modernist literature dissertation

Modernist Form: On the Problem of Fragmentation

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This dissertation explores formal fragmentation in the modernist novel. It shows that such fragmentation not only represents the historical conditions of modernism, but also posits the potential for new forms of human relation. Each chapter explores test cases of this potential through a close analysis of a novel and argues that in order to understand such literary structure one must look beyond literature to the wider episteme of modernism. Each chapter therefore positions literature alongside a related field, where the affinities are shown to be found not in a shared content but in a shared form. The chapters include explorations of: the problem of language in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying read alongside advertising; the problem of continuity and fragmentation in Ford’s Parade’s End read alongside security and administrative governance; and the problem of perception in Woolf’s The Waves read alongside physics. As the discussion of these pairings proceeds from chapter to chapter, it is shown that the fragmentation of each respective novel reveals an increasingly successful utopian experiment in alternative forms of human relationality. At an additional register, this dissertation also shows that such experimentation requires a redefined role for the critic, for the novels each draw the reader into their texts by not only representing but enacting fragmentation in a way that requires the reader to participate in the utopian experiment. Through the practice of criticism, the critic is therefore implicated in the modernist project, and complicit in all of the political and ethical concerns the project carries.

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Swacha, Michael Gabryel (2018). Modernist Form: On the Problem of Fragmentation . Dissertation, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/18281 .

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Mapping modernism: Connections between cartography and *literature.

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2018 Theses Doctoral

Modernist Unselfing: Religious Experience and British Literature, 1900-1945

Iglesias, Christina

This dissertation examines the role of religious experience in British modernist literature, arguing that a strain of modernist writing drew from different religious traditions to conceptualize and model ways of escaping the confines of the self. In distinctive yet strikingly similar ways, these writers draw from these traditions—orthodox and heterodox, eastern and western—not in an attempt to propound traditional theological ideas but to recapture a religious sensibility that extends beyond dogma or creed: a sensibility that can offer means of getting beyond the self’s limited, solipsistic, and myopic perspective. In response to the perceived decline of religion in late 19th- and early 20th-century British culture; the atomizing effects of industrial modernity; and a growing distrust, informed by contemporary psychology, of the limitations of the self and the self’s perspective, the works this dissertation examines achieve a frame of reference beyond the individual point of view through processes and practices I group under the term “unselfing.” Unselfing emerges in these works as a moral and broadly religious imperative, necessary to achieving authentic communion between people and, paradoxically, to achieving a more authentic relationship to the self; at the same time, these works represent unselfing as an endeavor that is necessarily asymptotic, difficult, and always incomplete. They model unselfing in and through literary form, not only conveying but also embodying processes of unselfing in their formal experimentation. Reading works by D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Dorothy Richardson, and T.S. Eliot alongside contemporary psychological, philosophical, and anthropological writings of the period, I show how a pervasive and urgent desire to use spiritual practices to escape the self shaped the development of British modernist literature. Modernist Unselfing thus challenges prevailing accounts of British modernism, according to which secular artistic innovation absorbed and attained the sacred value formerly located in religion. I argue that, on the contrary, these narrow accounts of secularization and aestheticization have obscured what much of modernist experimentation was actively attempting to capture: a desire, often ethically-minded, to forego self.

• English literature
• Modernism (Literature)
• Religion in literature

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UKnowledge > College of Arts & Sciences > English > Theses & Dissertations > 105

Theses and Dissertations--English

Waking sleep: the uncanny in modernist literary aesthetics.

Delmar R. Reffett Jr. , University of Kentucky Follow

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Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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Doctoral Dissertation

Arts and Sciences

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Dr. Jonathan Allison

With the dawning of the twentieth century, writers and critics found themselves facing a social world undergoing massive change, the forces of capitalist modernity leaving the individual increasingly disaffected and disconnected from her surroundings. This social world, rent as it was by alienation, offered a hostile environment for the sort of coherence that had traditionally been prized by Western aesthetics since the Enlightenment. How could a literary work attain a degree of coherence while reflecting a deeply dissonant modernity? Navigating this contradiction between literature’s inherited values and literature’s possibilities in alienated society can be seen as central to the project of literary modernism that emerges at this time.

The uncanny, the experience of something appearing at once strange yet somehow familiar, offers a means by which these conflicting demands of coherence and relevance can be managed. Forwarding a theory of the uncanny that emphasizes its ability to bridge, if momentarily, the disconnect between a subject and her world while not hiding the reality of this disconnect, my dissertation seeks to place the uncanny at the center of our structural understanding of pivotal modernist texts. By employing the experience of the uncanny at crucial moments in the text, the work is able to achieve a coherence between a character’s psyche and their material surroundings otherwise difficult to come by when describing a social life often devoid of this coherence. Modernism’s innovation is to allot the uncanny the structural role of joining disparate elements of the text together; it is not that modernist works are more uncanny than that which came before, but more reliant on the uncanny on a structural level.

In support of this theory of the uncanny’s role in modernism, I look at the works of two of modernism’s canonical writers: D.H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield. In my chapter on Lawrence, I begin with a reading of his posthumous novella The Virgin and the Gipsy , a work that relies heavily on the uncanny as a structural support, before looking back to one of the earlier Brangwen novels, The Rainbow, to discern how those novels prefigure a deeper embrace of the uncanny as a means of dealing with problems facing the modern novel. In my chapter on Mansfield, I trace the evolution of her short stories from her first published collection, 1911’s In a German Pension , though her later works, Bliss and Other Stories and The Garden Party and Other Stories. In these later collections, there is seen a movement toward a more uncanny short story, a movement which can be understood as an attempt to deal with the problem of depicting alienated characters while still bringing the story to a satisfying conclusion, a problem which bedeviled many of the stories in her early collection. Mansfield is thus seen as, over the course of her career, tending toward the uncanny as a way of reconciling content and form within her stories.

In this dissertation, I see the first step toward a longer, book-length study of the uncanny as central to the development of twentieth century literature, the changing role of the former reflecting changing pressures on the latter as modernism gives way to postmodernism.

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https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2020.049

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Reffett, Delmar R. Jr., "Waking Sleep: The Uncanny in Modernist Literary Aesthetics" (2020). Theses and Dissertations--English . 105. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/105

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Modernist Spacing: Spatial Rhetoric and Poetics in the Modernist Novel

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• September 20, 2019
• Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English and Comparative Literature
• This dissertation, “Modernist Spacing: Spatial Rhetoric and Poetics in the Modernist Novel,” examines how Anglo-American modernist novelists explored and tested the complexity of space and its relationship to aesthetics, culture, and politics. By closely attending to works by Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Djuna Barnes, and Elizabeth Bowen, each chapter demonstrates how modernist texts exploit space’s semantic mobility—the unfixed and provisional meanings conferred upon space that allow it to converge with, break away from, and transform into other spaces. Building on the work of major philosophers and spatial theorists, the project offers critical frameworks for the study of space in modernist literature that can account for space’s heterogeneous meanings, subcategories, and representations while avoiding the common conceptual pitfalls which beset much scholarship on literature and space. The dissertation argues that language and space share a metonymic capacity to link the real and the abstract; in this way, modernist literature is uniquely equipped to reveal space’s power as an instrument for both repression and liberation.
• English literature
• geocriticism
• Modern literature
• women's writing
• American literature
• spatial theory
• https://doi.org/10.17615/be2e-9n26
• Dissertation
• Langbauer, Laurie
• McGowan, John
• Cooper, Pamela
• Reinert, Thomas
• Salvaggio, Ruth
• Doctor of Philosophy
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School

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The Ontology of Modernist Character: Deconstructing the Human in the British Novel, 1899-1934

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Philosophy › Modernist Literary Theory and Criticism

Modernist Literary Theory and Criticism

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on December 13, 2020 • ( 0 )

“Modernist” is a term most often used in literary studies to refer to an experimental, avant-garde style of writing prevalent between World War I and World War II, although it is sometimes applied more generally to the entire range of divergent tendencies within a longer period, from the 1890s to the present. 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. My main focus here, however, is on English-language modernism. As a historically descriptive term, then, “modernism” is misleading not only because of its varying applications (to the historical period or to a highly organized style characteristic of some but not all writers of the period) but also because it is typically more evaluative than descriptive. In its positive sense, “modernism” signals a revolutionary break from established orthodoxies, a celebration of the present, and an experimental investigation into the future. As a negative value, “modernism” has connoted an incoherent, even opportunistic heterodoxy, an avoidance of the discipline of tradition. This critical overtone has sounded periodically since the eighteenth century, from the time that Jonathan Swift, in A Tale of a Tub (1704), lampooned the “modernists” as those who would eschew the study of the ancients through the late-nineteenth-century reform movement in the Catholic church, which was labeled “modernist” and condemned as the “synthesis of all the heresies” in the papal encyclical Pascendi of Pope Pius X (1907). It is interesting to note that in the recent debates over modernism versus postmodernism, the characteristic unorthodoxy of modernism has been displaced onto the postmodern; in a motivated reversal, modernism is characterized as the corrupt, canonized orthodoxy (identified, misleadingly, with the new critcism attributed to T. S. Eliot, among others), with postmodernism as its experimental offshoot.

The project of identifying a modernist criticism and theory is vexed not only by the imprecision and contradictory overtones of the word “modernist” but also by the category “theory.” Certainly many modernist writers wrote criticism: Virginia Woolf published hundreds of essays and reviews; W. B. Yeats’s most important literary criticism has been collected in Essays and Introductions ; Ezra Pound’s voluminous criticism is well known for its informality and directness; Eliot was as important a critic, especially in his later years, as he was a poet. But the most interesting theoretical dimension of modernist writing is not always explicitly presented as either criticism or theory but is instantiated in the writing itself; the theory can be deduced, however controversially, from the practice.

One axiom of modernist theory that was 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).

Hulme’s sounding of the note of classical style as one that is local, limited, intensive, and fresh resonates widely through the work of other modernist writers. Pound’s dictum “Make it New,” Eliot’s objective correlative (“Hamlet,” 1919, Selected Prose 48), James Joyce’s epiphanies, Woolf’s moments of being, and the explosive power of the concrete image celebrated in Imagism are all instances of a “classical” technique, a preference for the local and well-defined over the infinite. In Dubliners, Joyce defined the sickness of modern life as paralysis, a loss of local control, and he set about designing his fiction in a way that requires the reader to understand its individual, local parts before the whole can assume a meaningful shape.

The classical style is characteristic of much, but not all, modernist writing (D. H. Lawrence’s work being one well-known exception). However, the classical theory begins to bifurcate, producing political implications that are diametrically opposed, when the insistence on finitude is applied to the individual. Both groups of classical writers accepted the view that the individual is limited, but one group, which included Woolf, Joyce, and Yeats, began to develop a theory of supplemental “selves” that points toward a celebration of diversity as antidote to individual limitation. In Mrs. Dalloway , Woolf has Clarissa propose a theory that she is many things and many people, “so that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them” (1925, reprint, 1981, 52-53). Yeats worked out an analogous idea in his theory of the anti-self in “Per Arnica Silentia Lunae” (1917), a notion that each individual is implicit in his or her opposite, which eventuated in the complex theory of interlocking personality types outlined in A Vision (1925, rev. ed., 1937). In Ulysses (1922), Joyce also pursues the idea that the self is luxuriously heterogeneous, a heterogeneity brought to the surface by multiple encounters with difference. He makes his hero an apostate Jew who is defined on either extreme by a “spoiled priest” and an adulterous woman, and in these slippages between limited individuals he celebrates such limits, such insufficiencies, as conditions of communal possibility. As Stephen Dedalus explains in the library, the varied world represents the potential scope of a disunited selfdom: “Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves” ( Ulysses , 1922, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, 1984, chap. 9,11.1044-46).

The same recognition of the limitation of the individual produced in other modernist writers an insistence on strict, authoritarian regulation of the individual, the germ of fascist tendencies for which the movement became notorious. Hulme again articulates the premises of this position: “Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him” (116). He speaks of liberty and revolution as essentially negative things, citing the French Revolution as evidence that when you remove the restraints on individuals, what emerges is their destructiveness and greed. Like Eliot, Hulme appreciated religion for its power to control human depravity through traditional order.

The problem with controlling “human depravity” through institutional restrictions is that the controlling “order” tends to legislate sameness, so that some orders of existence are seen as preferable to—less depraved than—others. And this is where the seams of “classical” modernist theory split: not over the limited nature of humanity, but over the question of the value of difference. The split was a jagged one; some writers, such as Pound, could cultivate difference in their writing and denounce it in society (as he did in his infamous radio broadcasts of the 1930s). The different premium accorded to ethnic, social, religious, and sexual differences by writers who agreed on the limited nature of the individual, however, explains how the offensive tirades of Wyndham Lewis and the brilliant feminism of Woolf, the anti-Semitic propaganda of Pound and the Jewish hero of Joyce’s Ulysses could stem from the same “classical” root.

Virginia Woolf

In a period that was to culminate in World War II, racism was an inevitably controversial issue. The related cause of feminism was also hotly debated during the period, since women had only been granted suffrage after World War I (1920 in the United States, 1928 in Great Britain). Woolf, in A Room of One’s Own , details clearly and unpolemically the historical and material restrictions on women that prevented them from full participation in artistic and professional life. Her best illustration of the greater circumstantial constraints on women is her invention of a wonderfully gifted sister for Shakespeare named Judith, his counterpart in everything but freedom and opportunity. Woolf outlines what would have happened to this young girl if she had wanted to act in London, as her brother did; she sketches in the ridicule to which she would have been subjected, the ease with which more experienced men could have taken advantage of her, and the passion with which, upon finding herself with child, she would have killed herself: “Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?” (1929, reprint, 1981, 48). Woolf’s main argument is that women need space—a room of their own—and economic freedom (a fixed income) for their hitherto pinched genius to flourish.

Finally, no discussion of modernist criticism and theory is complete without an account of the collapse of plot and its replacement by intertextual allusion and the “stream of consciousness.” In a much-cited review of Joyce’s Ulysses called “ Ulysses , Order and Myth” (1923) Eliot argued that developments in ethnology and psychology, and Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough , had made it possible to replace the narrative method with what he called the “mythical method,” which was first adumbrated by Yeats. The mythical method works not through narrative but through allusion to different mythical narratives that, when fleshed out and juxtaposed, illuminate both the text in which they appear and each other in surprising and often revisionary ways. For example, Yeats’s early poetry worked to contextualize his hopeless love for Maud Gonne within the competing and mutually reinforcing contexts of Greek myth (Helen of Troy) and Celtic myth (Deirdre of the Sorrows; the magic of the Sidhe). In Ulysses , the main mythic parallels are the Odyssey and Hamlet , although individual episodes are further complicated by allusions to other intersecting narratives, historical, fictional, or mythic. Eliot’s The Waste Land provides the densest illustration of the mythical method, where the range of allusion includes a variety of Christian, Greek, occult, Scandinavian, Judaic, and Buddhist references, as well as allusions to music, drama, literature, and history.

Eliot chose to highlight myth as the key to modernist stylistics, but actually myth was just one category of narrative accessed through allusion; one might say that all kinds of narratives were situated behind the page, identifiable only through “tags” in the text, and that the interplay between these narratives produces a submerged commentary on it that imitates the pressure of the cultural unconscious (in narrativized form) on any individual performance. The stream-of-consciousness technique is yet another way of drawing the reader’s attention from conscious, deliberate, intentionalized discourse to the pressure of the unsaid on the said, of the repressed on the expressed. The apparent randomness of associative thought prompts the reader to question the submerged “logic” of connection, to listen for the unconscious poetry of repressed desire. This attention to the unknown as the shadow of the known is reversed in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake , in which it is the known that is obscured by the highly organized distortions of language and history as processed by the unconscious mind and the “mudmound” of the past. It is no surprise, in light of this sensitivity to the muted voice of the unconscious in the literature of the period, that another great modernist theorist was Sigmund Freud .

In fact, the opposing political tendencies of modernist writers bear a significant relationship to their different attitudes toward the unconscious. Bounded by the eruption of two world wars, the modernist period can be read as a historical enactment of the tension between Friedrich Nietzsche ‘s Apollonian and Dionysian forces. The Dionysian power of the unconscious was making itself felt, and the writers who sought to contain or deny it through the Apollonian power of civic or religious authority were, like Pentheus in the Bacchae , torn apart. Others sought to express the creative potential of the unconscious, its capacity to unify without homogenization, to proliferate via division, and it is the writing of this group that is most animated by the zest of manifold contradictions. As Yeats wrote near the end of his career in the voice of a crazed old woman,

‘Fair and foul are near of kin, And fair needs foul,’ I cried. ‘My friends are gone, but that’s a truth Nor grave nor bed denied, Learned in bodily lowliness And in the heart’s pride.

‘A woman can be proud and stiff When on Love intent; But love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement; For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent.’

(“Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,” Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition , ed. Richard J. Finneran, 1983, rev. ed., 1989, 259-60)

Bibliography T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (1923, reprinted in Selected Prose of T S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode, 1975);T. E. Hulme, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art (ed. Herbert Read, 1924, 2d ed., 1936); Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (1927); Lawrence I. Lipking and A. Walton Litz, eds., Modern Literary Criticism, 1900-1970 (1972); Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929, reprint, 1981); W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (1961), Mythologies (1959). Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds., Modernism: 1890-1930 (1976); Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (1971); Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (1957); Michael H. Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908-1922 (1984); Sanford Schwartz, The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth-Century Thought (1985); Vincent Sherry, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (1993). Source: Groden, Michael, and Martin Kreiswirth. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

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Harty, John Francis. "Oscillation in literary modernism." Frankfurt, M. Berlin Bern Bruxelles New York, NY Oxford Wien Lang, 2007. http://d-nb.info/994987064/04.

Hardwick, Joseph Brian. "Romans et theses : french "existentialist" fiction, literary history and literary modernism /." St. Lucia, Qld, 2002. http://www.library.uq.edu.au/pdfserve.php?image=thesisabs/absthe16410.pdf.

Potter, Rachel. "Modernism and democracy : literary cuture 1900-1930 /." Oxford : Oxford university press, 2006. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb40153067p.

Dobbin, Beci May. "The business of living in British literary modernism." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.608396.

Heaney, J. C. "Schopenhauer and the unconscious origins of literary modernism." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.676514.

Cardoso, Sebastião Marques. "De personagens e anti-herois : um estudo sobre a trilogia do exilio, de Oswald de Andrade." [s.n.], 2007. http://repositorio.unicamp.br/jspui/handle/REPOSIP/270090.

Al-Shamaa, Khaldoun. "Modernism and after : modern Arabic literary theory from literary criticism to cultural critique." Thesis, SOAS, University of London, 2007. http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/28817/.

McGinn, Emily. "The Science of Sound: Recording Technology and the Literary Vanguard." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/18389.

Davis, David A. (David Alexander) 1975 Hobson Fred C. "World War I, literary modernism, and the U.S. South." Chapel Hill, N.C. : University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2006. http://dc.lib.unc.edu/u?/etd,437.

Burley, Alice. "Literary diffusionism in the age of modernism, 1911-1937." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610921.

Sheehan, Paul Gordon. "Nothing human : narrative and human orientations in literary modernism." Thesis, Birkbeck (University of London), 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.325346.

Anderson, Kathryn. "Body language : ballet as form in literary modernism, 1915-1935." Thesis, University of East Anglia, 2014. https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/59609/.

Phillips, George Micajah. "SEEING SUBJECTS: RECOGNITION, IDENTITY, AND VISUAL CULTURES IN LITERARY MODERNISM." UKnowledge, 2011. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/gradschool_diss/221.

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Bailey, Charles Russell. "A ruptured vision the symbiotic relationship between literary modernism and cinema /." Connect to this title online, 2006. http://etd.lib.clemson.edu/documents/1175185054/.

Monaco, Beatrice. "Machinic modernism: the Deleuzian literary machines of Woolf, Lawrence and Joyce." Thesis, Birkbeck (University of London), 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.491002.

O'Dea, Dathalinn Mary. "The Afterlives of the Irish Literary Revival." Thesis, Boston College, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:104356.

Jaillant, Lise M. "Modernism, middlebrow and the literary canon in the modern library series, 1917-1955." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/44577.

Shail, Andrew. "A picture feverishly turned : cinema and literary modernism in the UK, 1911-1928." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2004. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.418489.

Lupold, Eva Marie. "Literary Laboratories: A Cautious Celebration of the Child-Cyborg from Romanticism to Modernism." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1339976082.

Kosiba, Sara A. "A Successful Revolt?: The Redefinition of Midwestern Literary Culture in the 1920s and 1930s." [Kent, Ohio] : Kent State University, 2007. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=kent1183804975.

Kuhn, Andrew Alan. "Networking Institutions of Literary Modernism: Technologies of Writing in Yeats, Joyce, Gissing, and Woolf." Thesis, Boston College, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:107980.

Hannah, Matthew. "Networks of Modernism: Toward a Theory of Cultural Production." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/19663.

Magerski, Christine 1969. "The constitution of the literary field in Germany after 1871 : Berlin modernism, literary criticism and the beginnings of the sociology of literature." Monash University, German Studies, 2002. http://arrow.monash.edu.au/hdl/1959.1/8724.

Johnson, Ryan Stasey. "Vagueness: Identity and Understanding Across Literatures East and West." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/20473.

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Banerjee, Rita. "The New Voyager: Theory and Practice of South Asian Literary Modernisms." Thesis, Harvard University, 2013. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:11044.

Powell, Jason A. "A Humble Protest: A Literary Generation's Quest for the Heroic Self, 1917 - 1930." The Ohio State University, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1218470232.

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Donofrio, Nicholas Easley. "The Vanishing Freelancer: A Literary History of the Postwar Culture Industries." Thesis, Harvard University, 2014. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:11532.

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Cheng, Maorong. "Literary modernity : Studies in Lu Xun and Shen Congwen." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0018/NQ46330.pdf.

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Hyde, Marissa Cathryn. "Personage and Post-Adolescence in F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise." Cleveland State University / OhioLINK, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1611535243379139.

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Coffee & Classics

Literary Modernism and Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs. Dalloway’

Capitalism, tradition and the modernist revolution.

“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” — Virginia Woolf

Literary movements born from the Age of Enlightenment dealt with the rational, observable world in their art.

Much of the literature that emerged during the time accorded with the principles of Science. Literature of the Modernist movement, however, did not follow this as stringently. Instead, it strived more to contend with the rebuttal of the unseen and the abstract. Its utopian philosophy argued that the seen is always, in some shape or form, fashioned by the unseen.

Experimentation was one of the chief stimuli guiding Modernist literature. In Modernism and Close Reading (2020), David James explains how Modernist literature, exhausted of conformity and the out-dated, desired to incite a literary revolution through the introduction of innovative methods of writing.

Literary modernism, by its very nature, encompasses a diverse range of artistic and cultural traditions.

Critic Antoine Compagnon discusses the modernist tradition in his book, The Five Paradoxes of Modernity (1990), characterising it as one “made up wholly of unresolved contradictions”. These contradictions, Compagnon argues, depict modernism’s struggle against itself, the traditions of the past and the present.

Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), explores the themes incited by Modernism. It is, in essence, a search to disclose, depict and understand the elusive aspects of life.

The novel begins by casting the reader into the ongoing thought-process of Mrs. Dalloway, rather than establishing a formal beginning to which we might be acquainted with whom she might be or what she might be doing.

The novel thus challenges the traditional Victorian novel. Victorian novels were written in a way which often sought to introduce the protagonist before any events. Modernist writers, however, argued that such a structure was not representative of how real life played out.

Like any real-life individual, Mrs. Dalloway does not exist in a vacuum. So it follows that she does not spontaneously begin her existence at the commencement of the novel. She has a pre-existence and, much like a radio, we are merely tuning into the thoughts of this one, specific individual whose life goes on — and has always gone on — irrespective of whether or not we have been aware of her.

Time is accordingly being handled as a process of constant fluidity. This accentuates the complexity of time and brings one to wonder whether it is truly linear at all. Mrs. Dalloway does not adhere to the quantitative clock time of a Capitalist society, but operates by her own internal, emotional one, and so submits to the authority of nature.

Historian Lewis Mumford explains how the shift from a qualitative classification of time to a quantitative one arose chiefly during the Industrial Revolution when changes in labour necessitated the use of a standardised, universal notion of time. Before this, time-keeping had always been reliant upon some external, nature-led measure, such as water or sand.

To Mumford, the mechanical clock was a revolutionary invention that single-handedly managed to “disassociate time from human events” within the political and social arenas.

Naturally, its effects were unprecedented; it shifted the authority from nature to Man.

In the novel, Big Ben may be viewed as the quintessential symbol of mechanical clock time. We are not informed of the exact time that Big Ben has marked so that we might be orientated in time; only that it “strikes . . . the hour” (p. 4). Clock or event time is rarely ever referred to during the course of the text, to the extent that even the authority of one of the chief symbols of clock time i.e. Big Ben, is subjugated.

Mrs. Dalloway participates in an active struggle against the dominating effect of historical time. What is further being subjugated is language itself, where it does not follow a linear trajectory nor describe one. The fragmented, dislocated style in which it is written is quite typical of a Modernist novel.

The character’s individual senses of time are being looked to as the source of authority to orient one in time, not the external clocks.

Woolf’s main concern was that traditional writers were not paying much attention to the true nature of life itself, which she regarded as an “incessant shower of innumerable atoms”.

Mrs. Dalloway aims to address this issue through the continuous construction and deconstruction of complex notions like time and the human spirit. Human beings, Woolf contends, are much more than the sum of their external environments and cannot merely be restricted to the pages of a book.

It might be argued that Mrs. Dalloway does not endeavour at the complete dismissal of traditional writing; like building a new civilisation, it simply develops upon what can be utilised and leaves what cannot. For one, there is still much use of standardised paragraphing and an omniscient narrator can be found at times.

T. S. Eliot argues for the need for the past and present to work together, rather than negate each other. Just as Mrs. Dalloway does not exist within a vacuum, nor does any work of art. Novels like Mrs. Dalloway exist within a broad continuum that continues to evolve over time — a literary conversation that continues throughout history. Eliot argues that criticism is “necessary for any culture . . . it is as inevitable as breathing” and renovations serve, not to denounce traditions, but to rejuvenate them.

For T. S. Eliot, there can be no such thing as an original piece of art.

Mrs. Dalloway experiments with both new and old styles of writing in order to generate a fresh angle of reading literature. It is an active process of working alongside the past.

Ultimately, Mrs. Dalloway participates in an active struggle with the traditions of the past in an effort to discover an innovative way to converse with it. It operates on its own spectrum, introducing a new design to literature.

Mrs. Dalloway argues that life is indefinable because the human spirit is indefinable. The abstract and concrete are continuously being pitted against each other throughout the text in an effort to bring awareness to the nature of life.

In the era of modernity, Mrs. Dalloway subverts all expectations of the traditional reader.

Works Cited

Bradbury, Nancy Mason, and Carolyn P. Collette, ‘Changing Times: The Mechanical Clock In Late Medieval Literature’, The Chaucer Review 43, 4 (2009), 351–75.

Compagnon, Antoine, The Five Paradoxes of Modernity, (U nited States: Columbia University Press, 1994).

Eliot, T. S., ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Perspecta 19 (1982), 36–42.

James, David, Modernism and Close Reading , (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

Woolf, Virginia, Mrs. Dalloway , (London: Penguin Classics, 2000).

Woolf, Virginia, and Andrew McNeillie, The Essays of Virginia Woolf , (London: Hogarth, 1986).

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