The English novel from the 1890s to the 1960s

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Modernism in fictions

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  • Modernism: a phase in the history of European art and literature from the last decades of the 19th century to the years before WWII

    • it is an umbrella term: covers a wide range of movements

      • l’art pour l’art, Symbolism, Cubism, Imagism, Expressionism, Futurism

  • British literary Modernism

    • Early Modernism

    • High Modernism (from end of WWI to early 30s)

      • W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf

    • Late Modernism

  1. Philosophical underpinnings of literary Modernism

  • Idealism (aesthetic and historical)

  • anti-utilitarian ethos

  • primacy of sensory experience

  • conviction that knowledge is subjectiv and relative —→ dustrust of the personal and preference of the objective

  • epistemological sceptism

  • experiementing (the pursuit of the perfect form)

  • elitism: the cult of the great man —→ most often personified by the figure of the poet

  1. Literary Modernism

  • reaction against Victorian values

  • Britain

    • industrial-mercantile society dominated by utilitariansim

    • scientific discoveries

    • decline of religion

    • rise of realism in art

  • a reaction to the developments of the era, a rejection of the 19th century traditions

  • the cult of beautiful: Walter Pater & Aesthetic Movement

    • the artist is the creator of beautiful things

    • ~ Romantic literature —→ some critics regard Modernism as a phase of Romanticism

  1. Literary market in the UK

  • high rates of literacy - approximately 80% of population

  • large market for literary products

  • newspaper culture: many writers worked as journalists

  1. Literary market in the USA

  • 1909 | Copyright Act - secured the rights and revenues of authors and controlled the market and distribution

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the modern novel

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  • the dominant form in Modernism because it’s adaptable, popular, capable of gratifying a variety of tastes and interests

  • grows out of 19th century fiction

  • adoption of complex and difficult new forms

  1. Thematic variation

  • horror/ Gothic fiction (Henry James)

  • travel writing (Joseph Conrad)

  • realist fiction (John Galsworthy)

  • social chronicles (E. M. Forster)

  • psychological novels (D.H Lawrence, Virgina Woolf)

  1. Technical characteristics

  • predominantly cosmopolitan —→ expressing a sense of urban cultural dislocation

  • awareness of new psychological theories

  • juxtaposition and multiple point of view —→ challenges the reader to establish a coherence in meaning from fragmentary forms

  • broad-endedness, open-endedness —→ life is a series of crises

  • spatial form, distancing —→ impersonality, authorial neutrality

  • impersonality

  • Henry James: “the novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life, experience is and immense sensibility“

  • plot based on private perception of the significant in human affairs —→ novel taken out of the public arena, emphasis on individual, private sphere and personality

  • realism: gves the impression of recording or “reflecting“ faithfully an actual way of life

    • modern criticism: realism is not a direct or simple reproduction of reality, but a system of conventions producing a lifelike illusion of some real world outside the text by processes of selection, exclusion, description and manners of addressing the reader

  • experiencing with new forms

  • stream of consciousness: the literary method of representinf the continuous flow of sense-perceptions, thoughts, feelings and memories in the human mind —→ form: interior monologue + impressions + violating the norms of grammar or punctuation

    • coined by William James

  • free indirect discourse: third person narration is combined with first person direct speech

  • symbolic structures: primary way to achieve unity in the text is by heavy use of imagery

  • critique of self-reliance

  • homodiegetic/ heterodigetic and extradiegtic/ intradigetic narrators (e.g.: Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness)

  • sensibility: the artist is isolated, truth is no longer given —→ the aim of art seizes to be seeking perfection

  • utopia: a fiction written about an imagined form of ideal or superior human society —→ is usually the basis of satire of the contemporary life

  • dystopia: the inverted equivalent of a utopia, applied to any unpleasant imaginary world, usually of the projected future

  • allegory: a story or visual image with a second distinct meaning partially hidden behind its literal or visible meaning, can be used as a method of satire

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4 Terms

1
New cards

Modernism in fictions

  • Modernism: a phase in the history of European art and literature from the last decades of the 19th century to the years before WWII

    • it is an umbrella term: covers a wide range of movements

      • l’art pour l’art, Symbolism, Cubism, Imagism, Expressionism, Futurism

  • British literary Modernism

    • Early Modernism

    • High Modernism (from end of WWI to early 30s)

      • W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf

    • Late Modernism

  1. Philosophical underpinnings of literary Modernism

  • Idealism (aesthetic and historical)

  • anti-utilitarian ethos

  • primacy of sensory experience

  • conviction that knowledge is subjectiv and relative —→ dustrust of the personal and preference of the objective

  • epistemological sceptism

  • experiementing (the pursuit of the perfect form)

  • elitism: the cult of the great man —→ most often personified by the figure of the poet

  1. Literary Modernism

  • reaction against Victorian values

  • Britain

    • industrial-mercantile society dominated by utilitariansim

    • scientific discoveries

    • decline of religion

    • rise of realism in art

  • a reaction to the developments of the era, a rejection of the 19th century traditions

  • the cult of beautiful: Walter Pater & Aesthetic Movement

    • the artist is the creator of beautiful things

    • ~ Romantic literature —→ some critics regard Modernism as a phase of Romanticism

  1. Literary market in the UK

  • high rates of literacy - approximately 80% of population

  • large market for literary products

  • newspaper culture: many writers worked as journalists

  1. Literary market in the USA

  • 1909 | Copyright Act - secured the rights and revenues of authors and controlled the market and distribution

2
New cards

the modern novel

  • the dominant form in Modernism because it’s adaptable, popular, capable of gratifying a variety of tastes and interests

  • grows out of 19th century fiction

  • adoption of complex and difficult new forms

  1. Thematic variation

  • horror/ Gothic fiction (Henry James)

  • travel writing (Joseph Conrad)

  • realist fiction (John Galsworthy)

  • social chronicles (E. M. Forster)

  • psychological novels (D.H Lawrence, Virgina Woolf)

  1. Technical characteristics

  • predominantly cosmopolitan —→ expressing a sense of urban cultural dislocation

  • awareness of new psychological theories

  • juxtaposition and multiple point of view —→ challenges the reader to establish a coherence in meaning from fragmentary forms

  • broad-endedness, open-endedness —→ life is a series of crises

  • spatial form, distancing —→ impersonality, authorial neutrality

  • impersonality

  • Henry James: “the novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life, experience is and immense sensibility“

  • plot based on private perception of the significant in human affairs —→ novel taken out of the public arena, emphasis on individual, private sphere and personality

  • realism: gves the impression of recording or “reflecting“ faithfully an actual way of life

    • modern criticism: realism is not a direct or simple reproduction of reality, but a system of conventions producing a lifelike illusion of some real world outside the text by processes of selection, exclusion, description and manners of addressing the reader

  • experiencing with new forms

  • stream of consciousness: the literary method of representinf the continuous flow of sense-perceptions, thoughts, feelings and memories in the human mind —→ form: interior monologue + impressions + violating the norms of grammar or punctuation

    • coined by William James

  • free indirect discourse: third person narration is combined with first person direct speech

  • symbolic structures: primary way to achieve unity in the text is by heavy use of imagery

  • critique of self-reliance

  • homodiegetic/ heterodigetic and extradiegtic/ intradigetic narrators (e.g.: Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness)

  • sensibility: the artist is isolated, truth is no longer given —→ the aim of art seizes to be seeking perfection

  • utopia: a fiction written about an imagined form of ideal or superior human society —→ is usually the basis of satire of the contemporary life

  • dystopia: the inverted equivalent of a utopia, applied to any unpleasant imaginary world, usually of the projected future

  • allegory: a story or visual image with a second distinct meaning partially hidden behind its literal or visible meaning, can be used as a method of satire

3
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Joseph Conrad

  • Polish background —→ his mother tongue was Polish but he chose to write in English (he also spoke French)

  • 1890 | went to Congo

  • psychological consequences of emigration can be found in his fiction

  • his heros: outcasts lured away from home by inexplicable impulses and longings —→ they are trapped, have little or no hope to return, and their lives end tragically

    • they find themselves in situations where normal public codes do not exist, do not work or are irrelevant

    • The Congo portrays the “Congo of the mind“

    • they either find strenght and recovery from self-knowledge and loneliness or go down to destruction

  • argues that society, politics and economy will eventually corrupt the individual

  • tragic view on life: material interest corrupts human relations and yet the attempt to escape into solitude results in ultimate distruction

  • deeply pessimistic view of man and human society

  • his message: Idealism corrupts, and loneliness can force a man into horrified awareness of his identity with his own moral opposite

  • Conrad & Romanticism: clinging to “noble“ ideals —→ learn that reality, nature, society, and the individual cannot be adjusted to them —→ tragedy follows

    • nostalgia for exotic and unusual settings

    • no real attempt to understand the East or Africa —→ merely absorbing their mood of strangeness and communicating this mood to the reader

  • experiments in chronology:

    • flashbacks - story told in reverse, plot revealed through bits and snatches (put together in the reader’s mind)

    • rearrangement of chronology, mixed-up order of events

    • detective story construction

  • mood

    • weather, objects, nature are depicted

    • animates material objects

    • the mood of action is experienced by the people participating in it

  • characters

    • real, vivid characters, but sometimes their motivation is weak

    • heroes are psychologically accurate in general, we sometimes perceive their inner thoughts

    • grotesque - vulgar, twisted, disgusting oucast of the tropics

    • fascination with the primitive character

      • elemental wisdom in the savage that is lacking in civilized men

  • not a conventional plot

    • no coherent plot, lack of interest in the conventional love-plot

    • most typical works involve no women at all

4
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Heart of Darkness (1899)

  • human nature is capable of being both good and evil

  1. Historical background

  • exploring Congo

    • slavery, slave trade

    • depopulation

  • King Leopold - constitutional monarch of Belgium —→ wanted colonies

  • Stanely (acting as the King’s agent) gets Congo chiefs sign treaties

  • monopoly of ivory trade

  • rebellions against oppression

  1. Setting

  • frame story: the center of all (human) time and all (human) space

  • The Congo: Marlow’s mission to find Kurtz

  • the frame narrative explains and motivates the embedded narrative

  • the frame narrative is usually removed in time and space from the embedded narrative

  • the narrator’s values and assumptions are challenges by Marlow’s story

    • 2 points of view = 2 diferent understandings of man’s relationship to the natural world and the people in it

  1. Narration

  • 2 narrators

    • a man aboard the Nellie, who listens to Marlow’s story - anonymous

      • uses the first-person plural, on behalf of 3 other passengers

    • Marlow himself

      • first-person singular - subjective

      • begins a tale by saying: “and England also, has been one of the dark places on the Earth”

      • he says that he went to Africa

        • working for a European ivory extraction operation

        • simply known as “the company”

        • his task was to pick up one of its agents in Africa (a man named Kurtz) to relieve him of his duty

  • extra/ intradiegetic narration - concerns the level at which the narrator is located as narrator of the story

    • extradiegetic narration: the narrator exists outside the story world and is not a character within it

    • intradiegetic narration: the narrator exists inside the story world as a character (either a main or secondary figure)

  • homo/ heterodiegetic narration - whether or not the narrator participates in his own story

    • homodiegetic narration: the narrator is a participant in the story (a character within it)

    • heterodiegetic narration: the narrator is not a character in the story and tells it from an external perspective

  • Marlow is uable to fully articulate the exact meaning of what he saw in the Congo (the Congo’s name is not mentioned in the book)

  1. Themes

  • Kurtz’s idealism (spreading the light of civilization)

    • Marlow has read Kurtz's report

      • Gods like whites can bring civilization to Africa

      • Marlow thinks Kurtz has gone mad

  • approach to Kurtz’s station —→ an introduction to failure

    • Marlow observes fence posts with several human heads on it

    • Kurtz is very ill

      • Marlow wants to protects his papers and his reputation

      • Kurtz dies on the trip down river

  • synchronicity of the non-synchronous —→ space becoming time - “Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world.”

  • Kurtz’s failure is applicable to Marlow and to civilized humanity (Marlow: “The most you can hope from life is some knowledge of yourself”)

  • The meaning of Kurtz’s cry: “The horror, the horror.”: illusions preserved at the cost of a lie: Marlow back in the “sepulchral city”, Brussels

  • meeting the “Other” - Africa

    • Chinua Achebe: “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’” (1975)

      • “Conrad dehumanizes and depersonalizes “a portion of the human race” in order to make it a prop to the disintegration of one petty European mind”

      • Conrad reduces and degrades Africans to “limbs,” “angles,” “glistening white eyeballs,”

    • Despite their European names and mannerisms, Conrad’s narrators are not average unreflecting witnesses of European imperialism

    • Marlow and Kurtz are also creatures of their time and cannot take the next step, which would be to recognize that what they saw, as a non-European ‘darkness’ was in fact a non-European world resisting imperialism so as one day to regain sovereignty and independence, and not, as Conrad reductively says, to reestablish the darkness

  • darkness: symbolises literal darkness in the jungle and the waters of the river

    • metaphoric darkness in the hearts of the company’s agents

  • ivory: greed and corruption of the Europeans

    • consuming their every passion and desire in luring them into Africa

    • hypocrisy and indifference: they are recalling Kurtz because they find Kurtz’s methods to be excessively brutal

      • yet company officials overlooked their own brutality in pursuit of ivory