Modernist literature
Modernism (literature), a literary and cultural movement which flourished in the first decades of the 20th century. The term is generally used to refer to English literature in the broad sense, though its major figures included American and Irish writers, such as Eliot, Yeats, and Joyce, as well as the Norwegian and Swedish dramatists Ibsen and Strindberg. Moreover, the roots of Modernism are European rather than British, and indeed the determination to take European culture as a model was one of the hallmarks of the Modernist movement. The term “Modernist” was not generally used by the exponents of the movement themselves, who rather referred to their works and aesthetic theories as “modern”, but became popular later, when the group in question were clearly no longer modern in a historical sense. The one notable early use of the term was in the critical work by Robert Graves and Laura Riding entitled A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927).
Modernism as a movement can be recognized not only in literature but also in painting, music, sculpture, and architecture, as well as in the sciences and in theology, aesthetics, and anthropology. The turn of the century was a key moment when a number of theories, to prove influential for Modernism, were elaborated, such as Einstein's treatise on relativity (1905), Max Planck's on quantum theory (1900), and Freud's on the unconscious (The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900). In the literary domain, major influences on Modernism include the late 19th-century French novelist Flaubert, and the Symbolist poet, Mallarmé.
Modernism is not a term to which a single meaning can be ascribed. It may be applied both to the content and to the form of a work, or to either in isolation. It reflects a sense of cultural crisis which was both exciting and disquieting, in that it opened up a whole new vista of human possibilities at the same time as putting into question any previously accepted means of grounding and evaluating new ideas. Modernism is marked by experimentation, particularly manipulation of form, and by the realization that knowledge is not absolute. Marx, Freud, and Darwin had unsettled the human subject from its previously secure place at the centre of at least the human universe, and had revealed its unwitting dependence on laws and structures outside its control and sometimes beyond its knowledge. Historical and material determinism, psychoanalytic theories which reveal the self as a pawn in a process dominated by an inaccessible unconscious play of forces, and a conception of evolution and heredity which situates humanity as no more than the latest product of natural selection—these theories conspired to threaten humanist self-confidence and to provoke a feeling of ideological uncertainty. In so far as the Arts were concerned, such insecurity proved immensely productive. It engendered an aesthetics of experimentation, fragmentation, ambiguity, and nihilism. Modernism was built on a sense of lost community and civilization. It embodied a series of contradictions and paradoxes. Since it had no stable centre it could embrace a multiplicity of features of the modern sensibility which might have appeared, in a logical sense, mutually exclusive. The loss of a sense of tradition, for example, was a theme common to Modernist writers, but it was lamented by some in an extreme form of reactionary conservatism, and celebrated by others as a means of liberation from the stranglehold of past practices. Revolution and conservatism coexisted, not necessarily peaceably, under the Modernist umbrella. The increasing dominance of technology was another prevalent Modernist preoccupation, but it was condemned by some as vehemently as it was embraced by others who saw it as the flagship of 20th-century progress.
Not surprisingly, the diversity of Modernist theory is matched by the variety of Modernist practice. Poets like T. S. Eliot in his Waste Land (1922), and Ezra Pound in his Cantos (1917-1970) express the concerns of Modernism in a form which itself breaks radically with previous poetic tradition. Similarly, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925) and James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) explore the disintegration and fragmentation of conscious control in their protagonists, adopting a style which itself mirrors the disconnectedness of experience and the triumph of the random and contingent over the structured and unified. In works such as these it is impossible to separate form from content in any meaningful way. The dissolution of meaning, the incoherence of character, the lack of recognizable “plot” are features which not only transmit but actually constitute the “theme” of the art-work. Flaubert's famous desire to write a “book about nothing” was never realized by him (or, at least, not in Madame Bovary, about which he made the comment) but his successors sometimes seem to have come as close to accomplishing his aim as is possible using language which, of course, can never escape meaning entirely. Indeed, this relationship to linguistic meaning is one of the aspects of Modernism which is most commonly misrepresented: the desire expressed by the poets Mallarmé and Valéry, for example, to achieve the condition of music does not refer primarily to the aim of harmonious or “musical” sonorities. It represents rather the attempt to use language in a way that is driven by the signifier as much as by the signified (see de Saussure; semiotics), that is to say by the formal qualities of language as much as by the desire to communicate a “message”. Modernist novelists as well as poets viewed the work of art more as an aesthetic object than as a representation of reality. Their legacy survives in both contemporary theory and practice.
Modernist literature is the literary form of Modernism and especially High modernism;[1] it should not be confused with modern literature, which is the history of the modern novel and modern poetry as one. There is a separate section on modernist poetry.
Modernism as a literary movement reached its height in Europe between 1910 and 1920, and addressed aesthetic problems similar to those found in non-literary forms of contemporaneous Modernist art, such as painting. Gertrude Stein's abstract writings, for example, have often been compared to the fragmentary and multi-perspectival Cubism of her friend Pablo Picasso[2].
The general thematic concerns of Modernist literature are well-summarized by the sociologist Georg Simmel:
"The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life."[3]
The Modernist emphasis on a radical individualism can be seen in the many literary manifestos issued by various groups within the movement; the concerns expressed by Simmel above are echoed in Richard Huelsenbeck's "First German Dada Manifesto" of 1918:
"Art in its execution and direction is dependent on the time in which it lives, and artists are creatures of their epoch. The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week ... The best and most extraordinary artists will be those who every hour snatch the tatters of their bodies out of the frenzied cataract of life, who, with bleeding hands and hearts, hold fast to the intelligence of their time."
The Modernist re-contextualization of the individual within the fabric of a received social heritage can be seen in the "mythic method" which T.S. Eliot expounded in his discussion of James Joyce's Ulysses:
"In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him ... It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history."[4]
Through an aesthetic examination of these and related concerns, Modernist literature developed a style that can be characterized by a preoccupation with stylistic novelty, formal fragmentation, multiple perspectives, and alternatives to traditional narrative forms.
Modernist literature involved such authors as Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Joseph Conrad, Andrei Bely, W. B. Yeats, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Luigi Pirandello, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Jaroslav Hašek, Samuel Beckett, Menno ter Braak, Marcel Proust, Mikhail Bulgakov, Robert Frost and Boris Pasternak.
Modernist literature attempted to move from the bonds of Realist literature and introduce concepts such as disjointed timelines. Modernism was distinguished by emancipatory metanarrative. In the wake of Modernism, and post-enlightenment, metanarratives tended to be emancipatory, whereas beforehand this was not a consistent characteristic. Contemporary metanarratives were becoming less relevant in light of the implications of World War I, the rise of trade unionism, a general social discontent, and the emergence of psychoanalysis. The consequent need for a unifying function brought about a growth in the political importance of culture.
Modernist literature can be viewed largely in terms of its formal, stylistic and semantic movement away from Romanticism, examining subject matter that is traditionally mundane--a prime example being The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot. Modernist literature often features a marked pessimism, a clear rejection of the optimism apparent in Victorian literature. In fact, "a common motif in Modernist fiction is that of an alienated individual--a dysfunctional individual trying in vain to make sense of a predominantly urban and fragmented society".
However, many Modernist works like T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land are marked by the absence of a central, heroic figure; in rejecting the solipsism of Romantics like Shelley and Byron, these works reject the notion of subject associated with Cartesian dualism, and collapse narrative and narrator into a collection of disjointed fragments and overlapping voices.
Modernist literature often moves beyond the limitations of the Realist novel with a concern for larger factors such as social or historical change; this is prominent in "stream of consciousness" writing. Examples can be seen in Virginia Woolf's Kew Gardens and Mrs Dalloway, James Joyce's Ulysses, Katherine Porter's Flowering Judas, Jean Toomer's Cane, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, and others.
Modernism as a literary movement is seen, in large part, as a reaction to the emergence of city life as a central force in society. Furthermore, an early attention to the object as freestanding became in later Modernism a preoccupation with form. The dyadic collapse of the distance between subject and object represented a movement from means to is. Where Romanticism stressed the subjectivity of experience, Modernist writers were more acutely conscious of the objectivity of their surroundings. In Modernism the object is; the language doesn't mean it is. This is a shift from an epistemological aesthetic to an ontological aesthetic or, in simpler terms, a shift from a knowledge-based aesthetic to a being-based aesthetic. This shift is central to Modernism. Archibald MacLeish, for instance, said, "A poem should not mean / But be."
Many Modernist works are studied in schools today, from Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, to James Joyce's Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Characteristics of Modernism
Formal characteristics
Open Form
Discontinuous narrative
Classical allusions
Borrowings from other cultures and languages
Unconventional use of metaphor
Fragmentation
Thematic characteristics
Breakdown of social norms and cultural sureties
Dislocation of meaning and sense from its normal context
Valorization of the despairing individual in the face of an unmanageable future
Rejection of history and the substitution of a mythical past, borrowed without chronology
Product of the metropolis, of cities and urbanscapes
Overwhelming technological changes of the 20th Century
Intertextuality is the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. It can refer to an author's borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader's referencing of one text in reading another. The term “intertextuality” has, itself, been borrowed and transformed many times since it was coined by poststructuralist Julia Kristeva in 1966. As critic William Irwin says, the term “has come to have almost as many meanings as users, from those faithful to Kristeva's original vision to those who simply use it as a stylish way of talking about allusion and influence” (Irwin, 228).
Intertextuality and poststructuralism
Kristeva's coinage of “intertextuality” represents an attempt to synthesize Ferdinand de Saussure's structuralist semiotics—his study of how signs derive their meaning within the structure of a text—with Bakhtin's dialogism—his examination of the multiple meanings, or “heteroglossia,” in each text (especially novels) and word (Irwin, 228). For Kristeva (69), “the notion of intertextuality replaces the notion of intersubjectivity” when we realize that meaning is not transferred directly from writer to reader but instead is mediated through, or filtered by, “codes” imparted to the writer and reader by other texts. For example, when we read Joyce's Ulysses we decode it as a modernist literary experiment, or as a response to the epic tradition, or as part of some other conversation, or as part of all of these conversations at once. This intertextual view of literature, as shown by Roland Barthes, supports the concept that the meaning of an artistic work does not reside in that work, but in the viewers. More recent post-structuralist theory, such as that formulated in Daniela Caselli's Beckett's Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism (MUP 2005), re-examines "intertextuality" as a production within texts, rather than as a series of relationships between different texts. Some postmodern theorists[citation needed] like to talk about the relationship between "intertextuality" and "hypertextuality"; intertextuality makes each text a "mosaic of quotations" (Kristeva, 66) and part of a larger mosaic of texts, just as each hypertext can be a web of links and part of the whole World-Wide Web.
"Intertextuality" and competing terms
Some critics have complained that the ubiquity of the term "intertextuality" in postmodern criticism has crowded out related terms and important nuances. Irwin (227) laments that intertextuality has eclipsed allusion as an object of literary study while lacking the latter term's clear definition. Linda Hutcheon argues that excessive interest in intertextuality obscures the role of the author, because intertextuality can be found "in the eye of the beholder" and does not necessarily entail a communicator's intentions. By contrast, parody, Hutcheon's preferred term, always features an author who actively encodes a text as an imitation with critical difference. However, there have also been attempts at more closely defining different types of intertextuality. The Danish film theoretician has made a distinction between what he labels 'vertical' and 'horizontal' intertextuality. Horizontal intertextuality denotes references that are on the 'same level' ie. when books make references to other books, whereas vertical intertextuality is found when, say, a book makes a reference to film or song or vice versa. Similarly, Linguist Norman Fairclough distinguishes between 'manifest intertextuality' and 'constitutive intertextuality,'(Fairclough 1992: 117). The former signifies intertextual elements such as presupposition, negation, parody , irony, etc. The latter signifies the interrelationship of discursive features in a text, such as structure, form, or genre. Constitutive Intertextuality is also referred to interdiscursivity. (Gunhild Agger, "Intertextuality Revisited: Dialogues and Negotiations in Media Studies." Canadian Journal of Aesthetics, 4, 1999.)
Examples and history of intertextuality
While the theoretical concept of intertextuality is associated with post-modernism, the device itself is not new. New Testament passages quote from the Old Testament and Old Testament books such as Deuteronomy or the prophets refer to the events described in Exodus (though on using 'intertextuality' to describe the use of the Old Testament in the New Testament, see Porter 1997). Whereas a redaction critic would use such intertextuality to argue for a particular order and process of the authorship of the books in question, literary criticism takes a synchronic view that deals with the texts in their final form, as an interconnected body of literature. This interconnected body extends to later poems and paintings that refer to Biblical narratives, just as other texts build networks around Greek and Roman Classical history and mythology. Bullfinch's 1855 work The Age Of Fable served as an introduction to such an intertextual network;[citation needed] according to its author, it was intended "...for the reader of English literature, of either sex, who wishes to comprehend the allusions so frequently made by public speakers, lecturers, essayists, and poets...".
Sometimes intertextualiy is taken as plagiarism as in the case of Spanish writer Lucía Etxebarria whose poem collection Estación de infierno (2001) was found to contain metaphors and verses from Antonio Colinas. Etxebarria claimed that she admired him and applied intertextuality.
Some examples of intertextuality in literature include:
Metanarrative
In critical theory, and particularly postmodernism, a metanarrative (sometimes master- or grand narrative) is an abstract idea that is supposed to be a comprehensive explanation of historical experience or knowledge. According to John Stephens it "is a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience".[1] The prefix meta means "beyond" and is here used to mean "about", and a narrative is a story. Therefore, a metanarrative is a story about a story, encompassing and explaining other 'little stories' within totalizing schemes.
The concept was criticized by Jean-François Lyotard in his work, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979). In this text, Lyotard refers to what he describes as the postmodern condition, which he characterized as increasing skepticism toward the totalizing nature of "metanarratives" (or "grand narratives," typically characterised by some form of 'transcendent and universal truth'):
Examples of metanarratives
The Marxist-Leninists believe that in order to be emancipated, society must undergo a revolution. Just as the bourgeoisie (whose living depends on the control of capital or technology) took power from the noble class (whose wealth was based on control over land), they believe that the present system of capitalism will fall and the proletariat (who live by selling their labor) will take over. This change will be driven by the unstable and cyclical nature of capitalism, and by the alienation felt by the labourers who keep the system working.
Poststructuralist skepticism toward metanarratives
Lyotard and many other poststructuralist thinkers have viewed this as a positive development for a number of reasons. First, attempts to construct grand theories tend to dismiss the naturally existing chaos and disorder of the universe. Second, metanarratives are created and reinforced by power structures and are therefore not to be trusted. 'Metanarratives' ignore the heterogeneity or variety of human existence. They are also seen to embody unacceptable views of historical development, in terms of progress towards a specific goal. The latent diverse passions of human beings will always make it impossible for them to be marshalled under some theoretical doctrine and this is one of the reasons given for the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.
Replacing grand, universal narratives with small, local narratives
According to the advocates of postmodernism, metanarratives have lost their power to convince - they are, literally, stories that are told in order to legitimise various versions of "the truth". With the transition from modern to postmodern, Lyotard proposes that metanarratives should give way to 'petits récits', or more modest and "localised" narratives.[citation needed] Borrowing from the works of Wittgenstein and his theory of the "models of discourse",[3] Lyotard constructs his vision of a progressive politics that is grounded in the cohabitation of a whole range of diverse and always locally legitimated language games. Postmodernists attempt to replace metanarratives by focusing on specific local contexts as well as the diversity of human experience. They argue for the existence of a "multiplicity of theoretical standpoints"[4] rather than grand, all-encompassing theories.
Is poststructuralism a metanarrative?
Lyotard's analysis of the postmodern condition has been criticized as being internally inconsistent. For example, thinkers like Alex Callinicos[5] and Jürgen Habermas[6] argue that Lyotard's description of the postmodern world as containing an "incredulity toward metanarratives" could be seen as a metanarrative in itself. According to this view, post-structuralist thinkers like Lyotard criticise universal rules but postulate that postmodernity contains a universal skepticism toward metanarratives; and this 'universal skepticism' is in itself a contemporary metanarrative. Like a post-modern neo-romanticist metanarrative that intends to build up a 'meta' critic, or 'meta' discourse and a 'meta' belief holding up that Western science is just taxonomist, empiricist, utilitarian, assuming a supposed sovereignty around its own reason and pretending to be neutral, rigorous and universal. This is itself an obvious sample of another 'meta' story, self-contradicting the postmodern critique of the metanarrative.
Thus, the postmodern incredulity towards metanarratives could be said to be self-refuting. If one is skeptical of universal narratives such as "truth", "knowledge", "right", or "wrong", then there is no basis for believing the "truth" that metanarratives are being undermined. In this sense, this paradox of postmodernism is similar to the liar's paradox ("This statement is false."). Perhaps postmodernists, like Lyotard, are not offering us a Utopian, teleological metanarrative, but in many respects their arguments are open to metanarrative interpretation. They place much emphasis on the irrational, though in doing so apply the instruments of reason[citation needed]. Postmodernism is an anti-theory, but uses theoretical tools to make its case. The significance of this contradiction, however, is of course also open to interpretation.
Stream of consciousness writing
In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a literary technique that seeks to portray an individual's point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character's thought processes, either in a loose interior monologue, or in connection to his or her sensory reactions to external occurrences. Stream-of-consciousness writing is strongly associated with the modernist movement. The introduction of the term to describe literature, transferred from psychology, is attributed to May Sinclair, and is mostly a dead metaphor.
Literature
Stream-of-consciousness writing is usually regarded as a special form of interior monologue and is characterized by associative (and at times--dissociative) leaps in syntax and punctuation that can make the prose difficult to follow, tracing a character's fragmentary thoughts and sensory feelings. Stream of consciousness and interior monologue are distinguished from dramatic monologue, where the speaker is addressing an audience or a third person, and is used chiefly in poetry or drama. In stream of consciousness, the speaker's thought processes are more often depicted as overheard in the mind (or addressed to oneself) and is primarily a fictional device. The term was first introduced to the field of literary studies from that of psychology by philosopher and psychologist William James, brother of the influential writer Henry James.
Several notable works employing stream of consciousness are:
The technique has been parodied, for example, by David Lodge in the final chapter of The British Museum Is Falling Down.
Molly Bloom's soliloquy is presented in the eighteenth, and final, chapter of James Joyce's novel Ulysses. It is a compilation of the thoughts of Molly Bloom, the concert-singing wife of advertising agent Leopold Bloom, whose wanderings around Dublin are followed in much of the book. Molly's physicality is often contrasted with the intellectualism of the male characters, and of Stephen Dedalus in particular.
Joyce's novel presented the action with numbered episodes rather than named chapters. Most critics since Stuart Gilbert, in his James Joyce's Ulysses, have named the episodes and they are often called chapters. The final chapter is referred to as Penelope, after Molly's mythical counterpart. One major difference between Molly and Penelope is that while Penelope is eternally faithful, Molly is not, having an affair with Hugh 'Blazes' Boylan after ten years of her celibacy within the marriage.
Molly's soliloquy (or interior monologue) consists of eight enormous "sentences," with only two marks of punctuation in the entire episode (periods after the fourth and eighth "sentences"). Molly accepts Leopold into her bed, frets about his health, then reminisces about their first meeting and about when she knew she was in love with him. The final words of Molly's reverie, and the very last words of the book, are:
"...I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. "
Joyce noted in a 1921 letter to Frank Budgen that "[t]he last word (human, all too human) is left to Penelope." The episode both begins and ends with "yes," a word that Joyce described as "the female word" and that he said indicated "acquiescence and the end of all resistance." This last, clear "yes" stands in sharp contrast to her unintelligible first spoken line in the fourth chapter of the novel.
Internal monologue, also known as inner voice, internal speech, or stream of consciousness is thinking in words. It also refers to the semi-constant internal monologue one has with oneself at a conscious or semi-conscious level.
Much of what people consciously report "thinking about" may be thought of as an internal monologue, a conversation with oneself. Some of this can be considered as speech rehearsal, and it seems to be that the internal monologue is generally in the native language of the person concerned.
An internal monologue may be consciously used in order to organize thoughts to solve problems or keep track of a long list. More mysterious is subconscious internal monologue, which is thought to be used in long term memory and dreams.
In fiction, when one person reads the mind of another, it is often described as being able to hear this internal monologue as if it were said out loud.
When children are taught to read out loud and then later taught to read quietly, they often subvocalize. This has led to a discipline called Speed reading that attempts to suppress this.
There is uncertainty about what the source of these internal sentences are in some conditions. Attribution for a recently produced internal sentence may lead to concerns over schizophrenia, hallucinations, or hearing voices.
Free indirect speech (also free indirect discourse, free indirect style, or discours indirect libre in French) is a style of third-person narration which combines some of the characteristics of third-person report with first-person direct speech. Passages written using free indirect speech are often ambiguous as to whether they convey the views, feelings and thoughts of the narrator or those of the character the narrator is describing. This allows a flexible and sometimes ironic interaction of internal and external perspectives.[1]
Comparison of styles
What distinguishes free indirect speech from normal indirect speech, is the lack of an introductory expression such as "He said" or "he thought". It is as if the subordinate clause carrying the content of the indirect speech is taken out of the main clause which contains it, becoming the main clause itself. Using free indirect speech may convey the character's words more directly than in normal indirect, as he can use devices such as interjections and exclamation marks, that cannot be normally used within a subordinate clause.
Examples
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.
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?
Usage in literature
The nineteenth century French novelist Flaubert is often cited as an early and influential example of free indirect speech. This style would be widely imitated by later authors, called in French style indirect libre.
In German literature, the style, known as erlebte Rede, is perhaps most famous in the works of Franz Kafka, blurring the subject's first-person experiences with a grammatically third-person narrative perspective.
In English literature, Jane Austen was among the first authors to use free indirect speech in a significant and deliberate manner. The opinions of her narrators are frequently blurred with the thoughts of her characters. James Joyce is also renowned for invoking the method in works such as "The Dead" (see Dubliners) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
1