Literary works 20th c lit.

The garden party (Katherine Mansfield; 1922)

- Loosely based on her own childhood (atonement for her younger self)

story: Throws party but also someone died, and they hear about it and she feels it is inappropriate to have the party but others don’t care

MODERNIST ELEMENTS

• In medias res = not really starts in the middle of action, but it seems to start in the middle of a sentence or thought (first word is literally ‘and’)

• Epiphany : yes, when she sees the dead man. She perceives it as something beautiful

• There is a lack of closure = readers are left wondering

• There is fragmentation = but it is not difficult to follow since there is a lineair directions (don’t even see anything about the garden party)

• Ellipsis = the whole party is an ellipsis since it’s missing (but the reader has to fill in the blanks)

• Her age = vague and unknown but maybe an early teenager (15?) = she is allowed autonomy but still has innocence.

An outpost of progress (Joseph Conrad; 1897)

story: 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.

ELEMENTS

(circularity starts with grave, ends with death)

• Epiphany = when he sits with the body, thinks, realizes he can think and is a living creature, later he snaps out of it.

• third person narrator, negative view of main characters (irony)

Heart of darkness (Joseph Conrad; 1899,1902)

first published in serialized form (3 parts), later in book (collection) form.

story: a sailor named Charles Marlow who takes a job as a steamboat captain for a Belgian trading company in the Congo. His journey upriver to retrieve an enigmatic ivory agent named Kurtz becomes a harrowing exploration of imperialism, human nature, and moral decay.

ELEMENTS

• framed narrative (story in story)

• In medias res :“and this also, has been one of the dark paces on the earth”

• Fragmentation: Marlow’s story is often interrupted (by external narrator ‘he paused’,’broke off’, he was silent for a long time’,…)

  • = jolts us from willing suspension of disbelief, builds tension

• übermensch= Mr. Kurtz (as if more than human) BUT: Marlow “and so on, and so on”= doesn’t really care?

The dead (James Joyce; 1907,1914)

Final piece of Dubliners. (later added to the collection)

Story: Gabriel Conroy and his wife Gretta at an annual holiday party hosted by Gabriel's elderly aunts. The evening peaks with a song that reminds Gretta of her first love, Michael Furey, who died for her. This revelation triggers a profound, life-altering epiphany for Gabriel.

ELEMENTS

• In medias res but explained “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.”

• Uncle charles principle = language tailored to focalizer

• Epiphany: sees himself in mirror and doesn’t recognize himself

• 3rd person but (Narrated monologue?)

A portrait of the artist as a young man (James Joyce; 1916)

Bildungsroman, kunstlerroman

story: Stephen Dedalus growing up in turn-of-the-20th-century Ireland. He navigates restrictive religious and political landscapes, casts off the bonds of his family, the Catholic Church, and his country, and ultimately exiles himself to Europe to pursue a life as a writer.

(themes: identity, nationalism & religion, exile)

ELEMENTS

• Uncle charles principle: literally where it comes from.

• narration: constantly 3rd person but in the end change to 1st person

• stream of conciousness

• Epiphany(s): walking on Dollymound strandt = he has just been offered an opportunity to join the order, but on the walk, he decides he wants to be free and want to become an artist (sees bird, want to be free as such)

Nausicaa (James Joyce; 1922)

13th episode of ulysses

story: Leopold Bloom spends 18 hours in Dublin doing stuff while his wife fucks other men (they have an agreement on this) in this episode he walks on beach, sees woman Gerty MacDowell who dreams of romance

ELEMENTS

• Narration = rather showing than telling (again uncle Charles principle)

  • Gerty and Bloom are both dominant focalisers

• stream of consciousness

• Gerty= presented through physical characteristics and beauty products

• male gaze? : • Gerty is looked down upon for what she likes and the magazines she reads

• Gerty romanticizes Bloom ‘perfect husband’

The mark on the wall (Virginia Woolf; 1917)

story: a stream-of-consciousness story about an unnamed narrator who spots an ambiguous black mark above her fireplace. Refusing to get up, she uses the mark as a launchpad for philosophical musings on time, memory, the nature of knowledge, and society, ultimately discovering the mark is a snail

ELEMENTS

• The structure is not very obvious, but there is clear opening and clear closure => almost each paragraph starts with ‘but the mark’ = not really a plot or development but constant return to the mark

• epiphany: perhaps when she realizes the mark is a snail (mark is her anchor to the real world (D. Herman))

• focus on the mind and life of the character, and breaks genre conventions

Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf; 1925)

story: follows a single day in post-World War I London. It contrasts the domestic life of high-society hostess Clarissa Dalloway with the tragic decline of Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked war veteran.

ELEMENTS

• multiple variable focalizers/ main characters (Clarissa Dalloway, Peter Walsh, Septimus Dedalus, maybe also Richard, Elizabeth)

• cinematic principle: linking elements: smooth way to switch focalizers (mostly modern elements as linkers: aeroplane, ambulance..)

• In medias res

• Stream of consciousness (though not always perfect in theoretical sense, the principal still applies

• Unreliable narration (ex: peter though aunt died and told us- but we see her at party later)

• Fragmentation

• Obscurity/ difficulty

• Intertextuality (ex; Shakespeare)

• Lack of closure (actually there isn’t much to close so in a way there is closure, since the party ended)

• A(nti)-historical

• Microcosm vs macrocosm

The wasteland (Thomas Stearns Eliot; 1922)

heavily edited by Ezra Pound

story: a profound meditation on the spiritual emptiness, disillusionment, and cultural decay of the modern world following the devastation of World War I

ELEMENTS

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

• structure= a heap of broken images

• 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), But all of the references are mythical, biblical, but not really historical

Endgame (Samuel Beckett;1957)

story: an absurdist, one-act play about a blind, paralyzed master named Hamm and his resentful servant, Clov. Trapped in an isolated room in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, they are joined by Hamm’s geriatric parents, Nagg and Nell, who live in trash cans. They anxiously wait for the end of their meaningless existence.

ELEMENTS

• 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?

THEMES

• there is no meaning. in anything

• 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…”