20th alles

Precursors modernist drama

Henrik Ibsen (revolutionised European drama → modern prose plays)

Oscar Wilde (aesthetics > ethics → subversive decadent style)

W.B. Yeats (Trad. Irish themes → Irish theatre)

Modernist drama

George Bernard Shaw (the play of ideas)

Bertold Brecht (verfremdungseffekt, epic theatre)

Samuel Beckett (theatre of the absurd?)

Samuel Beckett

Dublin → Paris

Met James Joyce

WWII french resistance, hiding

Nobel prize

Protestant minority in Ireland, devout when young, but turns away

<> Irish free state (censorship)

Joycean → Becjettian: omnipotence → impotence, taking away ipv adding → poetics of ignorance

Failure as a trope

Multimedial author, translingual

‘Gress’

Beckett

<> modernist notion of progress

Movement as gress → purity from destination and hence from schedule

Endgame

<> Godot easy writing

Difficult & elliptical, ‘more inhuman than Godot’

How: space, time (A-historical? But WWII, holocaust, apocalyps?)

Gress + dysteleology (doctrine of purposelessness in nature)

Structure: symmetry and repetition

Intertextuality: the bible, Greek philosophy, Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot?

Themes: ignorance / unknowing, importance (disability), exhaustion, failure & futility, suffering, ruination & end of the world, meaninglessness & inescapability of life

Meaning? → not very modernist, BUT form = content → modernist

Self-referentiality

Postmodernist lit

playful, self-referential, confuses distinction reality - fiction, mixes styles, pastiche, sus of grand narratives

No salvation, lost belief art can transform society

Language scepticism: word cannot actually convey meaning (also high modernist BUT still productive use) → enact failure of language:

Epanorthosis: technique constantly correct, negation of what was just said

High modernism: principle of possibility

Late modernism: principle of impossibility

Modernist poetry - background

Br. Poetry at the time conservative and insular

Influences from France: symbolism & USA: imagism

Symbolism

France, 2nd half 19th c

Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Valéry

escape from life, autonomy of poem, aesthetics

Reaction to old (realism) & new (Darwin, Marx)

Escape from the dreary, suggestive, evocative

Imagism

US & UK

Poetry = genre governed by conventions → imagism = make it new

From symbol (abstract) to image (concrete)

(1909-1917)

Ezra Pound

Viticism (energy, dynamism, abstract geometric forms)

Ezra Pound

(1885-1972)

Born in US, moved to London

Editor The Egoist & The Little Review

Paris & Italy

‘The Cantos’

“Image = radiant node or cluster, a vortex from which, and through which, and into which ideas are constantly rushing”

Image = “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”

-# achieved through metaphor, juxtaposition or fusion

Imagism - theory

3 founding theoreticians:

• Ezra Pound

• H.D.

• Richard Aldington

3 principles:

• treat the ‘thing’ directly (concrete visuals metaphors)

• Use no superfluous word

• choose musicality over metre

Stylistic principles:

• free verse

  • Objectivity and lucidity

  • Precise and concrete presentation

  • Directness

  • Concussion and compression → IMAGE

Thomas Stearns Eliot

(1888-1965)

Born in US, moved to London → met Pound (became Br citizen)

(Unhappy marriage)

Devout catholic

Emotionally repressed

Conservative pol views

Importance tradition, writing evoke ‘pastness of the present’

Eliot on poetry

<> romanticism: individuality of poet, emotions

Poetry = escape from emotion and personality

Poet not “personality” to express, but a particular medium in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways

Intertextuality (=/= influence) about reader

New criticism

Am lit crit form 40s

Persona from author = irrelevant, text itself

→ close reading

Objective correlative

term form Eliot

A set of objects / situation / chain of events which shall be formula of particular emotion → when external facts are given the emotion is immediately evoked

Show > tell

Cf imagism

Mythical method

term form Eliot

A continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, a way of ordering immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemp history

→ take what you know (antiquity) and fill it with contemp things

The Waste Land

1922

Pound pruned it significantly (more than half)

A lot of images, but relations between are important (symbolism)

Multiple languages used

Epigraph, idea of decay

Structure: montage → juxtaposition, lit allusions, association

5 parts, 3 contrasts

Linking devices (Tiresias)

The Waste Land - modernist properties

Lit of the urban (unreal cityscape → London)

Micro vs macrocosm: chunks focused on individuals, but mostly macro

Elliptical, dense & difficult ✅

fragmented and disjointed ✅

formal innovation ✅

A-historical: anchored in contemp situation, reference more mythical & biblical (=/= historical) → ✅

Apocalyptic ✅

Intertextuality ✅

Virginia Woolf

1882°, privileged family

Mother dies in 1895 → mental breakdown

Half-sister, father and brother die → depressions

Marries Leonard Woolf

Bloomsbury Group

Hogarth press

Started publishing in 1915

Bloomsbury Group

1907-1930

Modernist coterie (group of people united by same beliefs/tastes)

Core members: Virginia & Leonard Woolf, E.M. Forster, Vanessa & Clive Bell, Roger Fry etc.

Intellectual but also romantic (queer, polyamorous)

Hogarth Press

Est. 1917

Freedom (aesthetic and literary)

Bloomsbury Group & other (young) experimental authors

Translated works by Russian classics

Sigmund Freud

Virginia Woolf - artistic vision

Modern Fiction (1919; 1925)

Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1924)

(A Room of One’s Own, 1929)

Modern Fiction

First published 1919 ‘Modern Novels’

Revised and published as ‘Modern Fiction’ in The Common Reader (1925)

Materialists (H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett & John Galsworthy) and English lit more generally → “constrained to provide plot, comedy …, air of probability” → Realism

Vs. Spiritualists (Joyce, Conrad, Chekhov) and Russian lit more generally → look within, ordinary mind on an ordinary day

Literature not like technological progress

Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown

1924

Important manifesto for modernist lit

reaction to Arnold Bennett’s ‘Is the novel decaying?’

Creation of character

Edwardians vs Georgians

(Arrogant, self-confident tone)

The Mark on the Wall

1917, Hogarth Press

Structure: clear opening and closure, journey into character’s mind but constantly punctured → returns to mark, no real plot

Epiphany? Snail? Not life-changing → irony?

Modern fiction: focus on inner mind, against genre conventions BUT lots of objects, lists

Continuum tight-loose couplings: mark = tight, thoughts stray → loose, → back to mark

Long sentences, not really how mind works → Joyce more staccato

The Mark on the Wall - modernist properties

Not really in medias res, but few info about narrator

Stream of consciousness ✅

Unreliable narration ❌ reliable, but don’t know what’s going on themselves

Internal focalisation ✅

Fragmentation: SoC often punctured

Obscurity / difficulty, not really

Intertextuality, a little (Shakespeare)

Epiphany, maybe

Lack of closure ❌

A(nti)-historical, largely not historical, but end WWI

Micro vs Macrocosm: very micro

Mrs. Dalloway - context

1925

WWI, trench warfare, ptsd (shellshock)

Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis → free association, multi-layered self (Woolf dismissive, but actually similar)

Henri Bergson, chronological time vs duration

Mrs. Dalloway - Genesis

originally: short story, juxtaposition Mrs D <> PM, separate stories divided in chapters

But too neat, → organic flow of connections, Mrs D <> Septimus Smith (sanity <> insanity)

Figural narration

Filtered through character(s)

Third person

Narrator always there even when there’s no trace of him

Stream of consciousness

term from William James in regard to human mind (not fictional)

Cf. Freud principle of free association

In ‘The Little Review’ used for literature

Conveying of character’s consciousness NOT a ‘technique’

Ways to render consciousness (!)

Psychonarration: narrator translates character’s thoughts (often descriptive / summarising) → distance? Filtered through narrator

Quoted/interior monologue (free direct discourse): ‘unmediated’, present tense, I-form, narrator is ‘absent’

Narrated monologue (free indirect discourse): Narrator steers formally, but words are character’s → mix of mimeses (showing) and diegesis (telling), third person, past tense

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Serialised in ‘The Egoist’ (1914-15), 1916 full

Bildungsroman, Künstlerroman (exploration intellectual, emotional and aesthetic capacities)

Composition history:

• philosophical essay ‘A Portrait of the Artist’ (1904)

• Stephen Hero (autobiographical novel, abandoned) → largely based on

Themes: Identity → shackles (religion, family), exile → freedom (art, beauty, Europe)

Name: Stephen = first Christian martyr, Daedalus = craftsman, father of Icarus → using own craft to escape

Narration: Figural narr, end of novel switch to 1st p → matured, doesn’t need narrator anymore, UCP

Narrated monologue

Stephen dominant focaliser

Language grows with Stephen, more complex/inflated at end

Ulysses

1922

Structure: 18 episodes, +- 18h

Parallel Odyssey

Nausicaa

1920 publ in The Little Review, obscenity trial in US

13th ep Ulysses

Setting: evening 8 to 9pm, Sandymount Strand → romantic, pictorial, sets tone, juxtaposition: shore <> church

Leopold Bloom walking home

Focus on Gerty MacDowell, physical appearance, victim of ‘influencers’

→ pseudo-romantic ideal of love

Parallel: Gerty // Nausicaa // Virgin Mary (blue)

Narration: Figural, almost invisible (telling > showing)

Quoted & narrated monologue mixed with

UCP

Focalisation: Gerty & Bloom (the male gaze) dominant

James Joyce

(1882-1941)

Life full of travels

Money troubles

“Voluntary exile”

16 June 1904: first dat Nora Barnacle, day Ulysses takes place

1905-1915 Trieste: 1906 idea Ulysses, 1914 publ Dubliners, 14-15 portrait publ instalments

1915-1920 Zurich: 1916 portrait published full

1920-1939 Paris: Ulysses publ

1939-1941 Zurich: Finnegans Wake, falls ill

Artistic credo → write ‘the truth’, ‘the new realism’

Dubliners

1914

Started in 1904

15 stories daily life Dublin

Naturalism + modernism

Publishing obstructed by censorship: criticism of Catholic Church

“Paralysis” of a city, first stories children focalisers, later losing childlike innocence, frustration, resignation → paralysis

Circularity - death

The Dead - basic

Written in 1907

Longest and most complex story (part autobiographical)

Considered ‘best modernist story’

Main themes: death, hospitality, loss, love, memory, haunting history, intergenerational

In medias res

Uncle Charles Principle

Joyce, Portrait: “uncle Charles repaired to his outhouse”

→ When narrator describes character using the language of the character

The Dead - epiphany

(Borrowing from religious terminology)

Gabriel sees himself in the mirror as he really is

Thinks of death’s inevitability

‘Journey westward’

repetition of snow falling -> seeing the snow falling, Gabriel’s mind registers that every time -> innovative style 

The Dead - modernist properties

Uncle Charles Principle (UCP)

Symbolism (goloshes, snow)

Narratorial invisibility

• internal focalisation

• Abundance of dialogue

• UCP

Epiphany

“The horror! The horror!”

Meliorism

Belief that the world can be made better by human efforts

Human endeavour can improve nature

→ colonial doctrine

British and European Colonialism

1890s

• Late Victorian England → Heyday of British Empire

• slavery largely abolished

• Colonialism = a business, commercial concern (capitalist doctrine)

Berlin conference

• 15 Nov 1884 - 26 Feb 1885

• 12 European countries + Ottoman Empire + US

• Drafted regulations for colonial trade & borders of colonial Africa established

• Legitimised status of Congo as private property Leopold II

Contemporary attitudes: ‘carry light & civilisation into dark places of the world’ → ‘The White Man’s Burden’

Conrad, critical, minority view

Joseph Conrad

1857° in Polish Ukraine (minority in Russian Empire)

-1924

Parents intellectuals, activists, Polish nationalists

Years at sea (1874-1893): sails for the Congo, falls ill

An Outpost of Progress - basic

Written 1896, published 1897 (Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee (60y) → celebration heyday Br Imp)

Conrad: ‘my best story’

‘Insignificant events that bring on the catastrophe’

An Outpost of Progress - Structure

2 parts

• First sentences of both very similar

• End of part I suspense, begin part II leaves it hanging

Circularity:

• Begin: cross grave predecessor, steamer arriving

  End: body hanging from cross, steamer arriving

  -> implication cycle will go on, new men, company doesn’t care

An Outpost of Progress - Characteristics

Epiphany: killed unarmed man, changes way of thinking

Narrator: irony

Heart of Darkness - basic

First published in serialised form (1899)

Og title: ‘the’ → without more general, metaphorical

Structure 3 chapters, mirrors journey: outer → central → inner station // moving more in Marlow’s mind

Published in single volume in 1902 → many revisions (mostly cuts): reader had to infer more (mod), focaliser Marlow ‘how much can he know?’

Highly biographical

Heart of Darkness - narrative structure

Framed narrative: Marlow - prob ‘he’ (?)

→ why: distancing, uncertainty/ambiguity, confusion → mod char

Circularity

Breaks in framed narrative: suspense, takes reader out of suspension of disbelief, creates atmosphere, Emphasizes Marlow’s ability to tell the story coherently (form emphasizes content)

Heart of Darkness - characters

Two categories:

Names

• Kurtz

  • Nietzsche: “supernatural beings” → Übermensch

  • A lot of ellipses in quotes (mod) → Marlow finds him unimportant

  • Freud: id vs super-ego → instincts, monstrous passions vs “permitted”

• Marlow

Nameless → move away from individual, generalised, reduced to types

• Director of companies (captain)

• Accountant

• Lawyer

Modernism and gender

Modernism = masculine (?)

• Masculine elitism (education only for men)

• response to feminisation of society? (The new woman, suffragette movement)

Literature becoming a profession?

• 19th c: lit = hobby, entertainment → women

• 20th c: lit = educational, nation-building, regularised → men

Coping strategy → male pen names

(Early) criticism = emphasis on masculinity in modernist canon (writers excluded or marginalised), from 1980s change

Exceptions: Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf

Precursors mind exploration

Henry James:

‘Reflectors’ → centres of consciousness providing vantage points on story world, to dramatize how events are experienced by fictional minds

Focalisation

=/= narration → agent who tells

= agent who perceives → perspective

The Garden Party

Katherine Mansfield, 1922

Loosely based on real event from Mansfield’s childhood

Opening ‘in media’s res’: first word ‘And’, unclear relationships between characters, Laura’s age?

Variable focalisation: (narrator 3rd omniscient traditional), Laura, narrator, Mrs Sheridan

Fragmentation: information in bits, GP itself mostly skipped, but quite easy to follow

Ellipsis: ‘…’, party?

Kathrine Mansfield

(1888-1923) (tbc)

New Zealand, London, Europe

Upper-class background

Turbulent love life

Short stories

The modernist short story

Gains popularity as genre → very ‘modernist’ art form (magazines, easy to experiment, short period of time)

Properties:

• Epiphany: out of the blue revelation that has important consequences to character

• Formal experiment

  • ‘In medias res’

  • Fragmentation

  • Ellipsis: ‘…’, often something important is missing

  • Lack of closure

Two pillars modernism

‘Make it new’ (Ezra Pound, 1928)

‘Look within’ (Virginia Woolf, 1919)

’Make it new’

(Ezra Pound)

Modify / overturn existing modes of representation

(Largely about form)

→ radical formal innovation (Pound’s imagism)

BUT also use of tradition (Joyce’s Intertextuality)

‘Look within’

Focus on individual (interior?) mind

Woolf, ‘Modern fiction’:

• Look within, examine ordinary mind on an ordinary day

• Neo-realists write about ‘unimportant things’, concerned ‘not with the spirit but with the body’

• True task of novelist: ‘convey this varying, unknown and uncircumscribed spirit … with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible’

Inward turn

(Term coined by criticism)

Mind exploration → key theme in literary Modernism

Mind / world boundary (?)

‘Inward turn’ (Erich Van Kahler) about the novel as a genre: ‘A movement away from characters’ environments for acting and interacting → domain of mental / psychological, characterized as interior space separated from external, material reality’

Critical commonplace “modernism = mind → internal” → Herman questions this

Georg Lukàcs

criticised modernism for ‘inward turn’ → lack of social agenda

Realist fiction: characters cannot be distinguished form their social and historical environment, specific individuality inseparable from context in which they were created

(BUT this actually also applies to modernist characters)

D. Herman’s challenge

Is topic of ‘worlds-as-experienced’ the same as an ‘inward turn’?

Modernist fictional mind =/= ‘interior space’

Modernist mind exploration =/= ‘a movement inwards’

Instead continuum between ‘tight coupling’ between intelligent agent and agent’s surrounding environment — ‘looser coupling’ between agent and environment

Loose coupling example: daydreaming in lecture

Tight coupling example: taking notes, scrolling on insta → connection with physical world

→ X inward turn, but foregrounding of the inextricable interconnection between “inner’ and “outer” domains

Modernist narratives undermine classical Cartesian dichotomy between mind and body, mental and material → inseparability of perceiving and thinking from acting and interacting

Umwelt

Jakob von Uexküll

The organism’s model of the world

‘An animal’s environment in the sense of its lived, phenomenal world, the world as it presents itself to that animal thanks to its sensorimotor repertoire’

→ modernist writers = Umwelt researchers

‘Modern’ period literature

from 16th c

Or more specific use: avant-garde (late 19th c)

Modernity

Impercise term

• from Renaissance onwards?

• From 17th c scientific revolutions → enlightenment?

• Foucault: modernity = attitude rather than epoch

Anthropometric

Defenders: progress & productivity → emancipation human beings, extension of enlightenment optimism

Critics: no individual autonomy, no meaning just change and transformation, eurocentrism

Theorised by sociologists (Gemeinschaft → Gesellschaft)

Urbinisation by 1900

New technology

Technological progress - responses

Celebratory: Filipino Tommaso Marinetti (the beauty of speed), Le Corbusier (joy of power)

Despairing, apocalyptic: Most of Anglophone lit modernism (T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound)

Intellectual context of modernism

Pioneering thinkers:

• Charles Darwin

• Karl Marx

• Friedrich Nietzsche

• Sigmund Freud

• Ferdinand de Saussure

• Henri Bergson

• Albert Einstein

Charles Darwin

(1809-1882)

English naturalist

The Origins of Species By Means of Natural Selection (1859): nature not static but evolving, natural selection

Evolution = cyclical movement, not linear progression

Questioned religious dominance → not divine creation but pure chance

Human beings just another species

Consequences Darwin

Social Darwinism (Herbert Spencer, survival of the fittest)

Eugenics (Francis Galton)

Degeneration (Max Nordau)

Colonialism → social and racial superiority of European ‘civilisation’

Karl Marx

(1818-1883)

Social, political and economic theorist

Communist Manifesto (1848)

Das Kapital (1867-1894)

Capitalism thrives on recurrent crises (→ modernism = lit of the crisis)

Destabilizes society and causes alienation

Loss of old values due to egalitarian nature of capitalism

Friedrich Nietzsche

(1844-1900)

German philologist and philosopher

The Birth of a Tragedy (1872): Apollonian vs Dionysian experience (ratio vs pleasure)

Also sprach Zarathustra (1883-1892): God is dead, Theory of Übermensch

Sigmund Freud

(1856-1939)

Austrian neurologist

‘Psychoanalysis’ (principle of free association) and Traumdeutung

Ego = between Id and Super-ego

Society = repression of desire (sexual)

Ferdinand de Saussure

Swiss linguist

Course in General Linguistics (1916, post mortum)

Language = arbitrary, socially constructed, not divine or natural

Langue / parole

Words meaningless in absolute terms → only meaning in relation to each other

Basis for structuralism, semiotics and poststructuralism

Henri Bergson

(1859-1941)

French philosopher

‘Chronological time’ (clocks) = different from ‘duration’ (personal time)

Time is not objective, but differently experienced by each individual

(→ Mrs Dalloway)

Albert Einstein

German mathematical physicist

Theory of Relativity overturned Newtonian physics

No physical law is reliable → contingency

Always relative to observer’s position

→ embraced and discussed by artists

→ narrative relativity of Modernism: multiple focalisation, unreliable narrator, subjectivity

(Vs. (stable) Newtonian universe in realist novels)

Modernism as a period

approx. 1890-1930

1922 = ‘annum mirabilis’

• The Waste Land - T.S. Eliot (poem)

• Ulysses - James Joyce (novel)

• The Garden Party - Kathrine Mansfield (short story)

BUT most of the works written in period not modernist!

Modernism as a genre

Innovation and novelty:

• Experimental

• Formally complex

• Elliptical

• Self-reflexive

• Apocalyptically

• Uncertainty of reality

Response to crisis of modernity

‘The tradition of the new’

Model of modernism

description of representative features

• Anti-historicism: history not evolutionary or progressive (WWII)

• Focus on microcosm vs. macrocosm (individual vs social)

• Self-referential: art is about itself → texts self-contained (<> representational)

• Disjointed and disintegrated (<> Victorian harmony)

• Focus on aesthetics (<> Victorian morale)

Criticism of modernism

Georg Lukàcs

‘Man by nature solitary, asocial, unable to enter into relationships with other human beings’

‘ man is ahistorical being’, modernism = ‘negation of history’ (bc rejects models of historical understanding

// idk

Theodor Adorno (FS), modernism tried to change society by offering it shockingly radical art forms

Modernism vs realism

Realism → verisimilitude

Once innovative:

• ‘formal realism’ → ‘set of narrative procedures’ to portray all the varieties of human experience

• Realist novel → truth to individual experience (always unique and new)

Realism proposed shared world perceived in largely the same way by all members of society

Woolf ‘is life like this? Must novels be like this?’

→ modernism attempts to render human SUBJECTIVITY in ways ‘more real than realism’

Reality as varied as the individuals who perceived it