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NLP: Lute (Philosophy Narrative);
ETP: Campbell (Eve's Bayou)
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10. Character
and Self in
Narrative
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“We cannot
see inside
character.”
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reader/viewer + narrative –> reader/viewer’s
construction of a character
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“Guess what Flem Snopes did
last night?
reader/viewer + narrative –> reader/viewer’s
construction of a real person
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James Olney, who lead an NEH Summer
Seminar on “The Forms of Autobiography” I
attend in 1983 at UNC Chapel Hill
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"To create and in creating to be created,” the fine formula
of Lequier, ought to be the motto of autobiography.
The creative and illuminating nature . . . discerned in
autobiography suggests a new and more profound sense
of truth as an expression of innermost being, a likeness
no longer of things but of the person. Now this truth,
which is too often neglected, nevertheless constitutes
one of the necessary references for understanding the
human realm. We understand everything outside of us as
well as ourselves with reference to what we are and
according to our spiritual capacities. This is what Dilthey,
one of the founders of modern historiography, meant
when he said that universal history is an extrapolation
from autobiography.
Georges Gusdorf, "Conditions and Limits of
Autobiography"
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Little by little it has become clear to
me that every great philosophy has
been the confession of its maker, as it
were his involuntary and unconscious
autobiography.—Friedrich Nietzsche,
Beyond Good and Evil
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In living that life over again I struck up a first
acquaintance with myself. As if I had more choice than
time, I had walked with my face immovably set
forward, as incapable as time of turning my head and
seeing what was behind me. I looked, and what I saw
was myself as I had lived up to that moment when I
could turn my head. . . .
When my past life came alive in me after lying for so
long, a dead weight, my actual life came alive too as
that new life passed into it; for it was new, though old;
indeed, I felt that only now was I truly living it, since
only now did I see it as it was, so that at last it could
become experience. Without . . . looking and looking
back, I might never have lived my life.
Edwin Muir, The Story and the Fable
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V. Literary Fiction
and Reality
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Modernist Theory and Criticism
Second Edition 2005
Until the 1980s the term "modernist " was most often used in
literary studies to refer to a radical break with the literary forms of
the past in the experimental, avant-garde style of writing prevalent
between World War I and World War II. During the late 1980s and
early 1990s, understandings of the term "modernism " underwent a
temporary reversal. The emergence of postmodernism as the
preserve of emancipatory language practices and experimental
negotiations between "high " and "low " culture (technology, popular
culture) temporarily realigned modernism with Enlightenment
rationality and the traditional "elitist " notion of aesthetics as
necessarily divorced from cultural concerns. (While modernism is an
international movement, erupting in different countries at different
times, in fact one characteristic of modernism is its transgression of
national and generic boundaries. Our main focus here, however, is
on English-language modernism.) In the 1990s, however, the "return
to the scene of the modern " in literary studies has further redefined
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preserve the high cultural values of tradition. Consequently, the
project of identifying a modernist criticism and theory is often vexed
by contradictory definitions of the relation between art, society,
tradition, and the individual within the profusion of manifestoes and
essays characterizing the modernist period.
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One pervasive axiom of modernist theory that resulted in both
reactionary and progressive interpretations of art, society, and the
individual, importantly articulated by T. E. Hulme in "Romanticism
and Classicism " (1913–14, posthumously published in Speculations,
1924), is an acceptance of limits that are identified with classicism.
Hulme argues: "The classical poet never forgets this finiteness, this
limit of man. He remembers always that he is mixed up with earth.
He may jump, but he always returns back; he never flies away into
the circumambient gas " (120). The classical style, Hulme states, is
carefully crafted, characterized by accurate description and a
cheerful "dry hardness " (126). He asserts that "it is essential to
prove that beauty may be in small, dry things " (131); Hulme’s
preference is for the visual and the concrete over the general and
abstract, for freshness of idiom, for the vital complexities that are
"intensive " rather than extensive
(139).
http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0255.html
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modernism. "Modernity " increasingly refers to a highly
contradictory movement, often characterized by startling
juxtapositions and incongruities, whose criticism and theory both
affirmed traditional notions of "high " art and drew links between
the modernist poetics of change and the culture at large.
Thus, T. S. Eliot’s insistence in essays such as "Tradition and the
Individual Talent " (1917)that the young poet need only assimilate
the (all-male) canon of established authors contributed to public
definitions of literary modernism that would exclude mass culture.
Simultaneously, Eliot’s essays on the music hall and its performers,
including the now prominent article "Marie Lloyd " (1922), helped
make popular culture a legitimate object of criticism and a subject
for art. Similarly, prewar aesthetic manifestoes linked to movements
such as imagism and vorticism, including Ezra Pound’s well-known
"A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste " (1913)and Pound and Wyndham
Lewis’s 1914 manifesto published in the first number of their journal
BLAST, urged writers to "make it new " and praised the aesthetic
possibilities of urban, technological "steel " but also claimed to
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Muriel Spark
A. S. Byatt
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to live in conditions of
reality unprotected by
myth—Paul Tillich
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