LES 1&2 20th c lit.

‘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?