The Modern Period

The Modern Period 1914-1945 World War I (1914-1918) World War II (1939-1945) • Modernist writers rejected romanticism and realism in order to create work that demonstrated, in their opinion, a genuine reaction to the turbulent events of the world. o Modernist writers acknowledged the destruction happening right in front of them and wanted somehow to make sense of it. o They experimented with form, syntax, and structure, and challenged conventional ways of life as well as conventional ways of writing. They no longer felt the traditional ways were sufficient to reflect the drastically altered state of the world. • Their efforts to reflect the world resulted in works that are non-liner in plotline and non-traditional in discourse, narration, and overall structure. o Modernist literature focuses on psychological realism, which explores the inner workings of characters’ minds to tell stories, instead of the realism popular during the Victorian Period, which focuses on external descriptions. o Psychological realism includes free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness. • Famous British modernist writers o Poets: William Butler Yeats, T.S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot (American-born; became a British subject in 1927), Dylan Thomas, Seamus Heaney o Novelists: Joseph Conrad, D.H. (David Herbert) Lawrence, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf o Dramatists: Noel Coward and Samuel Beckett Modernism 1914-1945 Psychological Realism Types of Discourse Direct discourse (DD) • Speaker is directly quoted • Quotation marks • It is clear who the speaker is. • Martine thought, “Fran will throw a tantrum if I borrow her toys.” Indirect discourse (ID) • Speaker is identified, but not directly quoted • No quotation marks • It is clear who the speaker is. • Martine thought that Fran would throw a tantrum if she borrowed her toys. Free indirect discourse (FID) • Speaker is not directly quoted or identified • No quotation marks • It is not clear who the speaker is. • Fran would throw a tantrum if she borrowed her toys. • a style of third person narration which combines some of the characteristics of third person with first person. The combination includes shifts that change without signal. It is often unclear as to whether the thoughts of the narrator or the thoughts of a character are being conveyed, allowing a flexible and sometimes ironic interaction of internal and external perspectives. Even though the speaker or thinker is not named, it is often possible to infer his or her identity by examining the statements and using clues of characterization.  • The most famous nineteenth-century example of free indirect discourse is Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) are two famous British modernist examples. • Modernist novels such as the American William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury sometime deliberately create confusion as to the identity of the thinker, and modernist poets such as T.S. Eliot (in The Waste Land) produce instability by shifting between multiple, unidentified speakers. Modernism 1914-1945 “The Uncle Charles Principle” (UCP) and free indirect discourse “The Uncle Charles Principle” is very similar to free indirect discourse except that the narrator’s words are “contaminated” by the characteristics of a character, instead of the work completely shifting to a character’s thoughts. This technique was named after a character in a work by James Joyce. Such characters are so distinctive in the way they act, the words they use, and the terms they use that they are easy to detect. If you know anything about the characters or if there are characters from certain backgrounds or with specific characteristics, it is then easy to identify them when they speak. Here is an example from James Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916): • “Every morning, therefore, Uncle Charles repaired to his outhouse . . .” o Literary critic Hugh Kenner felt that the word “repaired” was not a word Joyce, as the third person narrator, would use. Instead, it is more likely that it would be used by a 19th century middle-aged Dubliner trying to make himself seem smarter than he is—someone like Uncle Charles from the book. This “contamination” of the supposedly objective narrative voice by the subjectivity of the characters collapses the distance between narrator and narrated, leaving no stable position from which to evaluate the characters. Instead, the world begins to take on the subjective qualities of the characters, and the distinction between subject and object breaks down. This technique, like free indirect discourse, breaks down the distance between the narrator and the characters, which creates a deeper intimacy between the reader, characters, and work as a whole. Critics themselves can’t come to a definite agreement about the differences between UCP and FID, so the terms can be used interchangeably. • Example from “The Dead”: “Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.” The narrator uses the word “literally” to flag a figure of speech (“run off her feet”); this error is typical in the speech of the uneducated, such as Lily, which the narrator takes on as his own at this moment and then shifts out of when bourgeois characters arrive. Modernism 1914-1945 Stream of Consciousness Stream-of-consciousness denotes a literary technique which seeks to describe an individual's point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character's thought processes. Stream-of-consciousness writing is strongly associated with the modernist movement. • A few of the most famous works that employ the technique are James Joyce's Ulysses (in particular, Molly Bloom's soliloquy), Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and American Jack Kerouac's On the Road. The technique has also been parodied, notably by David Lodge in the final chapter of The British Museum Is Falling Down. Stream-ofconsciousness writing is characterized by associative leaps that can make the prose difficult to follow. Typically, writers employ very long sentences, which move from one thought to another. Sometimes, writers avoid punctuation altogether in order to prevent artificial breaks in the "stream." • Stream-of-consciousness not only presents reality from the minds of characters, but it presents how they arrive from thought to thought. It presents thoughts as they occur and can give greater insight into how a character arrives at conclusions and makes decisions. This technique, from both topical and structural standpoints, provides authentic representations of psychological reality.