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 methods, which in turn had become conventional, as well as the detachment from elite high art towards 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 Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Western morale was threatened by the global economic crisis and political division of the 1930s, later exacerbated by experiences of Nazi totalitarianism, mass extermination, and the threat of the atomic bomb. In 1984, Orwell described society's fear of a totalitarian regime as a culture of mass consumption and a centralized economy developed in the post-war era. There was a rejection of old ideals such as Marxism, Freudism and the project of the Enlightenment. Literature of the period by authors such as Pynchon, Barthes, and Nabokov mixed genres in a way that avoided traditional classification, and the movement was also seen 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 D.H. Lawrence's Son's and Lovers, both can be insightful and problematic at the same time. Theories of psychoanalysis, identified primarily with Sigmund Freud, can be applied to imaginative literature and art in general, in order to study their manifest and latent manifestations. content, in the same way that Freud studied dreams. Literature clearly lends itself to such study, since, like dreams, the most significant meaning often lies beneath the conscious narrative surface of a text. Feminist approaches to literature concern the representation of female characters. Lawrence's depiction of women in her work has been admired by many readers for its insight, women among them, and has been strongly attacked by others for its biased male perspective. Classical psychoanalytic criticism applied theories to the author or his characters. , which were seen as internalized images coming from the author's unconscious. The high autobiographical content of Sons and Lovers lends itself to this type of study. Furthermore, if one considers works of art to be disguised expressions of infantile desire pushed into the unconscious, as Freud suggests, then Sons and Lovers is doubly interesting. This is the fundamental infantile desire that all boys have and represses, according to Freud, Oedipus' desire to kill his father and marry his mother. Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex and its frequent effect of psychic impotence, of which Paolo 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 dramatized most vividly by the episode in which Paul's mother cries at the thought of losing him to Miriam: “I can't bear it. I could allow another woman, but not her. He left me no space, not even a shred of space.' And he immediately hated Miriam bitterly.' And I've never - you know, Paul, I've 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 take her husband's place, but she accuses Miriam of the same possessive love with which she suffocates Paul. At the end of the chapter, Paul echoes Hamlet, another exemplary Oedipal victim, when he tries to convince his mother not to sleep with his father. At this point in the novel, the presence of the Oedipus complex in Paul is so evident that it can hardly be considered a submerged theme. Viewed from another point of view, one of the book's major themes is Paul's gradual awakening to the deadly effects of his Oedipal fixation on his mother. The penultimate chapter, significantly titled “The Deliverance,” shows how Paul comes to reverse the Oedipal desire to kill his father by administering an overdose to his mother. You might say that he has finally learned to direct his anger towards the 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 resemblance to Gertrude, represents the woman Paul can love only by repressing desire, so why does Lawrence feel it necessary to include the episode in which she and Paul become lovers? And if Clara is the prostitute mother that Paul can enjoy sexually, what about the introduction of Baxter Dawes? It has been suggested that he acts as a father figure, so that, through adultery, Paul can live out the Oedipal fantasy by proxy. At the same time, his guilt for breaking the incest taboo is strong enough to almost make him long for the punishment he receives during his fight with Dawes. The lover-son subsequently arranges his parents' reconciliation by proxy, living out a fantasy in which the incestuous son undoes the damage he has caused to the marital relationship. One of the roles of feminist criticism is to deconstruct texts written by men, by inverting hierarchies, to identify prejudices and distortions under the appearance of "natural" behavior. The first feminist criticism 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 opinions permanently altered subsequent readers' responses to the novel. The defects of selectivity and partiality have already been found in the failures of a psychoanalytic reading, and they also emerge in Millet's interpretation when he accuses Paul of unrepentant cruelty towards Miriam when he tries to teach her algebra, for example. Her feminist reading acutely uncovered a streak 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 vacillates between anger and shame over his loss of patience: He was often cruelly ashamed. But once again his anger burst like a supercharged bubble; and yet, when he saw her burning, silent, so to speak, blind face, he felt like throwing his pencil into it; and again when he saw her hand tremble, and her mouth open with suffering, his heart was seared with sorrow for her. (Lawrence, 1994, p. 157) This quote shows that Millett's reading depends on too little of the evidence. After examining the curious episode in which Paul returns Clara to Baxter in terms of enacting an Oedipal fantasy for proxy, (according to psychoanalysis) we can reinterpret it separately through a feminist angle. Paul's actions, from a woman's point of view, are offensive and arrogant, but with feminism, as with