Lecture 5 - 20th Century Literature

Modernism

A radical break with aesthetic conventions of previous periods

Art became more abstract (reduced to the minimum, and more ambivalent

Art became a thing of its own where people could escape to -not a pure mirror of reality

Specific form of Modern Poetry

An extreme degree of poetic reduction: one singular image

Not much room for interpretation, pushing the limits of the form

narrative technique

Imitates the process of thinking to capture the way our mind works

Realism left a detailed picture of the scene;

Modernism is less detailed, the painting doesn’t try to be real, it acknowledges that it is a painting

Realism tries to create something that feels real while modernism tries to distance itself from that.

• Literature liberates itself from Realism and tries to create something of its own.

Stream of consciousness

• thoughts and feelings of Mabel Waring are central to the narrative

• focus on the character instead of the plot

• no logical progression of ideas in the story; they occur randomly, as Mabel’s thoughts drift to and from the party

• mimics what people think (jumps from thought to thought

• Pause as we get additional information

• Strech through the description of a mental process

• extradiegetic level

• no interdiegetic level

• heterodiegetic

• fixed internal focalization as we are in the head of the character

• covert narration

  
  

• internal conflict of Mabel

  • second guessing herself and her dress

  • symbolized through the comparison of flies vs dragonflies and butterflies (impermanence vs power, energy and eternity)

  • thinking everyone is looking at her and making comments

  • social class, loneliness, poverty, and insecurity

Emphasis on lateness especially in age

• Loneliness, isolation, depression

Rather showing than telling

• implies Isochrony through dialogues between two waiters

extradiegetic level

homodiegetic

Covert narration

external focalization as we do not know what the drunken man knows

dynamic focalization as it changes to internal focalization

Modern prose due to its themes

well lighted cafe as a symbol for the small pleasures in life

• old drunken man and waiter enjoys staying late in the cafe

• comparison to bars as they are not well lighted and clean

meaning to the different persons

• younger waiter cant enyoy staying late at the cafe as he wants to go to his family

• older water and drunk old man just want to feel comfortable at the cafe

• youth and age differences as only the older ones can enjoy the present moment

texts tries to break with conventions

• Realism: would make the text feel more real; But this text is not, it´s not written in an emotional or real way

• Realism often uses an all-knowing narrator to depict all “relevant” perspectives

uses a narrator that has a limited perspective (only one perspective, or in Well-Lighted Place a narrator who knows or/describes very little)

• text can not look at all perspectives

fictional writing that consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact

Questions about the relationship between fiction and reality

Usually uses irony and self-referentiality

An entire text that uses nothing but intertextuality

An extreme form of intertextuality

Often the rewriting of a specific genre - at least one (interested in deconstructing them)

Modernism tries to represent the world subjectivity

social shift, movements, and reinventing itself

New century so make it new

• Radical reduction

• Imagism is concerned with giving one picture

• Breaking with the aesthetic conventions of Romanticism, Victorianism, and Realism

Growth of the working class

Social and international conflicts

Modernist Prose as a stream of one Consciousness

• Stream of Awareness

Narrative technique gives us more insight into a character’s mind and thought process

• long description implies the thought process

• thinking is not logical

Gertrude Stein as the most modernist writer

• Text is reduced and simple

• Word loses meaning

• no Stream of Consciousness (more Consciousness)

different perspectives of Picasso

• contain all perspectives

multiple perspectives in the world but she can only describe her own

we don’t know the truth

emphasis of subjectivity

no complete cut

• continuation of Modernism

we can’t make anything new

• remix of existing things to make it kind of new

self-referential

• endless reflection of the reflection

postmodernism what does reality begin with

Metafiction

• Text is just text not reality

capture the truth about political things

Examines the complex relationship between war experience & storytelling

• hard to seperate what happend vs what seemed to happen

• war is crazy and so is the truth about the story

• right turns into wrong and your sense gets lost which is why a true war story can not be absolutely true

Truth vs fiction (Truth depends on the audience)

important literary representation of the Vietnam War and the trauma it inflicted upon individuals

• friend died and made him go crazy

• he shot a baby water buffalo (it was to hurt not to kill - that how war was to him - but why do it to others)

• war makes you not only a man it makes you dead

Postmodern because it plays with fiction, it deconstructs

self-referential

extradiegetic level

intradiegetic level as he tells a story within the story

homodiegetic as he is not the main character

overt narration through comments

fixed internal focalization as we are in the head of the character

isochrony as we have dialogues in some parts

summary as there are 7 days of just listening within one or two sentences

Stretch as there are descriptions of the scene

foreshadowing (order in terms of discourse)

form of writing

get history from texts

exists in writing

Modernism

five sections differentiated by numerals

stanzas vary in length

free verse indicating an American poem

After WWI

• he was devasted by the war

• everything is falling apart and is broken

straw as a symbol for the emptiness of the hollow men

• their thoughts are empty, useless, and worthless.

• he made the argument even stronger with the wind which is meaningless

Enjambement

Anaphora

Repetition

Simile

Modernism

written like an academic text

• divided into 5 categories to explain the issue

• play with form and function

women find her husband cheating on her

• she was coming home earlier

• started cooking and put some sleeping pills in his food so that she can glue his hand to his penis as a revenge

the man’s behavior is analyzed in the 5 categories (opposites)

• nature and culture

• limp and stiff

• food and drug

• private and public

• comedy and tragedy