Modernism
Modernism
Definition
Dictionary definition:
o “the ideas and methods of modern art, especially when they are
contrasted with earlier ideas and methods”
= different from what came before (but it can be said for every
genres)
Etymology
o rooted in “modern”
from medieval Latin modernus
used from 16th C onwards to refer to the = contemporary
period (<--> medieval & ancient times)
o Modernist = more specific term → art
Modernist art is a specific mode of art produced during a
specific period, but what makes art Modernist?
Context
o Early 20th Century
o in British Isles & United States
o = Age of Innovations (whole mark of early 20th C)
“By the dawn of the twentieth century, traditional stabilities of society,
religion, and culture seemed to have weakened, the pace of change to be
accelerating.”
Early 20th C: Age of Innovations
1. Political and economic instability
2. new ideas and theories: Freud, Jung, Einstein; communism vs. fascism
3. social changes
4. artistic innovations
5. new perspectives in literary criticism (modernist lit. crit.)
Political and Economic Instability
a lot of wars, English writers go and assist the Spanish Civil War to write
about it
1899-1902: Boer War (South Africa)
1914-1918: W.W.I (The Great War) – see “In Flanders Fields”
1916: Easter Rising (Ireland)
1936-1938: Spanish Civil War
1939-1945: W.W.II
international economic depression after stock market crash of 1929
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War poetry (WWI)
o John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” (1915)
Canadian poem, poppies (association with WO1)
The poem reflects on the graves of soldiers who
died in the battlefields of Flanders (BE
Very important subgenre
New Ideas and Theories
foundations of modern scepticism -> growing scepticism about religion
& society
o theories of Marx, Darwin and Nietzsche undermine religious beliefs
Marx saw religion as a tool to control people
Darwin introduced evolution, questioning the idea of creation
by God
Nietzsche declared “God is dead,” criticizing moral values
based on religion
o new psychology of Freud and Jung
New psychology showed that human behaviour is driven by
unconscious desires, not just reason or divine will
o Einstein's theory of relativity
Changed the understanding of time and space, challenging
old scientific ideas
o rise of communism and fascism
new ways to organize society
Social changes
technological developments:
o photography, electricity
o phonograph, cinema, radio, television
o automobile (Henry Ford from one whole car to creation of specific
parts of car: faster)
o Titanic sinks (1912) was supposed to be greatest ship – 1st
transatlantic flight (1919):
end of the era of steam power – beginning of modern era
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expansion of reading class
changes in social (incl. sexual) mores
o US: prohibition (interdiction, no alcohol) & mafia (huge profits by
selling alcohol); Jazz Age (F. Scott Fitzgerald – writer, captured the
excitements/problem of the era) & Harlem Renaissance (black artists
flourish, e.g. the poets Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston)
European refugees flee to US (to escape nazi threat) : Jewish background,
people with different ideology, queer community
Harlem Renaissance: black artists are contributing into giving an artistic
boost
“I too, Sing America” -> even though he is African-American, he is an
American (Obama used the poem to support his election)
Artistic innovations
Artist try to give expression to “bewildering but exciting complexity
of the rapid changing world”
Marcel Duchamp, Nude descending a staircase (1913) -> the world is
changing and increasing complexity
New Perspectives in Lit. Criticism
most Modernist lit. figures also critics
numerous small literary magazines → respond to/stimulate changes
Modernist Aesthetics:
1. Challenging Romantic Aesthetics
2. Challenging Realist Aesthetics
3. Defining Modernist Aesthetics
4. Modernism as Cover-Term
5. ‘Modernism International’
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Modernist Aesthetics
Challenging Romantic Aesthetics
Challenging with nature, imagination, emotion, escapism
Romantic theory of organicism:
o poetry takes its origin “from emotion recollected in tranquillity”
(Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads – romantism)
<-> Modernist theory of (focus on) conscious and original
craftsmanship
o “It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by
particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable
or interesting.”
o “significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and
not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal.” (T.S.
Eliot, 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', 1919 - modernism)
Significant emotion : talking about significant emotions in
their poems, not their personal emotions, it has to be
impersonal, not about their lives
Challenging realist aesthetics
criticism on ideological and aesthetic conservatism of realism –
aesthetically & ideologically conservative (challenging verisimilitude)
they want to distant themselves from that, too conventional
o Bloomsbury Group (Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey,...) wanted to
escape from (ideological) conventionalism of Victorian England
e.g. Strachey’s attack on Victorians (Eminent Victorians,
1918) was successful with his contemporaries (younger
readers)
A witty and sharp book that satirically criticized famous
Victorian figures
Bloomsbury : area of London, group of writers, artists
o Laura Riding and Robert Graves criticise lack of technical
ingenuity in Victorian poetry in A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927)
They don’t like the lack of technical ingenuity & simplicity of Victorian
realism (cf. Charge of the light brigade -> simple, you know what it is
about, repetition)
→introduction of scepticism and innovation
Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927)
Previously “[t]he meaning of a poem was understood ... beforehand from
the very title ...” In Modernist poetry, however, there is a bond between
poet and reader of “technical ingenuity, in the poet in setting the
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meaning down in combinations of sounds, in the reader in interpreting
words as combinations of sounds rather than as words.” (31-32)
Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970)
Literary criticism
o traditional writing: lisible (readerly)
rather passive reader
o modernist writing: scriptible (writerly – of a characteristic of a prof
author)
refuses to satisfy the usual expectations of formal or
referential coherence
demands active participation of reader in production of
meaning (interminable process) – more effort to read
reader has to become involved in developing the
meaning
activity of reading is interactive rather than interpretative or
normative
the production of meaning is inconclusive (interminable
process) – meaning is endless
<-> Realism : one interpretation (cf. the charge of the
light brigade)
Defining modernist aesthetics
Keyword: innovation:
o thematic innovations (and continuations)
o stylistic innovations: experimentation
Modernism : thematic innovations
o Pessimism – the wars, the changes
o spiritual/existential problems & disillusionment (disappointment)
o mysticism
o intellectual depth (cf. T.S. Eliot’s appreciation of Metaphysical Poets)
o renewal but also tradition (e.g. references to the classics)
o industrialisation & urbanisation (≠ new)
o metafiction: self-consciousness
metafiction (self-consciousness)
“A work of fiction, a major concern of which is the nature of fiction itself.” –
works of fiction that are concerned with the nature of fiction itself
e.g. James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
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Modernism: Thematic Innovations - The Waste Land (1922) by T.S. Eliot (VS)
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
°St. Louis, Missouri
1914: Europe; friendship with Ezra Pound (British modernist writer)
1922: editor of The Criterion and later Faber & Faber
1927: British citizen; converts to Anglicanism
1948: Nobel Prize
1965: 'I can only repeat, but with the urgency of 50 years ago: READ HIM.’
(Ezra Pound)
T.S. Eliot: Most Significant Works
most significant works
o 'The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock (1915)
o The Waste Land (1922)
o 'The Hollow Men' (1925)
o play Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
o poems The Four Quartets (1942)
Variety in his works: poem, plays
The Waste Land (1922) : style
dedicated to Ezra Pound (long loyal friendship) : “il miglior fabbro” (“the
better craftsman” -> they see themselves as craftsman)
o Ezra pruned (cut off) the poem (ca. 1000 lines > 434 lines)
‘sprawling chaotic poem’ (Eliot)
o plurality of voices and many allusions/quotations
o no intrinsic organising principle, compared to other forms of art:
chaotic poem, tried to explain it...
musical poem
cinematic poem : it looks like there are multiple scenes,
characters
dramatic poem
mythical method
Pound’s Pruning
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o = cutting trees, snipping out stuff from the poem, what makes it
more realistic
o Pound reducing this lines, makes it modernist
The Waste Land (1922): Content
basic paradox of poem: death-in-life & life-in death
o “Life devoid of meaning is death; sacrifice, even the sacrificial
death, may be life-giving, an awaking to life.”
Death-in-life : life without meaning (-> life contains death)
Life-in-death : people sacrificing themselves so that people
live (-> death contain life)
geographical & spiritual waste lands:
o “gives voice to the nearly universal pessimism and alienation of the
early decades of the Twentieth century” (note: echoes of WWI ->
four years after WWI : people have encountered waste lands)
o “one of the century’s most incisive and insightful texts regarding the
breakdown of social, communal, cultural and personal relationships”
The Waste Land (1922): Intertextuality
waste lands evoked by means of many intertextual references incl.:
o Vegetation myths
explaining rebirth of nature in spring – life returning in spring
o The Fisher King
Arthurian Legend: impotence, infertility; waiting for healing –
associations with the Holy Grail) – infertile king – infertile land
bcs of his suffering
o Tiresias
Classical allusion: man-and-woman (which is better?), blind
yet prophetic (able to foretell the future)
o Upanishads (collection or ancient Indian spiritual texts)
India: core spiritual thought of Vedantic Hinduism, mystic or
spiritual contemplations
see also Hindi/Buddhist invocation of peace (in body, speech,
mind) at end of the poem (not only evocating Christianity)
o Upanishads of India: evocating spirituality (not only Christian, also
Hindi & Buddhist)
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The Waste Land: Opening Lines
tradition & renewal: evoke and revise opening lines of Chaucer’s
medieval masterpiece The Canterbury Tales (mythical method)
o in sharp contrast with reverdie (poem celebrates the arrival of spring)
presented in opening lines of CT and its celebration of spring (studied in
History I)
spiritual/existential problems, disillusionment, pessimism
o Eliot “develops the theme of the attractiveness of death” : a death-in-life-
existence more welcome to people of the wasteland than hardship of a
meaningful life
people prefer “forgetful snow” and how “winter kept us warm” to
the positive energy of spring (“April is the cruelest month” – cf. CT)
and the old fertility ceremonies – people are not excited about
spring bcs they’re dead inside
rootlessness of Marie
one of many “scenes” presented in poem; free verse
Stylistic innovations
key word : experimentation
o Technical ingenuity
o Construction out of fragments
o In reaction to increasing mass production and consumption
Stylistic innovations
1. subjective consciousness of focaliser (fiction)
2. stream-of-consciousness technique (fiction)
3. demise of conventional plot (fiction)
4. mythical method (fiction/poetry)
5. colloquial and dialect speech (fiction/poetry)
6. form awareness yet fewer metrical constraints (poetry)
Subjective consciousness of focalisator
in fiction: centrality of the subjective consciousness of focalise
o the agent who perceives and determines what is presented to the
reader
o not necessarily a character
Stream of consciousness
narrative device that grants reader access to a character’s thought
processes
o note spelling: as noun unhyphenated; as compound adjective hyphenated
(e.g. stream-of consciousness passage)
“in which fragmentary thoughts gradually build up a portrayal of
character’s perceptions and their unstated concerns”
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“recording of internal emotional experiences of character, it reaches
downward to the nonverbalized level, where images must be used to
represent sensations or emotions. It assumes the unrestricted and
uncensored portrayal of the totality of interior experience. It gives,
therefore, the appearance of being illogical and associational.”
Stream of Consciousness: Techniques
= realised in novels/short fiction by means of:
Associations – jump from one idea to the other
repetitions
run-on sentences
(esp. direct) interior monologue – unfiltered
o direct interior monologue (Dorrit Cohn: quoted monologue):
unfiltered, even lack of coherence and logic
Direct vs indirect interior monologue
direct interior monologue (unfiltered, therefore often chaotic):
o “the author [narrator] does not seem to exist and the interior self
of the character is given directly, as though the reader were
overhearing an articulation of the stream of thought and feeling
flowing through the character’s mind.”
o most extreme form of stream of consciousness (for some critics only
this is truly S of C)
see “Molly’s Speech” in Ulysses
indirect interior monologue
o “the author [narrator] serves as selector, presenter, guide, and
commentator.”
o see italicised passages of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”
Demise of conventional plot
conventional linear plot no longer deemed appropriate
o “Victorian novels were typically resolved in some definitive way,
such as by a marriage or a change in the financial status of the
protagonist”
linearity replaced with
o unresolved endings (<-> happy marriage)
modernists believed life itself is unresolved
o circularity (the end takes you back to the beginning
suggests life is cyclical
mythical method
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to demonstrate the gap between the past and the present (by referencing
to the past)
replaces “narrative method” (T.S. Eliot) – doesn’t appear to work in the
modernist world
ironic juxtaposition : show differences -> irony !
o e.g. of Homer's heroic poem with Bloom's anti-heroic life in Ulysses
(see discussion later) – the contemporary world isn’t heroic, to show
the fragmentation, not to evoke heroism, but to show the lack of it
o e.g. of medieval grail legend (and its promise of rebirth) with the
modern failures that The Waste Land articulates (The Waste Land)
= an expression of the age (T.S. Eliot, see next slide)
T. S. Eliot about Mythical Method
T. S. Eliot’s in “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (1923) about James Joyce’s
Ulysses
o the ironic “parallel [of the work] to the Odyssey”
o “way of controlling, or ordering, of giving a shape and significance to
the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is
contemporary history”
o “a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity”; “a
step towards making modern world possible in art”
also in T. S. Eliot’s own “sprawling chaotic” poem “The Waste Land”
Mythical Method in The Waste Land (1922): Example
many allusions/quotations, no intrinsic organising principle, plurality of
voices
o “his use of vegetation myth and romance structures points outside
the world of the poem to ‘another world’, where the brokenness
of the waste land might be healed.”
o “Beneath the density of the poem’s quotations and allusions, Eliot
hoped to suggest the possibility of an order beneath the chaos.”
o Sense of nostalgia <-> pre modernist
fragmentation and unity
Colloquial and Dialect Speech
e.g. Faulkner’s story
Stylistic Experimentation in Poetry
increased form awareness yet fewer metrical constraints -> more self-
conscious and experimental about poetic form
o belated influence of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889):
e.g. “The Windhover” (1877/1918) – modernist avant la lettre
results in
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o free verse
o experimentation with language and rhythm
new words and word combinations
conversational
o complex ordering of images
imagism
allusions
metonymy (rhizomatic not linear: network of meaning)
writing is more complex
Modernism as Cover-Term
o Cubism (visual arts)
o Dadaism
o Surrealism (skip form last week: popular in early 20th century,
reacting against limitations of rationalism, focusing on dream &
intuition)
o Futurism (esp. Italy)
o Vorticism (British response to Futurism)
o Expressionism (esp. Germany)
o Symbolism (esp. France)
o Imagism (esp. Anglo-Saxon world)
Surrealism
reaction against limitations of rationalism
importance of subconscious
focus on dreams, intuition, free association (Freud)
“A movement in art emphasizing the expression of the imagination as
realized in dreams and presented without conscious control.”
Imagism
Anglo-Saxon (= anglophone world)
no rigid rules of rhyme and metre
one-image poems → concentration of statement (sharp, precise,
concentrated statement)
image is concrete, sharp, precise, focuses directly on the essence – in an
instant of time you can express something very concentrated that focuses
on essence
o T.E. Hulme: "hard, dry images“
o Ezra Pound: “The image presents an intellectual and emotional
complex in an instant of time.”
e.g. Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” (1916)
Ezra Pound “In a Station of the Metro” (1916)
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The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
o one-image poem
o “direct treatment of the thing” (Pound)
He wanted to capture one image in a lifetime
Bough : bunch of leaves on a tree
Pedals : faces
o “It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce
voluminous works.” (Pound)
For him it’s better to write a small poem then a long narrative
Modernist literature : major authors
Modernist fiction
William Faulkner (1897–1962) VS
Nobel Prize (1950)
Southern ambiance – regionalist modernist : focus on
the South
Modernist sensibility
o experimented with narrative chronology
o frequently using stream-of-consciousness
narration
most significant works:
o The Sound and the Fury (1929) - As I Lay Dying (1930) Absalom!
Absalom! (1936) - the Snopes trilogy
“Barn Burning” (1938) : genre & literary style
Genre: short story
o “usually concerned with a single effect conveyed in only one or a
few significant episodes or scenes.”
o here: focus on the court proceedings and its immediate
aftermath interspersed with flashbacks
style:
o realist features: content and form
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o modernist features: content and form
Realistic features
o realist presentation of plot
begins in medias res: ≠ exclusively Modernist; = common in
short fiction: village store functioning as court room, where
father is on trial for having burnt down neighbour’s barn)
dramatically works its way towards a climax (in contrast with
e.g. Joyce’s stories in Dubliners)
o regionalism
white sharecroppers in American South: rural life and regional
language (Colloquial english spoken)
actual description of working-class family (verisimilitude)
o affinities with Bildungsroman and psychological novel
vignette of significant episode in Sarty’s life (esp. campfire
scene): "You got to learn to stick to your own blood or you
ain’t going to have any blood to stick to you.”
significant moment in Sartry’s life, insight in mental makeup
of character, chose btw principals or family (with each choice,
he is going to lose)
Modernist features
o content: father’s disillusionment & Sarty’s existential dilemma
dilemma: family & its corruption morality & its loneliness
o form: generally no objective third-person perspective → limited to
rendition of protagonist’s thoughts
young boy = focaliser: “from where he could see...” “he
could not see”
only occasionally the narrator departs from Sarty's
consciousness to tell us something about past/future
that Sarty does not (yet) know or how he would have
thought/felt had he known something he does not know
occasionally italicized passages directly render boy’s
thoughts
slip into brief stream-of-consciousness passages (direct
interior monologue)
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“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936/1938) by Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) VS
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Pulitzer in 1953; Nobel Prize in 1954
spokesperson for Lost Generation (came of age during WWI)
o wounded as ambulance driver in Italy at end of WWI
o in 1937 travels to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War for
American newspaper
most significant works
o The Sun Also Rises (1926)
o A Farewell to Arms (1929)
o For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
o The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
Ernest Hemingway: Principle of the Iceberg
clean style, devoid of unnecessary words
o “principle of the iceberg”: “seven-eights of it under water for every
part that shows”
o “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about,
he may omit things that he knows and the reader ... will have a
feeling of those things as though the writer had stated them.”
(Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon)
o “adapts journalist techniques in telegraphic prose that
minimized narrator commentary and depended heavily on
uncontextualized dialogue” (esp. in his stories)
Telegraph type of prose : focus on dialogue (in stories), but
good sense of what is happening (1/8 – 7/8)
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936/1938)
EH himself considered it one of his finest stories
fine ear for dialogue & exact description
Modernist style
o bare style (iceberg principle)
o fragmented narrative structure & (near) stream of consciousness
o circularity
o symbolism
Modernist themes
Genre : short story
o “usually concerned with a single effect conveyed in only one or a
few significant episodes or scenes.”
o Here :
hours before protagonist’s death
interspersed with flashbacks to other significant episodes in
protagonist’s life
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro”: Fragmentation
fragmented narrative structure
o (in medias res: ≠ exclusively Modernist; = common in short fiction)
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o short tenses in present tense for harsh utterances vs. longer
sentences in flashbacks, with more vivid descriptions and emotions
o nearly stream-of-consciousness interior monologues in italicized
flashbacks
5 scenes, indirect interior monologues, which he could have
written about but did not
access to his thoughts that are presented in italics passages
gradually in this passages that ‘he’ disappears
where do his thoughts take him? His past experiences (not
really nostalgia, he feels very disillusioned)
o Ending
misleading: events happening in reality vs. events in his mind
+ also circularity
End : howling hyena -> sense that someone is going to
die, announcing his death !
+ whose cry wakes up the woman at the end of the
story
beginning : evokes the leopard’s carcass in the
epigraph + snow of mountains -> for some reason he
got lost there
=> Circularity : leopard corpses, animal references ->
at the beginning and at the end
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro”: Modernist Themes
pessimism, disillusionment, alienation
o nothing heroic about his death but existential crisis the moment
before he dies
he’s dying, because he neglected his wound -> not a heroic
death, very pathetic situation, he could’ve avoided his death
o symbolism (symbol for his death) : physical decay (wound) of
protagonist mirrors emotional coldness & professional failure (all the
writing he had hoped to do but never did)
The relation btw men and women: he married her because of her
money, so he wasn’t a journalist as he wanted to be (he blames her
whereas he clearly has a factor in that)
gangrene stands for self-destruction & wasted talent
approaching death brings insight – existential crisis when he
realises that he will die
Chapter 18 from Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce
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James Joyce (1882–1941) IR
Irish writer, ° Dublin
Catholic education, rejects Catholic faith by the age of 16
studies modern languages at University College Dublin
travels abroad after graduation and after 1912 never returns (first Paris;
later Zurich)
exiled from Dublin, but all works set in Dublin
1905-1907: started writing in Modernist vein
prominent figure in the Modernist Avant-Garde
James Joyce: Most Important Works
Dubliners (1914) – collection of short stories
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914/1916)
o semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman (Künstlerroman) about young
writer Stephen Dedalus
Ulysses (1922)
Finnegans Wake (1939)
o targets the very structures of the English language (“Wakese” (LA
1133))
o “Here form is content, content is form” (Samuel Beckett)
all works set in Dublin
see map of Greater Dublin : Joyce paints Dublin with realistic precision, he
joked that if Dublin ever got destroyed it could be reconstructed from his
writings
Ulysses (1922): Story & Setting
1 day in Dublin
o 16 June 1904 (Bloomsday – celebration in honour of Leopold Bloom)
o Dublin, different parts
e.g. Martello Tower at Sandycove, Sandymount Strand, Howth,
...
o “Unity of time and place is observed in this unclassical book.”
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Ulysses (1922): Mythical Method
ironic juxtaposition of Homer's heroic poem (Odyssey) with Bloom's anti-
heroic life in Ulysses
o Leopold Bloom, 38, Jewish-Catholic, estranged from his wife (cf.
heroic Odysseus/Ulysses)
o Molly Bloom, his wife (cf. Penelope, Odysseus’ faithful wife, keeps
suitors at bay until she is reunited with O after 20 years)
o Stephen Dedalus, young writer (also protagonist of A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man) (cf. Odysseus’ son Telemachus)
Many parallels with Odyssey
He uses that to show how he sees the contemporary world (after WWI)
Ulysses (1922): Structure
3 parts, 18 numbered episodes (titles given by Joyce after, but not in original
text)
Telemachia (Chapters 1-3): consciousness of Stephen Dedalus
Wanderings of Ulysses (Chapters 4-15): consciousness of Leopold Bloom
Nostos (Chapters 16-18): Bloom takes Dedalus home; ends with Molly
Bloom's famous monologue
o cf. discussion of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy
No structure marks
No organisation of the thought, not connected, not filtered
(thoughts about Leopold masturbating, references to her
masturbating) -> normally filtered out of the text, here
present
Full flesh stream of consciousness
No narrator, no comment of narrator
Ulysses (1922): Style
different style for each episode
o “the use of appropriate styles and symbols to each division” (T.S.
Eliot’s in “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (1923))
frequent use of stream-of-consciousness technique
o = realised by means of direct interior monologue
o “the author does not seem to exist and the interior self of the
character is given directly, as though the reader were overhearing
an articulation of the stream of thought and feeling flowing through
the character’s mind.”
o e.g. in second part of Episode 13 “Nausicaa” (vs. indirect interior
monologue in first part) and in Episode 18 (Molly Bloom’s soliloquy)
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Stream-of-Consciousness in Ulysses
somebody is being described at the beach; we are watching her through
the eyes
interruption of the stream of consciousness
quick reminder of who is watching her: Mr bloom watcher..
he describes her very stream of consciousness like
looking at the girl, headache, letter that he needs to take care of -> a lot of
thoughts at the same time (normally filtered and ordered)
Fragment of Episode 18 (“Penelope” or “Molly Bloom’s Soliloquy”): An Impression
of Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce
Episode 18 (“Penelope”):
protagonists: Molly Bloom, Leopold Bloom’s wife, in bed
action: hardly any
o Joyce: “Penelope has no beginning, middle or end" (Letters 1: 172)
o Hard to say what it is about, just thoughts -> but intentional, how
it’s supposed to be
concludes with section called “Molly Bloom’s soliloquy”
o 8 long “sentences” of sustained stream of consciousness
o Molly’s thoughts on a variety of subjects
o chapter entitled “Penelope” but Molly Bloom in sharp contrast with
Homer’s chaste heroine (see “mythical method” below)
Episode 18 (“Penelope”): Mythical Method
chapter title “Penelope” BUT
o sensual and adulterous Molly Bloom is nothing like chaste and
faithful Penelope
frank, obscene thoughts
o Leopold accepts Molly’s unfaithfulness whereas Odysseus slaughters
suitors upon his return
o @ end: no heroic reunion of Leopold & Penelope
Molly resents Leopold’s attempt to resume patriarchal control
(cf. breakfast served in bed)
Final yes: confirmation of life; unclear whether it refers to
Mulvey or Leopold (we don’t know who she chooses)
ambiguity remains: typical for modernism
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“Molly Bloom’s Soliloquy”: Stream of Consciousness
soliloquy = 8 long “sentences” of sustained stream of consciousness
o unpunctuated (only 2 periods in entire ‘chapter’ (.) ; (,))
o very little action, verbs without apostrophe (don’t – dont)
o associative, frequent interruptions (<-> classical text : linear)
Molly’s thoughts on a range of subject (see below)
including references to Molly’s flatulence (farting) and
menstruation
“Molly Bloom’s Soliloquy”: Molly’s Thoughts
Leopold Bloom, incl. his marriage proposal at Howth (see map) and his
request to have breakfast served in bed
Stephen Dedalus (which prove she is fallible (capable of making mistakes);
she idealizes him)
sexual desire; her admirers, incl. Hugh ‘Blazes” (nickname) Boylan, with
whom she is having an affair and her first love, Lieutenant Mulvey
her memories of her childhood in Gibraltar
her daughter Milly (15) and her son Rudy (died shortly after birth; Dedalus
reminds her of her son)
Modernist Poetry
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Reading Modernist Poetry
Modernist Poets
Discussion of Selected Modernist Poems
Modernist poetry
Modernist Poetry cannot but be difficult:
responds to growing complexity of rapidly changing world
o cf. P. Faulkner in A Modernist Reader (1986)
modernist writers break traditional forms bcs they’re trying to
mirror a world that no longer feels stable
o T.S. Eliot in “The Metaphysical Poets”
Modern poets must hold together multiple levels of
experience at once – emotional, intellectual, historical – bcs
life has become too complex to separate them
results from conscious and original craftsmanship
o T. S. Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
It’s a craft not just raw emotion
greater technical ingenuity (Riding and Graves)
T.S Eliot: Conscious & Original Craftsmanship
Modernist theory of conscious and original craftsmanship
o “It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by
particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable
or interesting.”
o “significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not
in the history of the poem. The emotion of art is impersonal.”
(T.S. Eliot, 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', 1919, LA 1221)
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We expect it to be difficult, complex, ‘incomprehensible’ => poet has to be
more and more creative
Theory of craftsmanship: recollect in tranquillity, it’s not in personal
emotions, but emotions evoked in particular events => significant
emotions, more than his personal emotions
Difficult to grasps what it is about, sometime don’t even have a title <->
beowulf: we know the plot
Modernist writers want you to get involved, they want you to try to
understand by reading it, you might actually start to see something
Modernist poets
(later) W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
W. H. Auden (1907-1973)
Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) (not discussed)
e. e. cummings (1894-1962)
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
‘The Second Coming’ (1921) by William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
°1865 in Dublin
receives Nobel Prize in 1923
driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival (1896 onwards)
long poetic career (1890-1939): from Romanticism to Modernist
o influence of French Symbolist poetry and Ezra Pound
o more colloquial diction
o poetic economy
o gets rid of the romantic imagery
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“The Second Coming” (1921)
Apocalyptic poem -> fragmentation (thematically addressed), chaos, doom
o Written immediately after the Great War (WWI) : disillusionment is
still there
expresses Yeats's view on history (later presented in A Vision (1925))
o 2000-year cycles
gyres, visualised as three-dimensional cones (see next slide)
as one civilisation loses its strength, opposite movement
gathers impetus and eventually takes over to begin new
civilisation
Eg: Christ death brought greatness -> after 2000 years: dark ages
Also in the bible: a second coming -> in the bible it’s still apocalyptic, the
return of Jesus (here instead, it’s a sphynx, something threatens)
He doesn’t say ‘a rough beast’
Overview
o formal organisation
stanzas? length of lines? metre? rhyme scheme?
o semantic organisation
what is the subject in each stanza? what is relation between
stanzas?
o situation of discourse
who is addressing whom? what tone? what conclusion?
Formal organisation
o 2 stanzas: one longer than the other
In same metre but of unequal length
o Free verse
o Repetitions
Semantic organisation
o Stanza 1: image of impending chaos
o Stanza 2:
annunciation of second coming (= interpretation of speaker)
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Evocating of Biblical lore: example of mythical method ->
evocating established events
surely +? : cast doubt (expressing doubt)
speaker’s personal vision, not prophet-like statement
question mark casts doubt over either “I know”
passage or what kind of beast is coming
he’s not quite sure
he just doesn’t which beast is coming
“Musée des Beaux Arts” (1940) by W. H. Auden
W.H. Auden (1907-1973)
°York
studied English literature at Oxford (meets Stephen Spender, Cecil Day
Lewis, Louis MacNeice)
"combine elements from popular art with extreme technical formality"
Christian view on life, esp. after he returned to Anglicanism in 1930s
1937: Civil War in Spain
o with ideologically sympathy a lot of authors went to Spanish war
emigrates to US right before war
1948: Pulitzer Prize
Overview
ekphrastic poem
situation of discourse
formal organisation
semantic organisation
“Musée des Beaux Arts”: Ekphrastic Poem
ekphrasis = literary representation of visual work of art
Auden’s ekphrastic poem draws on several paintings by Brueghel
o most significantly “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” held at Les
Musées des Beaux Arts Brussels -> tragedy – even mythic – can be
completely unnoticed by the world
“The Census” (or “The Numbering at Bethlehem”) (1566)
by Brueghel
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“The Massacre of the Innocents” (1566-1567) by Brueghel “Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap”
(1565) by Brueghel
Formal Organisation
some rhymes but no formal rhyme scheme
o ABCADEDBFGFGE AABCDDBC
2 stanzas
o typographical division corresponds to semantic contrast between
the general (“the Old Masters”) and the particular
(“Breughel’s Icarus, for instance”
yet the particular already hinted at in the general
Situation of Discourse
speaker mixes objective description (casually explaining the suffering of
the poem) and subjective evaluation in each stanza
o compare with “The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats (where both are
separated)
contrast between poem's tragic subject and casual tone
Semantic Organisation
poem examines place of suffering in life (often also referenced
metonymically)
o Stanza 1: suffering is part of human existence – life goes on
o Stanza 2: self-absorbed people in painting uninterested in suffering
(= alienation of modern man (bcs of all the changes/wars) – how
people can ignore great suffering, people are too absorbed in
themselves, handle that feeling by isolation)
“[Auden] knew (...) the ways that history could rush
relentlessly on oblivious of the human lives swept up in its
current.”
Indifference of people – human suffering often happens while
others are just living their lives
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“In Just-” (1923) and “l(a” (1958) by e. e. cummings
E.e. cummings (1894-1962)
°Cambridge, Massachusetts
following example of Pound, more innovative
poetry to be widely accessible
celebration of individuals against mass society
attention for common speech and visual form
o e.g. “in Just” and “l(a)”
(poem not in two columns)
overview
o semantic organisation
o formal organisation
content
o theme : idyllic evocation of Spring (<-> The Waste Land)
o semantic organisation :
intrusion of “old queer (weird) balloon man" into naïve play of
children
similar approach in W.H. Auden’s ‘Hunchback in the
Park’ (1946)
goat-footed: possible reference to Greek god Pan (also
associated w. sexuality)
contrast between innocent world of the children and the less
than perfect world of adults (experience)
contrast in vocab
clash of two worlds
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style
o style : irregular and innovative
nine stanzas; stanzas of four lines and one line alternate
marked by
new word combinations (neologisms)
o words not in dictionary: newly coined words ->
neologisms : puddle-wonderful, eddieandbill
enjambments, line-breaks, blank spaces, variable
margin
o jump-rope and then the words jump to the next
lines
o balloon man and the words whistle away kinda
agglutination of certain phrases (words glued together)
no punctuation
irregular rhythm: fast-flowing vs. static (typography renders
this visible = the typography represents what is going on in
the text)
balloonman who whistles far and wee (slow) and
eddieandbill comes running (faster, excitement of
children <-> older generations)
Enjambment: Definition
o = run-on line (sentence/clause continues over line-break)
o in rhetoric and poetry
o “The continuation of the sense and grammatical construction of a
line on to the next verse or couplet. Enjambment occurs in run-on
lines and offers contrast to end-stopped lines.”
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“I(a” (1958)
Formal Organisation
o Experimentation ! – you can’t go further than that
o 2 elements: "loneliness" + parenthetical interjection of “a leaf
falls”
o appearance: clusters of meaningless letters; lines and stanzas
do not generate meaning (+ title = just first line)
reaches limits of formal innovation: line 8 only one
typographical character
typographical creativity pushed to the extreme → figure
poem
“l(a” (1958) as
Figure Poem
o poem’s overall shape resembles a giant “I” (in reference to
loneliness)
o mid-word enjambments ensure that typographically
the word “loneliness” is presented as the combination of four
words that also individually express solitariness ("one-one-
one-iness“)
the movement of the reading eye in combination with the
poem’s overall shape mirror the twisting & settling of a falling
leaf
leaf falls: eyes follow the leaf falling and then goes flat
on the ground
o = poem shaped like a falling leaf
Leaf by itself leaving the tree
Semantic Organisation
o simultaneous considering of
abstract concept of loneliness
concrete image of falling leaf
o falling of leaf symbolises journey of life
o concentrated statement into single image
imagist poem
Loneliness
o typographical presentation emphasises semantic & plastic (ability
to be shaped) quality of 'loneliness" ("one-one-one-iness“)
o life's journey = solitary event
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o humbling experience (no capital)
o one but last line: “formal experimentation has reached the final
frontier”
o modernism : final frontier, we can’t go further in terms of
experimentation (postmodernism has to do with that..)
Musée des Beaux Arts
By W. H. Auden
December 1938
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone (was shining)
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
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Icarus falls, but there are so much happening that life goes on
Icarus is the bird flying but goes to close to the sun and falls
Brueghel’s painting: you can barely see Icarus -> not important