Notes from research
Modernist Literature: at its height 1900-1940.
*TS Eliot*Joyce*Woolf*Yeats*F.Scott Fitzgerald*Pound*Stein*HD*Kafka*MennoterBraak*Hemingway*etc*
Modernism (abbrev. to Modm) moves from the bonds of realist lit, introduces concepts as disjointed timelines. "Modm was distinguished by emancipatory metanarrative" - after modm (and post-enlightenment) narratives tended to be emancipatory, but beforehand it wasn't a definite.
[Culture became politically important after WWI, trade unionism?]...
Moving away from Romanticism, modm goes into the traditionally mundane subject matters - think Eliot's "Prufrock". Also - a marked pessimism cf the optimism in a lot of Victorian lit. Common motif = an alienated individual...
[A dysfunctional individual trying in vain to make sense of a predominantly urban and fragmented society]
But then, poems like "The Waste Land" - there isn't (really) a central, heroic figure... (other than, perhaps, the author/poet?)
* cf Shelley + Byron (Romantics) and their solipsism; Modm rejects this?
* Also: rejects the subject of Cartesian dualism
[Collapse narrative and narrator into a collection of disjointed fragments and overlapping voices]
(But this is a crafted collapse - intended and designed for maximum effect; otherwise it would be reduced to Dada, surely? Dada always seems to find meaning out of chaos, rather than putting chaos into meaning, or constructing meaning with chaos. Limitations of the realist novel are taken further - Modm's concern for larger factors such as social or historical change -> "stream of consciousness" SoC.
SoC examples to chase down:
Woolf - 'Kew Gardens', 'Mrs Dalloway'
Joyce - 'Portrait', 'Ulysses'
Porter - 'Flowering Judas'
etc. etc...
Update (after receiving notes on the above): Menno ter Braak was a Dutch Modernist. Admittedly on a different kind of level than the other writers I mentioned, and undoubtedly less well-known, but still an interesting character (who was a polemicist, according to most reports). He wrote for the student magazine Propria Cures in Amsterdam in the 1920s (which is why I read about him to begin with), but his essays later in his life he was pretty ruthless, writing about extraneous authority and false values.
To be honest, what work of his I have read seems to be poorly translated (most of it translated by Dutch students, I think) but he is held in quite high regard by those students. I was just listing most of the big names I could think of that had some connections to the movement, and he came to mind. Likewise with Hilda Doolittle - I've read little of her work, but I remembered that she was leaning towards a kind of feminine modernism from what I have read.
*TS Eliot*Joyce*Woolf*Yeats*F.Scott Fitzgerald*Pound*Stein*HD*Kafka*MennoterBraak*Hemingway*etc*
Modernism (abbrev. to Modm) moves from the bonds of realist lit, introduces concepts as disjointed timelines. "Modm was distinguished by emancipatory metanarrative" - after modm (and post-enlightenment) narratives tended to be emancipatory, but beforehand it wasn't a definite.
[Culture became politically important after WWI, trade unionism?]...
Moving away from Romanticism, modm goes into the traditionally mundane subject matters - think Eliot's "Prufrock". Also - a marked pessimism cf the optimism in a lot of Victorian lit. Common motif = an alienated individual...
[A dysfunctional individual trying in vain to make sense of a predominantly urban and fragmented society]
But then, poems like "The Waste Land" - there isn't (really) a central, heroic figure... (other than, perhaps, the author/poet?)
* cf Shelley + Byron (Romantics) and their solipsism; Modm rejects this?
* Also: rejects the subject of Cartesian dualism
[Collapse narrative and narrator into a collection of disjointed fragments and overlapping voices]
(But this is a crafted collapse - intended and designed for maximum effect; otherwise it would be reduced to Dada, surely? Dada always seems to find meaning out of chaos, rather than putting chaos into meaning, or constructing meaning with chaos. Limitations of the realist novel are taken further - Modm's concern for larger factors such as social or historical change -> "stream of consciousness" SoC.
SoC examples to chase down:
Woolf - 'Kew Gardens', 'Mrs Dalloway'
Joyce - 'Portrait', 'Ulysses'
Porter - 'Flowering Judas'
etc. etc...
Update (after receiving notes on the above): Menno ter Braak was a Dutch Modernist. Admittedly on a different kind of level than the other writers I mentioned, and undoubtedly less well-known, but still an interesting character (who was a polemicist, according to most reports). He wrote for the student magazine Propria Cures in Amsterdam in the 1920s (which is why I read about him to begin with), but his essays later in his life he was pretty ruthless, writing about extraneous authority and false values.
To be honest, what work of his I have read seems to be poorly translated (most of it translated by Dutch students, I think) but he is held in quite high regard by those students. I was just listing most of the big names I could think of that had some connections to the movement, and he came to mind. Likewise with Hilda Doolittle - I've read little of her work, but I remembered that she was leaning towards a kind of feminine modernism from what I have read.
posted by David | 5:05 PM
1 Comments:
Super color scheme, I like it! Keep up the good work. Thanks for sharing this wonderful site with us.
»
Post a Comment
<< Home