Schoolism in Literature

The schoolism approach in literature refers to those studies that are in the domain of literary history. The study of authors and their works in a specific time period is an attempt to create order, coherence and discontinuity in a heterogeneous set of discontinuity. The present research aims to investigate the idea of literary school and its composing elements, exploring the connection of these components with history and aesthetics. It also strives to analyse the performance and consequence of such a chronological approach in the light of critical perspective. The concluding words of the present study is that schoolism and standardisation, while dictating a historical and patriotic attitude on literature, is quite prescriptive and reductive which by centralising the author propagates the causal approach in literary studies. Although each literary school, by taking advantage of such ideas as freedom, innovation and creation of new possibilities, challenges and opposes the other schools, and claims to set literature free from its shackles and limitations, it will lead to another prison for literature. Normally, the advent of every new school is conceived and perceived as a break in literature. However, repetition, imitation and continuity reduces the aesthetic function of the new school, bringing about its fall, and seemingly suggesting that literature cannot tolerate any kind of limitation and restriction and is constantly and relentlessly at work to achieve its freedom.