ENGLISH LITERARY CRITICISM AND THEORY

1. ENGLISH LITERARY CRITICISM AND THEORY LECTURE 5: MODERNISM

5. Edwardian Age (1901-1910/1914) • subperiod to Realistic Period (1870-1914) • age of transition • characterised by the loss of Victorian values • fiction of the ”Materialists” (Galsworthy, Bennett, Wells) – social documents of the era (e.g. The Forsyte Saga) and description of ”unimportant things” (see Woolf’s criticism in ”Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” or ”Modern Fiction”) • but Wells’ ‘scientific romances’ (e.g. A Modern Utopia)

6. Modernism • ‘modern’ puts emphasis on the strong and conscious break with traditional formsand techniques of expression in arts (e.g. Futurism, Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism) • the term also implies the rejection of historical continuity and of the society leading to a sense of isolation and alienation with the elevation of the invidual over the social human being

13. Modernist Period in English Literature

14. Modernism: the Georgian Age (1910-1936) • ‘dark age’ with deepening pessimism • overall influence of the First World War – loss • Russian Revolution, fascism, the Great Depression of the 30s – time of disillusionment! • great losses of past foundations (Christianity, commonly shared social and moral values) • questioning certainties in existential philosophies (e.g. Nietzsche’s ”God is dead” and Übermensch; Henri Bergson’s theory of time) and in psychology (Freud’s and Jung’s ideas)

15. ‘Modern Tradition’in English-American Literature • period of remarkable literary productivity • importance of reading with the widening of the reading public (public libraries!) • novelties in fiction of Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce (stream-of-consciousness novel) • E. M. Forster’s Passage toIndia and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928,sexuality!) • G. B. Shaw’s ‘drama of ideas’ (e.g. Saint Joan) and the Irish Renaissance (J. M. Synge, Sean O’Casey, W.B. Yeats) • in poetry W. B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and the American Ezra Pound • American ‘Lost Generation’ in 1920s (e. g. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The GreatGatsby) • Ernest Hemingway’s and Graham Greene’s war novels

16. Thomas Sterne Eliot (1888-1965) • American-British critic, poet, playwright • ”a classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion” • conservative, the least modern in his criticism but in his poetry antiromantic and innovative (TheWaste Land, 1922) • emphasising tradition, denying the literary significance of the poet’s personality • to show the power of objectivity and intellect -- ”Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) and ”Metaphysical Poets” (1921)

17. T.S. Eliot, ”Tradition and the Individual Talent” • traditional is archeological? • in criticism we try to find what is individual, ”what is the peculiar essence” of a writer • but tradition is crucial: ”the most individual parts […] may be those in which the dead poets, [the] ancestors, assert their immortality” (73B) • it involves great labour and the historical sense: ”a sense of the timeless and of the temporal together” - in composition being aware of not only one’s generation but the predecessors and the classics, cf. ”the mind of Europe” (74A) – interdependence of the present and the past

18. T.S. Eliot, ”Tradition and the Individual Talent” 2 • in aesthetic criticism, a writer should be tested and judged ”by the standards of the past” and one’s knowledge of the dead poets • in poetry: ”continual surrender of [one]self,” ”continual self-sacrifice” in the ”process of depersonalization” (74A) – scientific approach • the poet’s mind is a storehouse of feelings, phrases and images • ”the poet has, not a ‘personality’ to express, but a particular medium” (75A) (e.g. see Keats) • antiromantic approach, mainly criticising the Wordsworthian ”emotion recollected in tranquillity” in poetry -- instead, complexity and ”concentration” of ordinary emotions into new ‘structural’ ones

19. T.S. Eliot, ”Tradition and the Individual Talent” 3 • ”Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but escape from personality.” (75B) • ”The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.” (76A)

20. T.S. Eliot, ”Metaphysical Poets” 1 • 17th century poets: John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, and Andrew Marvell • for Dryden, metaphysical meant ‘philosophical’, for Dr Johnson ‘learnt’ • not a class or school of poets • common feature: usage of the metaphysical conceit (farfetched metaphor, e.g. ”The Flea”) • ”richness of association” in simple language • they differ from other poets in the degree of sensibility

21. T.S. Eliot, ”Metaphysical Poets” 2Metaphysical Poets vs. later ones • they possessed ”mechanism of sensibility”: the close association of thought and feelings • reflective poets: their feelings and thoughts were united (78B) • simple language • ”dissociation of sensibility” set in (till today) • intellectual poets are more concerned about their thoughts about feelings (e.g. Milton, Dryden, Tennyson, Browning) • more refined poetic language • ”The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force […] language into his meaning.”(79A)

22. T.S. Eliot’s ‘objective correlative’ • the poet should rely on ”the logic of imagination”, as it is impossible to express the complexity of the world directly • the usage of images (condense short expressions), set of objects, situations, events, and fragments of memory (e.g. the Grail legend in The Waste Land) • visible and auditory details were put together without explanation and meant to evoke and transmit the same emotion, or state of mind that the poet wanted to convey

23. The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, And seeing that it was a soft October night, Curled once about the house, and fell asleep. And indeed there will be time For the yellow smoke that slides along the street, Rubbing its back upon the window panes; There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands That lift and drop a question on your plate; Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea. T.S. Eliot, ”The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1920)

24. Criticism of Fiction: Henry James • so far theorising about drama, epic and poetry, not fiction • in the Victorian period the novel became the dominant literary form • first true criticism of fiction: Henry James, the American novelist’s ”The Art of Fiction” (1884) • fiction (also) gives the ”sense of the whole” • life is in flux and the novelist is to create the illusion of wholeness / roundedness • the author’s detachment with the focus on the central character – ”liberating the character” (in The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl) • subtle voice of the narrator with ‘free indirect speech’ helps the character to reveal herself • storytelling is an artistic skill

25. the materialists concerned with the body good workmen writing of unimportant, trivial things (81B) ”life escapes them” the Edwardian Bennett, Galsworthy, Wells (81A) the spiritualists they come closer to life (82) interest in ”the dark places of psychology” also influenced by the Russian writers of ”compassionate” and ”comprehensive” mind (e.g. Tchekov) Conrad, Joyce, Woolf Virginia Woolf, ”Modern Fiction” (1925):- modern also means ”improvement upon the old”? – development in literature? - in the middle of the great time of fiction (young genre) with different paths:

26. Virginia Woolf, ”Modern Fiction” 2 • ”life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope sorrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” (82A) • functioning of the mind: ”it receives a myriad impressions” every day (+William James, psychologist) • the spiritual/modern novelist with the technique of stream-of-consciousness tries to show ”life or spirit, truth or reality” (essentials) • good method brings us closer to this (82B), while falsity and pretence are forbidden (83B)