Modernism in litirature

Literary Modernism is a subset of a larger artistic movement called Modernism that embraces painting and music
In the literary realm, it's basically responsible for some seriously weird literature produced roughly between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II.

Modernism
a term typically associated with the twentieth-century reaction
against realism and romanticism within the arts. It is a cultural movement which
rebelled against Victorian morals
More generally, it is often used to refer to a twentieth-century belief in the virtues
of science, technology and the planned management of social
change.

Why????
a response to a lot of the destruction and disruption caused by World War I (technology that was better than the warfare style it was designed for, trench warfare and poison gas)
the city transforms
It provoked a lot of artists, writers, and also painters and musicians, to really think that they need a new art to make sense of this new world

WWI: Trench War Fare and Poison Gas

What???
Doesn’t usually make sense
nonlinearity of plot or sequence of things – unexpected plots, puzzle
irony and satire (verbal irony, situational irony, dramatic irony ) - mismatch
voices and the idea of stream of consciousness
allusions

Modernist literature
the literary expression of the tendencies of Modernism, especially High Modernism, Modernistic art and literature normally revolved around the idea of individualism, mistrust of institutions (government, religion), and the disbelief of any absolute truths.

“As far as literature is concerned modernism reveals a breaking away from established rules, traditions and conventions, fresh ways of looking at man’s position and function in the universe and many experiments in form and style. It is particularly concerned with language and how to use it (representationally or otherwise) and with writing itself”
(Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory).

Characteristics of Modernism in Literature
doesn’t usually make sense
different perspectives
nonlinearity of plot or sequence of things – unexpected plots, puzzle
irony and satire (verbal irony, situational irony, dramatic irony ) - mismatch
voices and the idea of stream of consciousness
allusions

Perspectives
Literature Exhibits Perspectivism
Meaning comes from the individual’s perspective and is thus personalized;
A single story might be told from the perspective of several different people, with the assumption that the “truth” is somewhere in the middle

Characteristics of Modernism in Literature
Inner psychological reality or “interiority” is represented: Stream of consciousness—portraying the character’s inner monologue
Organized non-sequentially: Experience portrayed as allusive, discontinuous, using fragmentation and juxtaposition.
Ambiguous endings—open endings which are seen as more representative of reality.

Main representatives
James Joyce
T.S. Eliot
Virginia Woolf
D.H. Lawrence
Samuel Beckett
Ezra Pound
Gertrude Stein
Katherine Mansfield

Ezra Pound
Comes to London in 1908
hangs out with Yeats and T.S. Eliot
created artistic movements
Short poems
The Cantos, which is unfinished 800 page epic poem
a Fascist in Italy

Voiticism

Imagism
direct treatment of the “thing” as "thing" (an attempt at isolating a single image to reveal its essence)
short
use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.

In the Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Ezra Pound

Gertrude Stein
American living in Paris
difficult-to-understand poems, mostly characterized by wordplay as greater than meaning. She's more interested in how words sound
A classic Steinian phrase is 'A rose is a rose is a rose.' "There is no there there“
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Tender Buttons 1914

Tender Buttons
A RED STAMP.
If lilies are lily white if they exhaust noise and distance and even dust, if they dusty will dirt a surface that has no extreme grace, if they do this and it is not necessary it is not at all necessary if they do this they need a catalogue.

Tender Buttons
MILK.
Climb up in sight climb in the whole utter needles and a guess a whole guess is hanging. Hanging hanging.
EGGS.
Kind height, kind in the right stomach with a little sudden mill.
Cunning shawl, cunning shawl to be steady.

Katherine Mansfield
from New Zealand
a pretty bohemian lifestyle
Anton Chekov
In a German Pension (1911)
The Garden Party & Other Stories (1922)
Bliss and Other Stories (1923)
died at the age of 34

Virginia Woolf
She was born in 1882
father - a historian/writer, involved in the art world; mother - a model for paintings
mental illness
self-educated
married Leonard Woolf in 1912, they started their own printing press - the Hogarth Press - publishing arm of the Bloomsbury Group .

Major Works
The Voyage Out 1915
Night and Day 1919
Jacob's Room 1922 - success ☺!
(more experimental. It's an indirect character study of Jacob)
Mrs. Dalloway 1925 - breakthrough novel!!!!
To the Lighthouse 1927 - even more experimental
Orlando 1928
A Room of One's Own 1929
The Waves 1931 - extremely experimental
The Years 1937
Between the Acts 1941

Yellow and black, pink and snow white, shapes of all these colors, men, women, and children were spotted for a second upon the horizon, and then, seeing the breadth of yellow that lay upon the grass, they wavered and sought shade beneath the trees, dissolving like drops of water in the yellow and green atmosphere, staining it faintly with red and blue

Mrs. Dalloway, 1925
a novel that takes place in a single day in June
Characters: Clarissa Dalloway, her husband Richard, her daughter Elizabeth; Septimus Smith - a shell-shocked World War I veteran, Peter Walsh, who's an old friend of Clarissa's
book is about their memories and their thoughts, a lot of the internal narrative of these characters
death of SS seems to CD as a way of saying something or preserving some sort of independence, something that she and her friends haven't been able to do as they've gone through life

Style - free indirect discourse
free indirect discourse (reads a little like stream of consciousness) - a third person representation of a person's thoughts, but without the 'he said,' 'he thought', 'he considered' tags.
'He wondered why he hadn't thought to try Pepsi before. How effervescent the bubbles, how lovely the taste!' (instead of: 'He thought, How effervescent the bubbles.‘)
'Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer's men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning - fresh as if issued to children on a beach. What a lark! What a plunge!'

Style
interweaving plot
the style of the novel: indirect to direct, thoughts and description, all going on at once without really letting readers know the difference between the two - stylistic effect where we're always in the characters' thoughts and we're always out of the characters' thoughts.
a meditation on perspective and thoughts - the characters are constantly thinking about what could have been in their pasts
how people observe the same thing differently

Summary
How is Virginia and Leonard Woolf's publishing house called?
Virginia Woolf was a member of a bohemian group of artists, writers, and thinkers called…
Though many of Virginia Woolf's works deal with women's issues, which is an essay specifically targeting inequality in access to education?

In Virginia Woolf's novel, Orlando, the title character is an Elizabethan man who is transformed into…
Who is Peter Walsh?
Mrs. Dalloway takes place in a single: Hour? Day? Month? Year?

Which of the following is an example of free indirect discourse?
'What a lark! What a plunge!'
'Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street.'
'Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.'
'She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall's van to pass.'
'The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer's men were coming.'

D.H. Lawrence
was born in 1885 in English coal-mining country. His father was a coal-miner.
showed from pretty early on that he was a good writer
ended up becoming a teacher in London
got discovered by writer Ford Madox Ford. He starts publishing novels in the early 1910s.
Frieda Weekley

Sons and Lovers - first major book, published in 1913
semi-autobiographical
set in coal-mining country
in coal-mining country a lot of oedipal issues (an unconscious sexual feeling of a son to his mother)
his primary concerns in literature - relationships

Other novels
The Rainbow (1915) is D.H. Lawrence's first brush with obscenity (a word or action that is sexually offensive).
Women in Love, which is its sequel, comes out in 1920.
Lady Chatterly's Lover (1928) - published in a heavily abridged form until 1960 (Obscene Publications Act passed in 1959 )

Summary
Which D.H. Lawrence novel does Modern Library rank as #9 in its list of the 100 Best Books of the 20th Century?
Which D.H. Lawrence novel was the subject of a famous obscenity trial in 1960?

T.S. Eliot
American, born in St. Louis, went to Harvard, spent some time in Boston
become a British citizen later on in life and he lived in London from 1914 onward

Major Works
The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock, 1915 - a meditative monologue presumably of J. Alfred Prufrock
1919 - critical essays 'Tradition in the Individual Talent' - a controversial claim that poetry needs to be impersonal. You need to be able to interpret it without knowing anything about the author and his circumstances.
'The Waste Land.' 1922 - the most famous work of Modernism
'The Hollow Men,' a follow-up to 'The Waste Land.' 1925

in 1927 he converts to Anglicanism - his poetry and his plays after that start to be more religiously focused
a poem 'Ash Wednesday,' 1930
a play 'Murder in the Cathedral,' 1935
final masterpiece 'Four Quartets,' published from 1936 through 1942 - four poems 'Burnt Norton,' 'East Coker,' 'The Dry Salvages' and 'Little Gidding.'

culmination of his career - the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948
In 1957, he's 68 and he gets married to his 32-year-old secretary, whose name is Esme Valerie Fletcher
He dies in 1965
'Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats' got turned into the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical 'Cats.'

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, 1915
first big break poem
American poem (Boston?)
theme of being old
Plot - What happens in this poem is we follow around the speaker or narrator as he wanders around town. He also wanders through his memories.
It's really a non-linear plot; just his thoughts as he goes.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells

Style
this poem is written in free verse, since it doesn't have any set length or set rhyme scheme. At the same time, it has half-rhymes and internal rhymes even though there's no real structure
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea

a non-linear plot
repetitive phrases:
…in the room the women come and go,
talking of Michelangelo.
…I have known them all already, known them all.
…that's not what I meant at all
Reference to Prince Hamlet (an allusion):
No! I am not Prince Hamlet,
nor was meant to be.

mood and tone of regret
I grow old…I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each
I do not think that they will sing to me

'I've measured out my life in coffee spoons.'
it's about looking back and assessing
describe unremarkable life

James Joyce
had long-lasting impact in literature
particularly famous for starting the technique known as stream of consciousness

Ulysses:
a quarter after what an unearthly hour I suppose theyre just getting up in China now combing out their pigtails for the day well soon have the nuns ringing the angelus theyve nobody coming in to spoil their sleep except an odd priest or two for his night office or the alarmlock next door at cockshout clattering the brain out of itself let me see if I can doze off 1 2 3 4 5 what kind of flowers are those they invented like the stars the wallpaper in Lombard street was much nicer the apron he gave me was like that something only I only wore it twice better lower this lamp and try again so that I can get up early

James Joyce
Irish author
the oldest of 10 surviving children
boarding school,
local school, college in Dublin,
heads off to Paris, medical school,
Mother is dying - comes home, stays in Dublin, starts to work on Portrait
in 1904, on June he meets his future wife Nora Barnacle

James Joyce
a short-story collection Dubliners (1914)
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 1916
starts working on Ulysses, which starts getting published serially - in installments (1918)
Ulysses gets published in its final book form in 1922
Finnegans Wake 1939

Finnegans Wake
experimental & unreadable !!!
lots of words from foreign languages
the beginning of the book and the end of the book are the same sentence, but in a circle. The beginning of the book is:
'riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.'
And the end of the book: 'End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousandsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.'

Dubliners - 1914
a short-story collection (15 stories) about people living in Dublin:
3 – about childhood,
4 – adolescence,
4 – mature life,
3 – public life,
The Dead – summary
JJ intended these short stories to be “a chapter in the moral history of Ireland”
JJ recreated the short story, moving its action & focus from external to internal events
the most famous stories - 'Araby' and 'The Dead.'

epiphany
(comes from the Christian church year commemorating the visit of the Wise Man – January 6);
an experience of sudden and striking realization
indicates a sudden revelation or discovery, usually unexpected, that allows the protagonist or reader to see smth in a new way

Bildungsroman
novel of formation, novel of education, or coming-of-age story,
a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood and in which, therefore, character change is extremely important
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Stephen Dedalus - an alter-ego of young Joyce
abandons the idea that he needs to be strictly realistic. He starts to get a little more interested in representing Stephen's consciousness

Part I
Childhood
this very young child stage is represented in language
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.

Part II
Sexual Awakening - his first sexual experience with a prostitute
Part III
Religious Torment - Stephen going in for a confession
Part IV
Discipline – not indulging in pleasures - to be a priest? - thinks about his name and his father - his destiny as an artist
Part V
University - the diary - a dedication to his father
Old father, old artificer, stand me forever in good stead

Ulysses
June 16th
Stephen Dedalus - in Dublin, working as a schoolteacher
Chapter 4 - Leopold Bloom 'Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.'