WEEK 13 & 14
BBL-3102
► An
Overview of General Characteristics,
Themes, Narrative Technique
20th-Century British and Irish
Modernist Literature
Historical Background
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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
Who is a “British” Writer in the 20th
Century
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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
Who is a British Writer in the 20th
Century?
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Writers that were once marginalized by
sexuality, gender, and class were now
celebrated.
W. H. Auden
Virginia Woolf
D. H. Lawrence
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.
Value Differences in the Modern
World
► Modern World (Early 20
th
Pre-Modern World
► Ordered
► Meaningful
► Optimistic
► Stable
► Faith
► Morality/Values
► Clear Sense of Identity
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Century)
► Chaotic
► Futile
► Pessimistic
► Fluctuating
► Loss of faith
► Collapse of Morality/Values
► Confused Sense of Identity
and Place in the World
Forces Behind Modernism
► The
sense that our culture has no center, no
values.
► Paradigm shift
 from the closed, finite, measurable, cause-andeffect universe of the 19th century to an open,
relativistic, changing, strange universe;
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
Inner psychological reality or “interiority” is represented
Stream of consciousness—portraying the character’s inner
monologue
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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
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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
Krúdy: The Adventures of Sindbad
► Tolstoy: Anna Karenina (1877)
► Virginia Woolf
► Gyula
Metanarrative
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►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
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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
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Intertextuality
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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
► 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.
► 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
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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
Product of the metropolis, of cities and urbanscapes
► Overwhelming technological changes of the 20th
Century
► Disillusionment
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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
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
Modernist Literature
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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
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)
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)
D. H. Lawrence
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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
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.
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3. Analysis of his masterpiece
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(1) Brief introduction of Sons and Lovers:
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Sons and Lovers is largely an autobiographical novel told by means of
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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 strongwilled, 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
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(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.
James Joyce
1.Biography
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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
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.
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. 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.
(3) Character analysis
Bloom, Leopold "Poldy": The protagonist of Joyce's mock-epic. Bloom is a
"modern" hero in contrast to the Homeric Ulysses. 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.
MODERNISM
WAR POEMS
► “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 Poets
must be truthful.”
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Wilfred Owen, from a preface to a planned
book of his poetry.
►“It's
a sin
To 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
“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.
The Soldier
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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.
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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.
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--Rupert Brooke
Summary
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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.
“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.
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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 hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
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Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And 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.
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In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
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If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind 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 blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
“Dulce et Decorum Est”
by Wilfred Owen
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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”
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.