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Literary Modernism Form and Content

The document provides an overview of various techniques and themes associated with literary modernism, including alienation, objection to tradition, disillusionment and fragmentation, stream of consciousness, interior monologue, flashback and flash-forward, free indirect style/discourse, logopoeia, allusion, and epiphany.

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85 views

Literary Modernism Form and Content

The document provides an overview of various techniques and themes associated with literary modernism, including alienation, objection to tradition, disillusionment and fragmentation, stream of consciousness, interior monologue, flashback and flash-forward, free indirect style/discourse, logopoeia, allusion, and epiphany.

Uploaded by

Ame Angélique
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Course: British Literature Level: Master 01

Lecture one:

Literary Modernism: form and content

Introduction:
Modernism, in arts as in literature, is a radical break with the past and the concurrent search for
new forms of expression. Modernism fostered a period of experimentation in the arts from the
late 19th to the mid-20th century, particularly in the years following World War I.
For that reason, the literature of this era is characterized by some innovatory features as to form
and content. Hereafter, we discuss some.

Thematic content:
Alienation

In an era characterized by industrialization, rapid social change, and advances in science and


the social sciences (e.g., Freudian theory), Modernists felt a growing alienation incompatible
with Victorian morality, optimism, and convention. New ideas in psychology, philosophy, and
political theory kindled a search for new modes of expression.

Objection to tradition and norms:

Modernists followed no order or convention. The movement depicts a break away from the
established norms including a fresh looking at the self (the individual) or one’s position in the
world rather than discussing the whole society’s matters as well as much experimentation in
form and content.

Disillusionment and fragmentation

The Modernist impulse is fueled in various literatures by industrialization and urbanization and


by the search for an authentic response to a much-changed world. Although prewar works
by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and other writers are considered Modernist, Modernism as a
literary movement is typically associated with the period after World War I. The enormity of
the war had undermined humankind’s faith in the foundations of Western society and culture,
and postwar Modernist literature reflected a sense of disillusionment and fragmentation. A
primary theme of T.S. Eliot’s long poem The Waste Land (1922), a seminal Modernist work, is
the search for redemption and renewal in a sterile and spiritually empty landscape. With its
fragmentary images and obscure allusions, the poem is typical of Modernism in requiring the
reader to take an active role in interpreting the text.

Techniques:

Stream of consciousness & interior monologue

The publication of the Irish writer James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922 was a landmark event in the
development of Modernist literature. Dense, lengthy, and controversial, the novel details the
events of one day in the life of three Dubliners through a technique known as stream of
consciousness, which commonly ignores orderly sentence structure and incorporates fragments
of thought in an attempt to capture the flow of characters’ mental processes. Portions of the
book were considered obscene, and Ulysses was banned for many years in English-speaking
countries. Other European and American Modernist authors whose works rejected
chronological and narrative continuity include Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein,
and William Faulkner. Stream of consciousness is a technique which seeks to record the flow
of impressions passing through a character’s mind. The best-known English exponents are
Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Later novelists have often employed the
technique, though rarely with such thoroughness as its early proponents. For them it was a fresh
weapon in the struggle against intrusive narration. By recording the actual flow of thought with
its paradoxes and irrelevancies they sought to avoid the over-insistent authorial rhetoric of
Edwardian novels. They felt that the traditional techniques could not meet the social pressures
of the new age; believing that, in Virginia Woolf’s words, ‘human nature had changed . . . in or
about December 1910’, they rejected the socio-descriptive novel in favour of a novel centring
on ‘the character itself’. Inner thoughts and feelings now occupied the foreground of attention.

Interior monologue In FICTION, a NARRATIVE technique in which a character’s


intimate thoughts and impressions are related directly and immediately. For the reader the
effect is, in the words of novelist and critic David Lodge, “like wearing earphones plugged into
someone’s brain, and monitoring the subject’s impressions, reflections, questions, memories,
and fantasies as they are triggered either by physical sensations or the association of ideas.” The
term is sometimes used interchangeably with stream of consciousness, although increasingly
there has been a tendency to define stream of consciousness as a type of fiction that
represents a character’s consciousness, and interior monologue as one form of that
representation, others being free indirect discourse and simple first-person narration. The
best-known example of interior monologue is Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, the closing section of
James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922). Other novels featuring interior monologues include To the
Lighthouse (1927) by Virginia Woolf, and The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying
(1930) by William Faulkner.

Flashback and flash-forward

Foreshadowing (flashforward) is the hint in a narrative of later developments. Foreshadowing


may assume a variety of forms: Hedda’s toying with a pistol early in Ibsen’s play Hedda
Gabler anticipates her eventual suicide, while the description of a graveyard with “five or six
graves” foreshadows the fate of the traveling family in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A
Good Man Is Hard to Find.”

Flashback  in literature and dramatic media, an interjected scene or point that takes the
narrative back in time from the current point.

Free indirect style/discourse

The presentation of thoughts or speech of fictional characters which seems by various devices
to combine the character's sentiments with those of a narrator.
FREE INDIRECT DISCOURSE: A style of third-person narration that mingles within it
traits from first-person narration, often shifting pronouns, adverbs, tense, and
grammatical mode. The term comes from the French "style indirect libre," and Flaubert's
use of this technique in French literature strongly influenced English-speaking authors
like James Joyce
The following is an example of sentences using direct, indirect and free indirect
speech:

 Quoted or direct speech: He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune.
"And just what pleasure have I found, since I came into this world?" he asked.
 Reported or normal indirect speech: He laid down his bundle and thought of his
misfortune. He asked himself what pleasure he had found since he came into the
world.
 Free indirect speech: He laid down his bundle and thought of his misfortune. And
just what pleasure had he found, since he came into this world?

Logopoeia,
a term introduced, along with phanopoeia (visual image) and melopoeia (sound), by Ezra
Pound from Greek logopoeia, from logos "word" ( Logos) + poiein "to make, create".
LOGOPOEIA: Ezra Pound's term for one of the three techniques he would use to create
"charged" language. According to Pound, you can charge any particular word by "using
the word in some special relation to 'usage,' that is, to the kind of context in which the
reader expects, or is accustomed, to finding it". Basically, if a poet takes a word and uses
it in a strange or unusual manner, or alters its normal relationship to expected grammar
or its most common semantic field, that word will then stand out from the rest of the line
and be poetically energized. That technique is logopoeia.

ALLUSION: A casual reference in literature to a person, place, event, or another


passage of literature, often without explicit identification. Allusions can originate in
mythology, biblical references, historical events, legends, geography, or earlier literary
works. Authors often use allusion to establish a tone, create an implied association,
contrast two objects or people, make an unusual juxtaposition of references, or bring the
reader into a world of experience outside the limitations of the story itself. Authors
assume that the readers will recognize the original sources and relate their meaning to
the new context. For instance, if a teacher were to refer to his class as a horde of
Mongols, the students will have no idea if they are being praised or vilified unless they
know what the Mongol horde was and what activities it participated in historically. This
historical allusion assumes a certain level of education or awareness in the audience, so it
should normally be taken as a compliment rather than an insult or an attempt at
obscurity.
Epiphany : When used as a literary device, an epiphany is a moment in which there is a sudden
realization that leads to a new perspective that clarifies a problem or situation. A character may
have an epiphany, or it may also occur in the narration such that the reader has the epiphany.

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