-Classicism toward Romanticism. This period emerges after preparing the ground for the decline of neoclassicism in the first half of the eighteenth century in the areas of art, literature, etc. in Europe. It is considered as the beginning of a period of art and literature consisting of artistic creativity and intuitive perception. Three main principles of "unity of time", "unity of place", and "unity of subject" based on which the classical literature was founded become subject to change and transformation. England, Germany, and France were the primary manifestation points of this movement in European literature. Although the role of the literature of ancient east in the foundations of the characteristics of "Romanticism" and pre-romanticism cannot be overlooked, the social grounds of the emergence of this age can be summarized in the longings for change of society, getting tired of old criteria in the fields of art and literature, tendency toward platonic thoughts, and escape from modernity and inclination toward logical thoughts in the works of "Kant" and "Rousseau".

The present paper seeks to address and examine the literary movements, trends, and schools in Kurdish literature, and to account for their true representations in Kurdish literary works. According to contemporary Kurdish literary historians, Kurdish literature before the era of the Renewal is referred to as the classical literature; Romanticism appeared simultaneously with the Renewal, and realism was manifested afterwards. Is it appropriate to refer to these trends and periods in the Kurdish context as classicism, romanticism, and realism? The present research argues that these terms applied to Kurdish literature were introduced into Kurdish letters and culture as the immediate result of the influence of European letters and trends. The central argument of this study is that Kurdish literary movements and the historical epochs assigned to them by the scholars are not the same as what is observed in the history of French and English literature. This study considers the whole body of Kurdish written literature into three distinct periods and sections that are the ancient literature, also called ‘the literature of Diwan’, from the beginning to the early twentieth century, ‘the literature of the renewal period’, from the 1900s to the mid twentieth century, and ‘the modern and contemporary literature’, from the 1960s to the present.

This paper deals with Wallace Stevens’s first collection of poetry, Harmonium, in light of Heidegger’s philosophy, with a particular emphasis on Da-sein as the place of negativity. The focus is particularly on Heidegger’s later philosophy, where he defines Man as the juncture where the four constitutive elements (earth, sky, divinities, and mortals) converge to let Da-sein appear as the futural authentic animal whose Being matters to him as his distinctive mark. Stevens’s poetry in Harmonium displays an experimental development along the same lines. The collection consists of poems dealing with the effect that the prospects of death and finitude have on its protagonists. Stevens achieves authentic protagonists who accept the nihilating power of death in order to save themselves from any form of social, poetic, and philosophical closure. This is significant because Stevens conceives a creative potential that not only runs counter to the romantic nostalgia for a return to an innocent past, but also openly embraces the idea of finitude as the only way out of any logocentric and metaphysical forms of thinking. This study, therefore, aims to show how in Harmonium Stevens poetizes an endless creative power that sets upon reproducing the non-closure associated with nihilation and nothingness.