LES 8: 20th c lit.

Features of literary modernism

Form = innovation

Content = exclavation

Philosophy = ‘look within’ (Woolf) and ‘make it new’ (Pound)

• Serious emancipation project to achieve cultural renewal

Form = innovation

• Complex

• Self-referential

• Stream of consciousness

• Lack of closure

• In medias res

Content = excavation

• Allusive & intertextual

• Difficult (to read)

• Mind exploration

• Cultural apocalypse

major texts

• Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (1922)

• James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

• T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

• Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925)

• Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)

• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)

• James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939

Samuel Beckett

1906- 1989

Transition figure of modernism & post-modernism

• Theatre of the absurd (term by Martin Esslin 1960s) (Beckett didn’t like this) = doesn’t like explanations and labels = there is no truth so you cannot assign a judgement to it.

Born in Foxrock (protestant suburb Dublin)

1923: trinity college Dublin (arts degree, English French & Italian)

1928 teacher of English in Paris (bad teacher and hated it)

Endgame (themes)

• Ignorance or unknowing (many questions and few answers “something is taking its course” as answer is a non-answer)

• Impotence (physical abilities, the inability to end)

• Exhaustion (no more coffins, no more painkillers, no more pap etc)

• Suffering (Linguistic aggression, mental & physical suffering, all relationships)

• Ruination and the end of the world(“Outside of here it’s death” ”The whole place stinks of corpses…”

• Meaninglessness and inescapability of life (“use your head can’t you, use your head, you’re on eart, there’s no cure for that”)

  • Meaning? (No meaning. Doesn’t want it to mean anything); meaningless is enacted and embodied in the play: repetitive, circular, pointless activity) >> form = content

Endgame (modernist properties)

• Experimental, not action driven, theatre of narration

• Verftremdungseffekt = self-referential

• Lack of closure? = circular= we’re back at beginning

• Notions of (cultural) apocalypse and disaster

• A-historical? (can maybe situate it because of pain killers and whatnot but further no idea)

• Intertextual?

modernism VS postmodernism

• Modernism = difficult & serious

• Postmodernism = more playful

  • Closeness with Joyce, effort to reinvent (make it new) = makes him exemplary modernist

  • After = became exemplary post-modernist for a time, modernism turned from the world in the effort to create a second-order world of art, postmodernism pluaralist this act of worldmaking (less is more)

Beckett = late-modernist not either or, but a thing on it’s own

Late modernism

• commited to modernist formal, stylistic innovation

  • Much darker vision of history and humanity tan high modernism

  • Failure to achieve cultural renewal through art (because we got the war and holocaust)

    • inability to express oneself in words but in a very eloquent way.

• Turns language back against itself – linguistic self-undioing in the attempts to capture human reality/experience
  (tries to explain using words but failing to = contradicatary)

• Both post- and late modernism = language is meaningless but in a very different way

High modernism = principle of possibility (make it new)

Late modernism = principle of impossibility

• Beckett = even if language is meaningless, he kept trying (failure to express on one hand, but obligation to express on other)

gress

Beckett

• different from modernist notion of progress

• movement as gress = moving forward without destination and schedule

• = movement without progress or regression

Modernist drama

Georg Bernard Shaw: the play of ideas

Bertold Brecht: verfremdungseffekt & epic theatre

Samuel Beckett: theatre of the absurd