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Intro To Modernism Spring 2024

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65 views13 pages

Intro To Modernism Spring 2024

Uploaded by

郭怡文
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Introduction to Modernism

English Literature Since Romanticism Spring 2024


Victorianism vs. Modernism (Norton 5)

Victorianism Modernism
• Conviction • Skepticism e.g. Conrad
• Optimism • Irresolution
• Progress • Bleak worldview
• Stoicism e.g. Robert Louis
Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling
Historical background
• Alienation of modern artist (Norton 3)
• Gap between high and low art (4)
• Against Victorian values e.g. Butler, Strachey (4)
• Disruption of old order (5)
• Psychoanalysis e.g. Freud (5)
• Challenges to religion e.g. anthropology, comparative mythologies (5-6),
Nietzsche (6)
• Transformation of everyday life: electricity, cinema, radio, aspirin (6)
• Scientific revolution e.g. quantum theory, theory of relativity (6)
Historical background
• Women’s property, education, suffrage (Norton 6-7)
• Post-WWI disillusion e.g. war poets (8)
• Independence of colonies; establishment of the British Commonwealth
(8; see maps on 12-13)
• 1930s: depression, unemployment, Nazism, the red decade (9)
• Post-WWII decolonization (10; see maps on 12-13)
• 1940s: Windrush Generation
• 1950s-1960s: race riots, Irish Republican Army
• 1979-1990: Thatcher, Conservative Party, free-market economy
1920s:
high modernism
Periodization (Norton 20-21)
• For high modernists (e.g. Joyce,
Midcentury (1930s-1950s):
Woolf), WWI shattered the
confidence that supported 19- reaction against modernism
century fiction (religion, old
grand narratives, notions of
ordinary reality etc.)
1960s:
• Diverse background of high realisms
modernists e.g. Conrad (Polish),
Joyce (Irish), D. H. Lawrence
(working class), Henry James
(American) End of the 20th century:
postmodernism and postcolonialism
High modernism: questioning reality (Norton 21)
• Woolf’s “Modern Fiction”: attacks the materialism of the Edwardian
authors (see p. 7 for the definition and time frame of the Edwardian
period)
• Reality existed only as it was perceived.
• Introduces impressionist, flawed, unreliable narrators (c.f. 19-century
narrator as authorial, omniscient, and reliable)
• Woolf’s subject: “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day”
• Emphasis on “mental life,” not material life
• Modernist fiction turns inward, not outward
Techniques of high modernism (Norton 22)
Stream of consciousness Free indirect discourse (free
indirect style)
Imitates what characters think: Third person narration + first-
non-linear, repetitive, fragmentary person characteristics (idioms etc.),
etc. but without tags
“Free”: authors can roam from one
viewpoint to another
Direct discourse Indirect discourse
“It was a boring class,” he thought. He thought that it was a boring
Quotation marks + tags class.
No quotations marks or tags
Examples
• Direct discourse: He put down his Norton and thought, “What’s the
point of modernist fiction?”
• Indirect discourse: He put down his Norton and asked himself what the
point of modernist fiction is.
• Free indirect discourse: He put down his Norton. What’s the point of
modernist fiction?
Themes in high modernism (Norton 22-23)
• WWI’s influence on the high modernists: shattered beliefs, fragility of
language and human
• Existential loneliness
• Building modern myths
• Metafiction, linguistic self-consciousness
• Urban life
Midcentury modernist fiction (Norton 23)
• WWII’s influence
• Documentary realism
• Politicizes modern novel’s linguistic self-consciousness by using the
discourse of the unemployed or of the proletariat
• Search for new moral foundations
Late 20-century fiction (Norton 24-25)
• Nostalgia for old imperial days
• Possessed by the past
• Greater freedom in exploration of gender and sexuality
• Feminist writers in the 1980s and 1990s
• Local idioms
• Postcolonial writers: untold histories, creolized vocabulary
• Emigrant and expatriates writers enrich the English-language fiction
Authors and themes
• William Butler Yeats: his work encapsulates a history of English poetry
between 1890 and 1939 (Norton 18)
• Joseph Conrad: empire
• Virginia Woolf: feminism, consciousness
• James Joyce: Irish nationalism
• D. H. Lawrence: gender and sexuality
• T. S. Eliot: repulsion by modernity
• Samuel Beckett: minimalism, absurdism
No class next week
April 9: William Butler Yeats
“The Stolen Child”
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
“Who Goes with Fergus?”
“Easter, 1916”
“The Second Coming”
“Leda and the Swan”

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