An Overview of 20th-Century British and Irish Modernist Literature

1. WEEK 13 & 14BBL-3102 An Overview of General Characteristics, Themes, Narrative Technique

2. 20th-Century British and Irish Modernist Literature

3. Historical Background 1901- The End of the Reign of Queen Victoria 1903- Ford Motor Company Founded 1905- Einstein Unveils the Theory of Special Relativity 1914-18- WWI 1916- Easter Rising in Dublin 1920- League of Nations Formed 1929- Stock Market Crash 1933- Hitler Rises to Power 1939-45- WWII 1945- Atomic Bomb Dropped on Japan 1969- Apollo Lands on the Moon

4. Who is a “British” Writer in the 20th Century 20th-century writers who we call British Conrad (Polish) T.S.Eliot & Pound (Americans) Yeats & Joyce (Irish) The British Empire has Stretched Across the Globe

5. Who is a British Writer in the 20th Century? Writers that were once marginalized by sexuality, gender, and class were now celebrated. D. H. Lawrence Virginia Woolf W. H. Auden

6. Much has Been Brewing in the World of Science, Philosophy, and Ideology Marx (1818-1883) Marx felt that reality was determined by materialist cultures and economics. He called for a social revolution. Darwin (1809-1882) Darwin's theory of evolution and “survival of the fittest” suggests that survival is determined by the ability to adapt. The Origin of the Species Nietzsche (1844-1900) Feels that traditional religions have been debunked by physical and natural sciences and thus, that moral and ethical systems that arise from traditional religions are illogical. Freud (1856-1939) Freud ‘s theories of the dynamic unconscious suggested that humans are not fully aware of what they think or why they think it. His ideas proposed that awareness existed in layers and that many thoughts occur "below the surface.” Einstein (1879-1955) Overturns Newtonian conceptions of Physics. The universe is uncertain and we are ill-equipped observers.

7. Value Differences in the Modern World Pre-Modern World Ordered Meaningful Optimistic Stable Faith Morality/Values Clear Sense of Identity Modern World (Early 20th Century) Chaotic Futile Pessimistic Fluctuating Loss of faith Collapse of Morality/Values Confused Sense of Identity and Place in the World

8. Forces Behind Modernism • The sense that our culture has no center, no values. • Paradigm shift • from the closed, finite, measurable, cause-and-effect universe of the 19th century to an open, relativistic, changing, strange universe;

9. Characteristics of Modernism in Literature • 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

10. Inner psychological reality or “interiority” is representedStream of consciousness—portraying the character’s inner monologue

11. Stream of consciousness • A literary technique • Portraying an individual's point of view • By giving the written equivalent of the character's thought processes: • Either in a loose internal interior monologue • Or in connection to his or her sensory reactions to external ocurrences • A special form of interior monologue • Characterized by: • Associative (and at times dissociative) leaps in syntax and punctuation • Making the prose difficult to follow • Tracing a character's fragmentary thoughts and sensory feelings • Distinguished from dramatic monologue: • The speaker is addressing an audience or a third person • Used chiefly in poetry or drama

12. Stream of consciousness (Continued) • A fictional device: Speaker’s thought processes depicted as overheard in the mind (or addressed to oneself) • Examples: • Ovid: Metamorphoses (Ancient Rome) • Sir Thomas Browne: The Garden of Cyrus (1658) • Rapid, unconnected association of objects • Geometrical shapes • Numerology • Gyula Krúdy: The Adventures of Sindbad • Tolstoy: Anna Karenina (1877) • Virginia Woolf

13. Metanarrative • Sometimes master- or grand narrative • A global or totalizing cultural narrative schema • Ordering and explaining knowledge and experience • The prefix “meta” = "beyond" [about] • A narrative = a story • A story about a story • Encompassing and explaining other 'little stories' within totalizing schemas

14. Free Verse • Vers libre • Styles of poetry that are not written using strict meter or rhyme • Still recognizable as 'poetry' by virtue of complex patterns of one sort or another that readers will peive to be part of a coherent whole • Intertextuality • Coined by poststructuralist Julia Kristeva in 1966 • Shaping texts' meanings by other texts • Author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text • Reader’s referencing of one text in reading another

15. Emphasis on the Experimental • Art is artifact rather than reality; • Organized non-sequentially • Experience portrayed as layered, allusive, discontinuous, using fragmentation and juxtaposition. • Ambiguous endings—open endings which are seen as more representative of reality.

16. Marked pessimism: a clear rejection of the optimism apparent in Victorian literature Common motif in Modernist fiction: an alienated individual (a dysfunctional individual) trying in vain to make sense of a predominantly urban and fragmented society Absence of a central, heroic figure Collapsing narrative and narrator into a collection of disjointed fragments and overlapping voices

17. Open Form • Discontinuous narrative • Juxtaposition • Two unlike things are put next to one another • A quality of being unexpected • To compare/contrast the two, to show similarities or differences • Example: A teacup and its saucer are expected • Classical allusions • A figure of speech • Making a reference to or representation of, a place, event, literary work, myth, or work of art, • Directly or by implication • Left to the reader or hearer to make the connection

18. Product of the metropolis, of cities and urbanscapes • Overwhelming technological changes of the 20th Century • Disillusionment • A feeling arising from the discovery • Something is not what it was anticipated to be • More severe and traumatic than common disappointment • Especially when a belief central to one's identity is shown to be false

19. Some Thematic Characteristics of Modernist Literature Alienation of the individual and the artist Society as fractured and culture as fragmented Sense of dislocation and meaninglessness Questioning the value of cultural norms Rejecting recorded history and valuing the mythic Focusing on the urban, the mundane, and the marginalized

20. Modernist Literature • The literary form of Modernism and especially High modernism • Different from Modern literature: history of the modern novel and modern poetry as one • At its height from 1900 to 1940 • Authors: • Poems: • T. S. Eliot • The Waste Land • Robert Frost • W.B. Yeats • Ezra Pound • Short stories and Novels: • James Joyce • William Faulkner • Ernest Hemingway • The Old Man and the Sea • Franz Kafka • Joseph Conrad • The Heart of Darkness • Virginia Woolf • F. Scott Fitzgerald • The Great Gatsby • D.H. Lawrence • Katherine Mansfield

21. T.S. Eliot 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. ( “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” lines 120-125)

22. James Joyce I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning. (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

23. D. H. Lawrence 1.Biography 1885–David Herbert Lawrence was born at a mining village in Nottinghamshire. His father was a coal-miner with little education; but his mother, once a school teacher, was from a somewhat higher class, who came to think that she had married beneath her and desired to have her sons well educated so as to help them escape from the life of coal miners. The conflict between the earthy, coarse, energetic but often drunken father and the refined, strong-willed and up-climbing mother is vividly presented in his autobiographical novel, Sons and Lovers (1913). Literary works The Rainbow Women in Love Lady Chatterley's Lover

24. 2.     Major theme In his writings, Lawrence has expressed a strong reaction against the mechanical civilization. In his opinion, the bourgeois industrialization or civilization, which made its realization at the cost of ravishing the land, started the catastrophic uprooting of man from nature and caused the distortion of personality, the corruption of the will, and the dominance of sterile intellect over the authentic inward passions of man. Under the mechanical control, human beings were turned into inanimated matter, while the inanimated matter should be animated to destroy both man and earth. It is this agonized concern about the dehumanizing effect of mechanical civilization on the sensual tenderness of human nature that haunts Lawrence's writing.

25. 3. Analysis of his masterpiece (1)Brief introduction of Sons and Lovers: Sons and Lovers is largely an autobiographical novel told by means of straight-forward narrative and vivid episodes in chronological sequence. The story starts with the marriage of Paul's parents. Mrs. Morel, daughter of a middle-class family, is "a woman of character and refinement", a strong-willed, intelligent and ambitious woman who is fascinated by a warm, vigorous and sensuous coal miner, Walter Morel, and married beneath her own class. (2)   Theme Lawrence was one of the first novelists to introduce themes of psychology into his works. He believed that the healthy way of the individual’s psychological development lay in the primacy of the life implulse, or in another term, the sexual impulse.huaman sexuality was, to Lawrence, a symbol of life force.by presenting the psychological experience of indivudual human life and of human relationships, Lawrence has opened up a wide new territory to the novel

26. (3)Character analysis Gertrude Morel - The first protagonist of the novel. She becomes unhappy with her husband Walter and devotes herself to her children. Paul Morel  -  Paul Morel takes over from his mother as the protagonist in the second half of the book. After his brother William's death, Paul becomes his mother's favorite and struggles throughout the novel to balance his love for her with his relationships with other women. (4)Artistic features Lawrence’s artistic tendency is mainly realism, which combines dramatic scenes with an authoritative commentary. And the realistic feature is most obviously seen in its detailed portraiture. With the working-class simpilicity and directness, Lawrence can summon up all the physical attributes associated with the common daily objects.

27. James Joyce 1.Biography 1882 James Joyce was born into a Catholic family Dublin, got his education at Catholic schools where he passed through a phase of religious enthusiasm but finally rejected the Catholic Church and started rebellion against the narrowness and bigotry of the bourgeois Philistines in Dublin. Influenced by Ibsen, Joyce finally decided to take the literary mission as his career. Joyce is not a commercial writer. In his lifetime, he wrote altogether three novels, a collection of short stories, two volumes of poetry, and one play. The novels and short stories are regarded as his great works, all of which have the same setting: Ireland, especially Dublin, and the same subject: the Irish people and their life.Literary works Dubliners A Portrait of Artist as a Young Man

28. 2. Major theme He changed the old style of fictions and created a strange mode of art to show the chaos and crisis of consciousness of that period. From him, stream of consciousness came to the highest point as a genre of modern literature.  In Finnegans Wake, this pursue of newness overrode the normalness and showed a tendency of vanity.

29. . Analysis of his masterpiece (1)Brief introduction of Ulysses: Ulysses gives an account of man's life during one day (16 June, 1904) in Dublin. The three major characters are: Leopold Bloom, an Irish Jew, his wife, Marion Tweedy Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The whole novel is divided into 18 episodes in correspondence with the 18 hours of the day. . (2)   Theme Ulysses is widely regarded as the most "revolutionary" literary efforts of the twentieth century if only for Joyce's "stream of consciousness" technique. In his efforts to create a modern hero, Joyce returned to classical myth only to deconstruct a Greek warrior into a parody of the "Wandering Jew." Joyce set a flawed and endearing human being. Joyce devoted considerably detailed passages to the most banal and taboo human activities: gluttony, defecation, urination, dementia, masturbation, voyeurism, alcoholism, sado-masochism and coprophilia and most of these depictions included the hero, Bloom.

30. (3)   Character analysis Bloom, Leopold "Poldy": The protagonist of Joyce's mock-epic. Bloom is a "modern" hero in contrast to the HomericUlysses. Throughout the novel, Joyce exposes Bloom, an ad-canvasser, as an outsider and as a Christ-like figure. Bloom, Molly (Marion Tweed): The wife of Leopold Bloom who has an affair with fellow singer, Blazes Boylan Boylan, Blazes: a Dublin singer who has sex with Molly Bloom on the afternoon of June 16, 1904. (4)   Artistic features Ulysses has become a prime example of modernism in literature. It is such an uncommon novel that there arises the question whether it can be termed as a "novel" all; for it seems to lack almost all the essential qualities of the novel in a traditional sense: there is virtually no story, no plot, almost no action, and little characterization in the usual sense. The events of the day seem to be trivial, insignificant, or even banal. But below the surface of the events, the natural flow of mental reflections, the shifting moods and impulses in the characters' inner world are richly presented in an unprecedentedly frank and penetrating way.

31. MODERNISM WAR POEMS

32. “Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.  My subject is War, and the pity of War…    Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory… All a poet can do today is warn. That is why true Poetsmust be truthful.” Wilfred Owen, from a preface to a planned book of his poetry.

33. “It's a sinTo say that Hell is hot ~ 'cause it's not:Mind you, I know very well we're in hell.” from The Mad Soldier by Edward Tennent

34. “The Soldier”by Rupert Brooke Background: • Even though British soldiers felt a strong urge to fight in order to preserve and defend the world they knew, the horrors of the war increasingly led them to become disillusioned with their cause. • Rupert Brooke wrote the poem at the beginning of the war when most soldiers believed in the justness of their cause and sought to reassure their families back home • When the horrors of WWI became widely known, Brooke’s poetry suffered a loss of popularity. • He died in 1915 from blood poisoning, he never saw combat.

35. The Soldier If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England.  There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England's, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. --Rupert Brooke

36. Summary The Soldier is the poem that uses his dead body as a symbol for England. He wants to be remembered for how he died and how he represented his country. He uses imagery to describe an ideal vision of England. Death has occurred at the end of the poem. Patriotism is a universal theme throughout the poem.

37. “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen Background: • World War I saw new weapons and technology never before seen on battlefields. Gas, machine guns, tanks, flamethrowers. • Trench warfare • Owen died in 1918, one week before the war ended.

38. Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,And towards our distant rest began to trudge.Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hootsOf gas-shells dropping softly behind. Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumblingFitting the clumsy helmets just in time,But someone still was yelling out and stumblingAnd flound'ring like a man in fire or lime. —Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams before my helpless sightHe plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams, you too could paceBehind the wagon that we flung him in,And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,If you could hear, at every jolt, the bloodCome gargling from the froth-corrupted lungsBitter as the cudOf vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —My friend, you would not tell with such high zestTo children ardent for some desperate glory,The old Lie: Dulce et decorum estPro patria mori.

39. “Dulce et Decorum Est”by Wilfred Owen The poem paints in stark images the brutality of war. The horrors of combat far outweighs its glory. A friend dying in a gas attack is depicted as well as the effects it has on the author. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori = “it is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country”

40. POSTMODERN • Following World War II (1939-1945), the Postmodern Period of British Literature developed. Postmodernism blends literary genres and styles and attempts to break free of modernist forms. • While the British literary scene at the turn of the new millenium is crowded and varied, the authors still fall into the categories of modernism and postmodernism. However, with the passage of time the Modern era may be reorganized and expanded.