Les 2 - deel 2

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?

Katherine 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