20th century literature all.

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

‘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: x= attitude rather than epoch

Anthropometric

= human experience as focal point

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

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

Theorised by sociologists (Gemeinschaft → Gesellschaft)

Urbanisation by 1900= mass migration from countryside to city (London, NY, Paris, Berlin)

New technology

o   When touch lost with progress and end product = too complicated to oversee it, anxiety & alienation

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’ = miraculous year of modernism

• 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: criticism inward turn

‘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

Theodor Adorno:, 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

Two pillars modernism

‘Make it new’ (Ezra Pound, 1928)

‘Look within’ (Virginia Woolf, 1919)

’Make it new’

(Ezra Pound)

Modify / overturning existing modes of representation

(Largely about form)

→ radical formal innovation (Pound’s imagism)

BUT also use of tradition (Joyce’s Intertextuality with ex: ulysses as counterpart for the odyssey)

‘Look within’

Focus on individual, interior mind

Woolf, ‘Modern fiction’:

• “Look within, examine an 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 1975-9) 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 context, 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 is NOT ‘interior space’

Modernist mind exploration is NOT ‘a movement inwards’

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

Loose coupling: when lost in thought or memory, not really connected to the current.

Tight coupling example: full attention, connection to world and in the current (like writing notes in class)

→ NOT inward turn, but interconnection between “inner’ and “outer” domains

Umwelt

Coined by German biologist: 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’

=> everyone observes the world differently = everyone sees and experiences the world in a unique way>

→ modernist writers = Umwelt researchers

Modernism and gender

Modernism traditionally associated with masculine (radical ideas)

• Masculine elitism (education only for men)

• response to feminisation of society (The new woman, suffragette movement > intimidating men)

Literature before not seen as a profession BUT 20th century =

• Nobel prize for literature

• TLS (a magazine of literature)

• Academic committee (1910) = all-male organ for English literature

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

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

Coping strategy → male pen names '(also earlier with Brönte sisters)

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

Exceptions: Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf

Focalisation

= agent who perceives → perspective

perspective = whose thoughts/ reflections/ observations are we reading?

The Garden Party

Katherine Mansfield, 1922

Loosely based on author’s own childhood

MC = Laura’s age = not very clear (allowed autonomy but still has innocence)

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

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

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

• Ellipsis: whole party because it’s missing

• Epiphany: when she sees dead man, perceives it as something beautiful

• lack of closure: readers left wondering

Kathrine Mansfield

(1888-1923)

New Zealand, London, Europe

Upper-class background

Turbulent love life

Interesting relationship with Virginia Woolf (who admired Katherine’s writing , but not personality lol)

Short stories

Died of tuberculosis

modernist short stories

Gains popularity as genre → very ‘modernist’ art form (magazines, easy to experiment and sustain new style)

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

Narration

telling = who is telling us the focalized thoughts/ reflections/ observations?

Poetry (Peter Childs)

• British poetry at the time >> conservative and insular

• Influences from France (symbolism) and USA (imagism)

Symbolism

• from France

• 2^nd half of 19^th century: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Baléry

  • from dreary, hard life: autonomy of poem, aesthetics.

• => reaction to old (realism) and new (systems of Darwin, Marx)

Imagism

• from USA

• Poetry as genre governed by conventions and constraints BUT now = “make it new”

• from symbol => image (abstract => concrete)

  • short lived sub genre (1909-17)

• Fouding father = T. E. Hulme (not popular) further established by Ezra Pound.

  • Treat the ‘thing’ directly (concrete visual metaphors

  • Use no superfluous words

  • Metre is not important but musicality is.

Ezra Pound

(1885- 1972)

• Born in Idaho (USA) (poor)

• MA in romance languages at UPenn

  • 1908= move to London

  • 1921-24= move to Paris (editor for the egoist and the little review, serialised Portrait and Ulysses)

  • 1924-1945= move to Italy (arrested for treason= fascist sympathies, anti-semitic)

  • 1945= arrested send to military prison and later mental hospital.

• Own work = The cantos (116 section-long poem)

Thomas Stearns Eliot

1885-1909

• Born Missouri

• 1916-1909= studies at Harvard (many Languages(alive and dead), art history and philosophy)

• meets Ezra Pound in England

  • Went to mental institution because of his wife

  • Religious background, conservative views<

• Early carreer as poet and critic.

• “poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of a personality, but an escape from personality”

  • (Samuel Beckett said: T. Eliot is toilet spelt backwards (LOL))

New criticism

T.S. Eliot

• American literary criticism from 1940s (especially regarding poetry)

• Text/ poem itself contains all the information the reader needs = close reading (no background information about author or anything)

• ‘tradition and the individual talent’ (1919): goal = evoke the ‘pastness of the present’

influence of literary tradition

Influence is not intertextuality

• Influence = author <> text <> other texts

• Intertextuality = reader <> text <> other text

objective correlative

show’ rather than ‘tell’

• You feel a certain emotion and you need a certain object so that people can correlate the emotion through the object (ex: rats and bones = fear/ terror)

mythical method

From narrative method to mythical method

• Like Ulysses = use of mythical structure and ‘filling it’ with contemporary content to give it shape

Thomas Stearns Eliot (views)

• New criticism

• Influence of literary tradition

• objective correlative

• mythical methid

The waste land (background)

1922

Thomas Stearns Eliot

Early title: He Do the Police in Different Voices (Dickens)

Original epigraph: ‘the horror! The horror!’ (only 1 gen older but was used to refer to antiquity)

• A lot of references , but even if you don’t get any of the references , you get the general vibe because of it

• 1921= start of writing and shows draft to friend Ezra Pound (who cut more than half the text) = dedicated poem to Pound

• Was too short to be published so had to add notes (publisher’s request) = later regretted it

The waste land (structure)

‘a heap of broken images’ = unordered

• Literary allusions (‘fragments’ from the past) ( greek myths, Dante, Shakespeare, Baudelaire etc.)

• Cinematic principle + linking devices (like in mrs Dalloway) = up to the reader to make right association

Five parts = each part has a title

• Unity in structure achieved by 3 contrasts:

  • Fertility vs infertility (>> water and fisherking)

  • Present vs. past/future

  • Here vs. everywhere

• Linking devices:

  • throughout all of text = rats, bones, water, rocks, fire, the violet hour, the waste land

  • Tiresias (woman/man, blind/can see) = represents both men and women but basically calls us blind, yet’ what Tiresias sees is the substance of the poem’

The wasteland (modernist properties)

• Literature of the urban (cityscape >> London) (like in Mrs Dalloway is with London and Ulysses with Dublin) = yes,, but in a different way

• Microcosm vs macrocosm

  • Overall more of a zoomed out perspective

• Elliptical dense and difficult & it is fragmented and disjointed

• Formal innovation

• A-historical?

• => Pretty anchored in contemporary situation (time of writing poem)

• => all references are mythical, biblical (not really historical)

Figural narration

Filtered through character(s)

Third person BUT constantly filtered through characters always there even when there’s no trace of him

= thoughts rendered by 3rd person/ invisible narrator

Stream of consciousness

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

= river metaphor = the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.

Cf. Freud principle of free association

In ‘The Little Review’ used for literature

Conveying of character’s consciousness NOT a ‘technique’

There is no discerning begin, middle or end.

Ways to render consciousness

• Psychonarration: narrator translates character’s thoughts (often descriptive / summarising) → certain distance

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

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

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

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

• Bildungsroman (coming of age, development, attaining wisdom and maturity)

• Künstlerroman (artistic development of an artist)

• Composition history: as philosophical essay ‘A Portrait of the Artist’ (1904)

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

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

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

Narration: Figural narrator, end of novel switch to 1st p → matured, doesn’t need narrator anymore, dropped shackles, own story in hands

• Narrated monologue

• Stephen dominant focaliser

• Language grows with Stephen, more complex/inflated at end

Ulysses

1922

Structure: 18 episodes, +- 18h

Leopold Bloom spends 18 hours in Dublin doing stuff while his wife fucks other men (they have an agreement on this)

Parallel Odyssey (Homer)

Nausicaa

1920 published in The Little Review, had obscenity trial in US leading to ban in 1921

13th episode in 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’ (magazines, adds beauty products)

→ pseudo-romantic ideal of love (romanticises Leopold as a perfect husband she’s dreaming of)

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

Narration: Figural, almost invisible (telling > showing)

Quoted & narrated monologue mixed with uncle charles principle

Focalisation: Gerty & Bloom (the male gaze) dominant

• Gerty is looked down upon for what she likes and the magazines she reads (so is it misogynist? Obscene? Or just truthful without embellishments like James says?)

Virginia Woolf

born 1882, privileged family (access to library)

Mother dies in 1895 → mental breakdown

Half-sister, father and brother die → depressions

• Marries Leonard Woolf (happy marriage)

• Bloomsbury Group & start Hogarth press together

Started publishing in 1915

(Born and died in same year as James Joyce (1882-1940))

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. (authors, artists, critics, intellectual)

Intellectual but also romantic (queer, polyamorous)

• wealthy, upper class, some critics were cynical toward them saying they were bored and came together to talk about those things.

Hogarth Press

Est. 1917

Freedom (aesthetic and literary)

Bloomsbury Group & other (young) experimental authors

Translated works by Russian classics

Sigmund Freud

• Leonard bought it to keep Virginia busy during her deteriorating mental health.

• Publish own work, work of Bloomsbury group, others (also authors who had little possibilities of publishing elsewhere) (T.S. Elliot, Katherine Mansfield,…)

  • Gave Virginia freedom to write whatever

Virginia Woolf (critical essays)

Modern Fiction (1919; 1925)

Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924)

A Room of One’s Own, (1929)

Modern Fiction

First published 1919 in the times literary

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

Materialists (H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett & John Galsworthy)

• says they are concerned with body not spirit= writing this way is stifling and she want them to let it go (versimilitude)

Vs. Spiritualists (Joyce, Conrad, Chekhov) and Russian lit more generally

• look within, ordinary mind on an ordinary day

• She likes them, says they come closer to life even if against conventions.

• she says you can write about anything as long as every feeling and thought is there

Literature not like technological progress

The Mark on the Wall

1917, Hogarth Press

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

Epiphany? that the mark is a Snail? but realization is not life changing

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 Dalloway <> Septimus, separate stories divided in chapters

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

Meliorism

Belief that the world can be made better by human efforts

Human endeavour can improve nature

“our fate is in our hands”

→ colonial doctrine

British and European Colonialism

1890s

• Late Victorian England → Heyday of British Empire

• slavery largely abolished

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

Berlin conference

• 1884 - 1885

• 12 European countries + Ottoman Empire + US

• regulated colonial business, borders of colonial Africa

• 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’

Joseph Conrad

1857-1924

Born in Polish Ukraine (minority in Russian Empire) so can identify with other minorities?

Parents intellectuals, activists, Polish nationalists

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

=> Moved to Britain and learned English very well (originally French)

An Outpost of Progress

Written 1896, published 1897

(= Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee → celebration of heyday of Britisch imperialism.

Conrad: thought it was his best story

‘Insignificant events that bring on the catastrophe’

Summary: two men left on an outpost for ivory= at some point another group comes and comes to take ivory = they stay lonely and become mad, one gets shot, the other hangs himself

An Outpost of Progress (structure)

2 parts

• First sentences of both very similar

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

• Part two starts with explosion, still in the dark but get sense something happened

Circularity:

• Begin: see cross grave predecessor, steamer arriving

  End: body hanging from cross, steamer arriving

  -> implication cycle will go on, men are replacable, company doesn’t care about men at post

An Outpost of Progress (Characteristics)

Epiphany: killed unarmed man, changes way of thinking = when he sits with the body, thinks, realizes he can think and is a living creature, later he snaps out of it.

Narrator: negative view of MC’s : irony

third person,

language such as N-word = should not be removed = would be errasing the problem, readers know it’s wrong

Heart of Darkness

First published in serialised form (1899)

• Og title: ‘the’ heart of darkness→ implies there’s only one, metaphorical

• ‘darkness’= ‘the dark continent’= not to do with skincolor byt ‘mysterious’

• A tale about human nature = less concentration on individuals

• 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, focaliser Marlow ‘how much can he know?’ = leaves things out

• Highly biographical

Heart of Darkness (narrative)

• Framed narrative: Marlow

=> distancing his own experience, uncertainty/ ambiguity/ confusion

• Circularity

Breaks in framed narrative = often interrupted (he paused, was silent for a while,…): suspense, takes reader out of suspension of disbelief, creates atmosphere, Emphasizes Marlow’s ability to tell the story coherently (form emphasizes content)

opens in medias res “and this also, has been one of the dark paces on the earth” = he is talking of England, London

Heart of Darkness (characters)

Two categories:

with names

• Kurtz (framed)

  • Nietzsche: “supernatural beings” → Übermensch

  • A lot of ellipses in quotes → Marlow finds him unimportant (“and so on and so on”)

• Marlow (frame)

  • director of companies, lawyer and accountant,

  • (stereotype men of wealth that represent the power/ system)

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

• Director of companies (captain)

• Accountant

• Lawyer

James Joyce

(1882-1941) Dublin

middle class, catholic parents, eldest of 10 siblings

Life full of travels

=> “Voluntary exile”

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

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

1915-1920 Zurich: 1916 portrait published full

1920-1939 moves to Paris: Ulysses published in France

1939-1941 Zurich: Finnegans Wake, falls ill

Artistic credo

• ‘Art is true to itself when it deals with truth’

• On Ulysses: ‘a new orientation in literature— the new realism’

Dubliners

1914

Started in 1904

15 stories daily life Dublin

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

Written in 1907

Longest and most complex story (part autobiographical)

Considered ‘best modernist story’

• Plot: A social gathering (Christmas party) is given by 2 women known for their hospitality. The people come together, party, talk,… Then the two protagonists go home, talk, the end

Main themes: History & memory, Death & loss, Hospitality, Love

• In medias res but explains character as well: ‘‘Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.’’

Uncle Charles Principle

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

→ When narrator describes character using the language of the character

The Dead (epiphany)

Gabriel sees himself in the mirror as he really is, dissapointed (after being very jealous concerning his wife

Thinks of death’s inevitability

‘Journey westward’

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

The Dead (modernist properties)

Uncle Charles Principle (UCP)

Symbolism (goloshes, snow)

Narratorial invisibility

• internal focalisation

• Abundance of dialogue

• UCP

Epiphany