20th-century literature in English

Modernism

An aesthetic response to the crisis of modernity.

It reacts to rapid technological, philosophical, and social change by radically reinventing literary

form in order to represent fractured subjectivity and unstable reality.

- collapse of religious certainty

- collapse of epistemological certainty

- collapse of linguistic certainty

'Modernity'

- first used by Baudelaire (1863): the fashionable, fleeting and contingent in art, as opposed to the

eternal and immutable. Modernity = something that is going to pass.

- 1986: Foucault: an ATTITUDE rather than an epoch

- Jürgen Habermas: progress and higher productivilty that will lead to the emancipation of human beings, away from dogmas

- critics: material benefit, but no individual autonomy

- Ferdinand Tönnies: shift from 'Gemeinschaft' to 'Gesellschaft'

Gemeinschaft

Social relations between individuals, based on close personal and family ties; community.

Gesellschaft

Social relations based on impersonal ties, such as duty to a society or organization.

Charles Darwin

English naturalist: 'The origin of species'

- Idea: nature is not static but evolving

- Natural selection

- Evolution = cyclical movement, not linear

- Implicitly: Darwin went against the idea of divine creation (= fundamental dogma for centuries)

All the species have evolved (especially humans), so not created by God

-Consequences:

o Social Darwinism (Herbert Spencer): survival of the fittest ( Darwin: natural selection)

o Eugenics

o Colonialism

Karl Marx

Social, political and economic theorist

- 'Das Kapital' (1867-1894) & 'Communist Manifesto' (1848)

- Capitalism thrives on recurrent crises, all about making money

Predictable => something new

- Destabilises society and causes alienation

- Loss of old values due to the egalitarian nature of capitalism

Friedrich Nietzsche

German Philologist and philosopher

- The birth of a tragedy

- Also sprach Zarathustra

o 'God is dead'

o Theory of the Übermensch

Sigmund Freud

Austrian neurologist

- 'psychoanalysis' and Traumdeuting

- Ego and id

o Ego = between id and super-ego (psychosis)

- Society = repression of desire (sexual)

- Principle of free association (cf. William James: stream of consciousness)

Ferdinand de Saussure

Swiss linguist

- Course in General Linguistics

- Language = arbitrary, socially structured, not divine or natural

- Structure (Langue) and randomness

=> Words are only meaningful in relation to each other

- Basis for structuralism, semiotics and poststructuralism

Henri Bergson

French philosopher

- 'Chronological time' (clocks) = different from duration ( the time we experience, personal time)

e.g. The trip back always seems shorter

- Cf. Mrs Dalloway

Albert Einstein

German mathematical physicist

- Theory of Relativity overturned Newtonian physics

o Newtonian: this is the way it is, has always been and will always be

o Relative: new (stability -> modern)

- Cf. Narrative Relativity of Modernism

o Multiple focalisation

o Unreliable narrator

o Subjectivity

Vs. (stable) Newtonian universe in realist novels

Malevich

'Black square'

We are looking at the spectator that is looking at the painting, and we are also looking at the painting.

=> multiplicity of focalisation

1922

'Annus mirabilis'

- T.S. Eliot, 'The Waste Land'

- James Joyce, Ulysses

- Katherine Mansfield, 'The Garden Party'

Modernism: a genre

Innovation and novelty

- Experimental

- Formally complex

- Elliptical

- Self-reflexive

- Apocalyptical

- Uncertainty of reality

Modernism: a model

- anti-historicism?

- microcosm vs. macrocosm

- self-referential

- disjointed and disintegrated

- aestehtics

Georg Lukacs

Modernism = 'negation of history' as it rejects models of historical understanding

- Modernism isolates individuals, denies historical totality, and produces 'ahistorical' protagonists, BUT texts often obsessively reference history

- Modernist texts: reject linear-progress history, not history per se

Criticised the modernist project for its 'inward turn'

- lack of social reality

- 'characters 'cannot be distinguished from their social and historical environment.'

=> Too individualistic

Theordor Adorno

- Critical of society but open to the forms that modernism was trying to introduce as a means to perceive society

- Changing society by offering it shockingly radical art forms

Two pillars of modernism

1. 'Make it new' - Ezra Pound

- Modernist drive to change things

- Modify/ overturn existing modes of representation

- Radical formal innovation cf. The Waste Land

- BUT also use of (literary) tradition (Ulysses, Murphy)

2. 'Look within' - Virginia Woolf

- Focus on the individual (interior) mind

- Virginia Woolf, 'Modern Fiction'

- 'Look within' and 'examine [...] an ordinary mind on an ordinary day'

- Neo-realists (Bennett, Galsworthy) write about about 'unimportant things' (159) and concerned 'not with the spirit but with the body'

Inward Turn

Erich Von Kahler:

The shift from realism to modernism. We are now interested in what happens inside the mind (the mind is the true site of experience).

External man -> internal man

Look within

The 'inward turn' was too simplistic. So David Herman suggests a continuum:

- loose coupling = between the mind and the world

- tight coupling = between the intelligent agent and that agent's surroundings

Umwelt

Jacob van Uecküll:

- An Umwelt is the specific, subjective world of experience of a species, shaped by its senses and perceptual systems, in contrast to an objective, general environment

- The mind experiences the world in a very unique way; we all have our umwelt

- progressive idea in the novel

Mind-world nexus

<=> inward turn

The tight and loose coupling come together on that continuum (a mind-world continuum)

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923)

- New Zealand, London, Europe

- Turbulent love life

- Died of tuberculosis

- Difficult relationship with Virginia Woolf

o Woolf admired Mansfield's writing

- Loosely based on her own childhood

o Atonement for her younger self

'The Garden Party'

- Katherine Mansfield, 1922

- short story

Modernist properties in 'The Garden Party'

- Epiphany

- In medias res

- Fragmentation

- Ellipsis

- Lack of closure

- Multiple focalisation

- symbols

End of the 19thC

- notion of progress: 'things will only get better'

- capitalism: money and capital were not an exclusive privilege of the upper class anymore

- Meliorism: the belief that we humans can improve the world and can tame nature

15 Nov 1884 - 26 Feb 1885

The Berlin Conference (a.k.a. The Congo Conference)

- 15 Nov 1884 - 26 Feb 1885

- 12 European countries + the Ottoman Empire and the US

- Drafted regulations for the borders of colonial Africa, established and colonial trade

- Legitimised the status of Congo as the private property of Leopold II of Belgium

1890

Conrad is appointed by the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo.

'An Outpost of Progress'

- Joseph Conrad, 1897

- Short story

- Two-part structure

- 3rd person omniscient narrator

'Heart of Darkness'

- Joseph Conrad, 1902

- originally: 'The Heart of Darkness'

- framed narrative

Joyce's artistic credo

'write 'the truth''

- 'Art is true to itself when it deals with truth'

- Joyce was trying to show the audience how Dublin really was

- New realism and new orientation in literature

'Dubliners'

James Joyce, 1914

- 15 stories about daily life in Dublin

- Naturalism + modernism

- Joyce's duty to hold a mirror and show what Dublin was really like

'The Dead'

James Joyce, 1907

- Short story

- Written in 1907 and later added to 'Dubliners'

- Part autobiographical

Modernist properties in 'The Dead'

- We can identify the characters by their idiom

- Uncle Charles Principle (UPC)

- filled with unfiltered dialogue

- The narrator is invisible -> perspective of the characters(doesn't steer us in any direction)

- Introspection (the ending)

- In medias res

- Epiphany

Epiphany

'a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself' (Joyce)

stream of consciousness

Not a narrative technique on itself; the effect of narrative techniques (Cohn).

= Mimics the natural, unfiltered flow of a character's thought process.

William James: 'Principles of psychology' -> 'it is nothing jointed; it flows. A river or a stream are the metaphors by which it is most described.'

Psychonarration

Representing a character's consciousness by directly telling the reader about their feelings and attitudes. The character is not actively involved.

quoted monologue

- present, first person

- invisible narrator, but never absent

- no tags like 'he thought...'

narrated monologue

- Free indirect discourse

- 'a character's mental discourse in the guise of the narrator's discourse'

- the words are the character's

- past, third person

Nausicaa

James Joyce, 1920

- 13th episode of Ulysses

- takes place on Sandymount Strand. It is divided into two parts: a sentimental, romanticized fantasy by a young woman named Gerty MacDowell, and a contrasting, sexually aroused inner monologue by Leopold Bloom as he watches her.

Modernist properties in 'Nausicaa'

- Free Indirect Discourse

- telling > showing

Victorian period

1837-1901

- civilisation as a safeguard, industrialisation, decorum

- cf. Conrad

Edwardian period

1901-1914

- As a reaction to the Victorian period

- 'fun' period

- prosperity

- social change

Georgian period

1910-1936

- WWI

- political change: House of Commons > House of Lords

- social change

Modern Fiction

Virginia Woolf, 1919; 1925

- Materialist vs. spiritualist

- Materialists write of unimportant things

- not every novel needs a plot, tragedy, a love interest ...

Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown

Virginia Woolf, 1924

- serves as a manifesto for literary Modernism

- Woolf uses the fictional "Mrs. Brown" to represent the elusive, complex nature of modern human character, critiquing traditional Edwardian writers like Arnold Bennett for failing to capture this inner reality

The Mark on the Wall

Virginia Woolf, 1917

- an ordinary mind on an ordinary day

- breaks the genre conventions

- Woolf constantly lists objects: connected

- Everything that happens in the story is interior, but something exterior triggers it (the mark on the wall)

Modernist properties in 'The Mark on the Wall'

- in medias res

- stream of consciousness

- unreliable narration

- internal focalisation

- fragmentation

- ahistorical?

Mrs. Dalloway

Virginia Woolf, 1925

see seminar

Modernist properties in 'Mrs. Dalloway'

- in medias res

- stream of consciousness

- unreliable narration

- multiple focalisation

- fragmentation

- obscurity

- intertextuality

- ahistorical?

'Make it new'

Ezra Pound's expression, which summarises the need for change felt in the period: tradition of the new.

Symbolism

France

A device in literature where an object represents an idea.

Imagism

A movement in early 20th-century English and American poetry that sought clarity of expression through the use of precise images

Three principles of imagism

1. Treat the thing directly

2. Use no superfluous words

3. Choose musicality over metre

Tradition and the Individual talent

T.S. Eliot, 1919

- directly rejects the core tenets of Romanticism

- poetry is a depersonalized craft deeply rooted in a collective literary history

New Criticism

A movement in literary criticism, dating from the late 1920s, that stressed close textual analysis in the interpretation of works of literature.

objective correlative

the artistic and literary technique of representing or evoking a particular emotion by means of symbols that objectify that emotion and are associated with it.

- show > tell

Mythical Method

A "way of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." Myth as "an effective strategy to establish a parallelism between the present and the past, by relying on the commonality of different creative moments." He brought light and meaning to a contemporary panorama that had lost them.

The Waste Land

T.S. Eliot, 1922

- spiritual decay, disillusionment, and alienation of post-WWI Europe

- 'il miglior fabbro'

Modernist properties of 'The Waste Land'

- literature of the urban

- elliptical

- dense

- difficult

- fragmented

- innovative

- ahistorical?

Beckettian ignorance

A deliberate pursuit of unknowing and impotence. Rather than viewing ignorance as a lack of education, Beckett treated it as an artistic goal.

Poetics of ignorance

An artistic philosophy of unknowing that strips away logical knowledge and omniscience

Endgame

Samuel Beckett 1957

- fin de partie

- All the characters depent on each other

- looking for meaning when there is none

Modernist properties in 'Endgame'

- Cyclical, Meaningless Action

- bare, grey interior

- Time seems to have ended

- ahistorical?

- symmetry

- intertextuality

- self-referentiality

Gress

Movement that doesn't have a purpose; doesn't lead anywhere.

This sets Beckett apart from canonical modernists