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Modernism

By Luips16
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    Stream of consciousness fiction: James Joyce and Virginia Woolf

    James Joyce and Virginia Woolf are the two greatest practitioners of stream of consciousness fiction. Their novels make use of many techniques, but the most important are:
    • Direct interior monologue: Direct presentation of a character’s stream of consciousness without the presence of a guide narrator. (Joyce’s Ulysses).
    • Indirect interior monologue: Indirect presentation of a character’s thoughts filtered through the voice of an anonymous third-person narrator. (Woolf’s To the light house).

  • Relevance: William James & idea of consciousness

    Relevance: William James & idea of consciousness
    • William James’s notion of ‘stream of consciousness‘ deeply influenced the narrative method of Modernist writers like Joyce or Woof.
    • Consciousness intend the entire range of an individual’s mental activity including pre-speech levels of consciousness and awareness
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    Modernism in Europe

    • Modernism started sometime after 1910, it flourished in 1920s and 1930. It involved all forms of art.
      • There was a desire to make a clean break with the traditions which came before them, through experimentation with form and style.

  • Features of Modernism

    Features of Modernism
    • Traditional forms of narration --> REJECTED in favour of a direct attempt to represent the unconscious.
      • Modernist work --> It favours subjective perceptions of reality.
      • The idea of one truth of event is often rejected.

  • Modernism and the novel: Style

    Modernism and the novel: Style
    • Omniscient narrator as a moral and spiritual guide disappeared and was replaces by a direct or indirect presentation of character’s thoughts, feelings and memories.
    • No longer followed a linear plot or chronological sequence of events  gave way (dar paso) to the idea of duration (Virginia Woolf called moments of being).A novel can be set in one day, while the analysis of a single moment can tell us more about a character than a traditional narrative life-story.

  • Modernism and the novel. Context

    Modernism and the novel. Context
    World War I (1914-1918): It was a fundamental break with the past, a break between the old world and the new. Lost of faith in society and institutions.
    The Victorian moral universe (idea of how society should be) was replaced by an ambiguous moral/ sense of emptiness which signalled an absence of values.