Modernism

Ca. 1910-1930

• Modern – new & better, has sth interesting to offer, associated with improvement, progress, evolution, idea

• After 1910 most of modernist writers published their first works

• Diaries of Virginia Woolf

• Advancement in sociology

• Towns: no communities, people are lonely in the crowd, surrounded by masses

• Quest for identity (who am I?)

• New branches of science: anthropology (also about exotic cultures)

• Development in psychology (Freud)- our conscience life is the small part above the water, major of it is unconscious, there are desires and emotions we don’t realize

• Einstein – theory of relativity

• Space and time were in the area of interest

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Modernism in fiction

• Modernist writers were quite harsh about Victorian writing (especially about characters)

• V. Woolf -> those naturalistic novels were quite good externally, but there was very little insight into character souls and thinking. There was nothing inside.

• Outside (in society, family, interaction, appearance) - inside (what he/she thinks, feels, what’s going on in their souls and minds)

• Concentration on character, not the plot

William Jones

• Philosopher connected with American pragmatists

• Process of human thinking, how human mind operates

• 1890  “Principles of Psychology”

  • He coins a metaphor which he finds for the description of how human mind works, our mind works in a digressive way, we do not think in well organized grammatical sentences, feelings, thoughts are than put into sentences

  • “stream of consciousness” – a set of literary devices how to create an illusion of human thinking, illogical, not ordered, chaotic

Modernism in fiction

• Interior monologue – it gives the idea of the protagonist’s talk, J. Joyce “The portrait of an artist as a young man”, “Ulysses”

• Free associations – vague switch from one idea to another, the connection between the two ideas is not visible

• Very often open ending + no clear beginning (the novel should be just a fragment, record of a certain moment in life)

• Modernists fiction is treated as experimental (new techniques)

• But its ambitions is to be realistic and record a moment of character’s life (documentary + shows human mind in the process of thinking)

• No 3xO narration

• The plot Is reduced with gaps in chronology, missing parts

• Language – grows up together with the character, in last chapters more sophisticated

• You may have feelings of repetitiveness

• A good novel shouldn’t be only a documentary, you should add something (some structure, extra layers)

• “Heart of Darkness” – journey:

  • Somehow keeps the story

  • But there’s also a journey of self-recognition etc, the journey into the darkness of human heart

  • It makes the novel universal

• “The Portrait of An Artist as a Young Man” –‘ “Ulysses” – intrusion of the myths

• There’s a system, logic but different, hard to trace

1. Shift:

   1. Inside – outside

   2. External – internal

   3. Objective – subjective

2. Symbolic objects, situations (colours – whiteness, blackness, name – Dedalus, setting – Labirynth)

3. Ambition: documentary

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