Chapter VIII Modernist English Literature维多利亚时期英国文学 (Word版)

Chapter Eight English Modernist Literature

I.Historical Background

1.Social and Political Background: the influences of the two world wars

(1)World War I weakened the British Empire and World War II marked the last stage

of the disintegration of the British Empire.

(2)The two world wars not only brought economic dislocation but also spiritual

disillusionment to the English people, inspiring cynical post-war works.

(3)Development in human rights: The Education Act in 1870 (the encouragement of

elementary education compulsory and universal resulting in the steadily growing rate of literacy among the masses) and the Married Women’s Property Act in 1882 (first wave of feminist movement; higher education and suffrage for women)

2.Cultural Background:

(1)Spiritual crisis: Owing to the two wars, skepticism and distrust spread in the

modern Western civilization, leading to prevalent despair and despondency.

(2)Ideologically: many kinds of pessimism and determinism (naturalism & fatalism);

a.In natural science: the development of Darwin’s theory of evolution (the

survival of the fittest; natural selection in the world); Einstein’s theory of

relativity

b.In social science: Karl Marx’s scientific socialism(the fundamental

contradictions within the capitalist system—and that the workers were

anything but free); Nietszche’s theory of irrationalism; Sartre’s theory of

existentialism; Schopenhauer’s theory of Will; Bergson’s irrational

philosophy; Sigmund Freud’s analytical psychology (the unconscious theory) (resulting in the emphasis on individual subjective experience, the rejection

and revolt against rationalism, materialism and positivism, the negation of the

"practical" philosophical ideas and the Realist political and aesthetic

ideology)

(3)Culturally: questioning of and challenge to the previous optimism, the bourgeois

conservative values, the axioms of the Victorian Age, the progress of civilization;

the reflections on a new definition of the meaning of existence;

(4)Artistically: Changes that resulted from social, political, and economic forces and

occurred across a wide range of scientific and cultural pursuits (industrialization and urbanization) call for the rejection of traditional aesthetic forms to serve the presentation of the new realm of subject matter followed by innovations in artistic form (impressionism in art, symbolism in literature as two schools of avant-garde appearing in the middle of the 19th century, encouraged by aestheticism)

II.Modernism: An Overview

a.Modernist literature is a predominantly European movement beginning in the

early 20th century that was characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional aesthetic forms.

b.Generally speaking, modernism is the result of the spiritual crises that took place

in the capitalist world around the two world wars, especially after the First World

War. It is a rebellion against the corrupted bourgeois values in morality, religion, culture and art.

c.Initiated by French symbolism, all kinds of literary trends of modernism appeare

d. III.C haracteristics of modernist literature:

1.Generally speaking, modernist literature is marked by a strong and intentional

break with tradition, hence a rejection of realistic literary conventions.

2.Thematic features: The major themes of the modernist literature are the distorted,

alienated and ill relationships between man and nature, man and society, man and man, and man and himself. (sense of disillusionment; alienation)

3.Formal / Stylistic features: Technical innovations and new narrative modes

(experimentalism) are made by modernist writers (Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make it new!").

a.The disruption of linearity in plot development, characterization and even in

thematic implications.

https://www.360docs.net/doc/1e18878173.html,e of symbolism: both universal and personalized symbols

c.Psychoanalysis: the techniques of stream-of-consciousness; the exploration of the

subconscious;

IV.Modernist Poetry

The 20th century has witnessed a great achievement in English poetry. Pound, Y eats and Eliot are the key poets who brought modernism into English poetry.

1.T. S. Eliot (1888 –1965)

(1)The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock(1915), the poem that made his name, is

regarded as a masterpiece of the modernist movement. Some of Eliot’s best-known poems includes Gerontion(1920), The Waste Land(1922), The Hollow Men (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930), and Four Quartets (1945).

(2)He is also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935).

(3)He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.

(4)The Waste Land (1922), which voiced the mood of a whole generation, is

considered to be a model poem and a manifesto of modernism in theme and technique. The Waste Land depicts the social and personal decay and despair of post-World War I Western culture. Features of the poem include: the use of dramatic monologue; hundreds of allusions and quotations from other texts (classic and obscure; "high-brow" and "low-brow"); seemingly disjointed structure (Eliot jumps from one voice or image to another without clearly delineating these shifts for the reader); phrases from multiple foreign languages. 2.William Butler Yeats (1865-1939):

(1)Irish poet and playwright, founder of the Abbey Theatre, driving force of the Irish

literary revival and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments; awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 as the first Irishman so honoured; generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel

Prize.

(2)Works:

a. poetic works: ―The Second Coming‖; "Sailing to Byzantium"; In the Seven Woods (1903); The Green Helmet and Other Poems(1910); ―Michael Robartes and the Dancer‖ (1912); ―The Wild Swans at Coole‖ (1919); ―The Tower‖ (1928); ―The W inding Stair‖ (1933);

b. dramatic works: The Countess Cathleen (1892), The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894) and The King’s Threshold (1904) are among his best known.

(3)Features and contributions:

a. a celebrated and accomplished symbolist poet,

b. A recurring theme is the polarity between extremes such as the physical and the

spiritual, the real and the imagined. using an elaborate system of symbols in his poems

c.some of his symbols are simple, whereas others are difficult to understand

d.his poetry is full of stanzas and lines of great beauty.

V.Modernist Fiction: Stream-of-consciousness novel and psychological fiction 1.James Joyce (1882-1941): An Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the

most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. (1)Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of

Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominently the stream of consciousness technique he perfected. Other major works are the short-story collection Dubliners(1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939).

(2)Joyce's career displays a consistent development. In each of his four major works

there is an increase in the profundity of his vision and the complexity of his literary technique, particularly his experiments with language.

a. Dubliners is a linked collection of 15 short stories treating the sometimes squalid, sometimes sentimental lives of various Dublin residents. The stories portray a city in moral and political paralysis, an insight that the reader is intended to achieve through a succession of revelatory moments, which Joyce called epiphanies.

b. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is an autobiographical account of the adolescence and youth of Stephen Dedalus, who comes to realize that before he can be a true artist he must rid himself of the stultifying effects of the religion, politics, and essential bigotry of Ireland.

c. Ulysses recreates the events of one day in Dublin-June 16, 1904; widely known as "Bloomsday". The fundamental design of Ulysses is based on Homer's Odyssey; each chapter in the novel parallels one in the epic and is also associated with an hour of the day, color, symbol, and part of the body. Attempting to recreate the total life of his characters --- the surface life and the inner life --- Joyce mingles realistic descriptions with verbal representations of his characters' most intimate and random thoughts, using techniques of interior narration.

Ulysses’s stream-of-consciousness technique, careful structuring, and experimental prose --- full of puns, parodies, and allusions, as well as its rich

characterizations and broad humor, made the book a highly regarded novel.

Interspersed throughout the work are historical, literary, religious, and geographical allusions, evocative patterns of words, word games, and many-sided puns. Despite its complexities, Ulysses is an extraordinarily satisfying book, a celebration of life unparalleled in its humor, characterization, and tragic irony. d.Joyce's last work, Finnegans Wake, presents the dark counterpart of "Bloomsday"

of Ulysses.Framed by the dream-induced experiences of a Dublin publican, the novel recapitulates the cycles of Irish history, and in its multiple allusions almost reveals a universal consciousness. In order to present this new reality Joyce manipulated and distorted language that pushed the work to the furthest limits of comprehensibility. Because of its complexity Finnegans Wake is perhaps more talked about than read, and despite the publication of the manuscripts and drafts of the novel in 1978, probably will never be completely understood.

(3)Features: method of stream of consciousness, literary allusions and free dream

associations

(4)Stream-of-consciousness novel: The term "stream-of-consciousness" was coined

by William James in Principles of Psychology(1890) and a literary approach to the presentation of continuous flow of sense as mental and spiritual experience: sensations, memories, imaginations, conceptions, intuitions, feelings and the process of association. Dorothy Richardson, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner are usually regarded as the most prominent stream-of-consciousness novelists.

2. Virginia W oolf (1882-1941): one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the

twentieth century; a member of the Bloomsbury Group;

(1) Works: The Voyage Out (1915); Night and Day (1919);Jacob's Room (1922); Mrs Dalloway (1925);To the Lighthouse (1927);Orlando (1928); The Waves (1931);The Years (1937); Between the Acts (1941); A Room of One's Own (1929) --- essay

(2) Features of Woolf’s works

a. Intense lyricism combined with stylistic virtuosity to create a world overabundant with auditory and visual impressions. Woolf is arguably the major lyrical novelist in the English language. Her novels are highly experimental: a narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace, is refracted in the characters' receptive consciousness.

b. The intensity of Virginia Woolf's poetic vision elevates the ordinary, sometimes banal settings.

c. Considered one of the greatest innovators in the English language, Virginia Woolf experimented with stream-of-consciousness and the underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of characters.

d. Woolf shows a lot of feminist ideas in her works.

3. D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930): an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter; valued as a visionary thinker and significant representative of modernism in English literature; "The greatest imaginative

novelist of our generation" (E. M. Forster)

(1) Works:

●The White Peacock (1911)

●Sons and Lovers (1913)

●The Rainbow (1915)

●Women in Love (1920)

●Aaron's Rod (1922)

●Kangaroo (1923)

●The Plumed Serpent (1926)

●Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

(2)Features

a.Themes: Lawrence explores the possibilities for life and living within an

industrial setting. In particular Lawrence is concerned with the nature of relationships that can be had within such settings. Though often classed as a realist, Lawrence's use of his characters can be better understood with reference to his philosophy. His depiction of sexual activity, though shocking at the time, has its roots in this highly personal way of thinking and being. His interest in physical intimacy has its roots in a desire to restore our emphasis on the body, and re-balance it with what he perceived to be western civilisation's slow process of over-emphasis on the mind.

b.Style: All of Lawrence's novels are written in a lyrical, sensuous, often

rhapsodic prose style. He had an extraordinary ability to convey a sense of specific time and place, and his writings often reflected his complex personality.

VI. English Literature after W orld W ar II:

Against the social background of the Cold War in 1960s, and the cultural background of the Existentialist philosophy, there was a widespread sense of pessimism in English literature with a lot of unreliability of human nature, a return to the tragic sense of life. Thus a message of anguish, forlornness and terror of the contemporary historical situation; they conveyed the sense of emptiness and cruelty of existence, the loss of significance in experience, the inner vacancy of self.

(1)The Angry Young Man:

During the 1950s there appeared a group of young writers who were fiercely critical of the established order. The term ―Angry Young Man‖was taken from John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger(1965). The writers of this group include Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim, 1954), Alan Sillitoe (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1958). They wrote about the ugliness and sordidness of life and exposed the hypocrisy of the genteel class. Their works were written in ordinary, sometimes dirty language. The scenes were usually set in the dark rooms or kitchens of industrial cities instead of the drawing rooms. The ―heroes‖were men with high ideals. They were bitter defeated men in society. These works filled the need for a working-class perspective in English literature.

(2) Theatre of the Absurd: a designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction,

notably the plays of John Osborne, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, David Storey, and Arnold Wesker. The Theatre of the Absurd is commonly associated with Existentialism. Their work expressed the belief that, in a godless universe, human existence has no meaning or purpose and therefore all communication breaks down. Logical construction and argument gives way to irrational and illogical speech and to its ultimate conclusion, silence. As an experimental form of theatre, Theatre of the Absurd employs techniques borrowed from earlier innovators.

Playwrights commonly associated with the Theatre of the Absurd include Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Edward Albee etc. Samuel Beckett is considered the greatest exponent of the theater of the absurd whose primary focus was on the failure of man to overcome "absurdity". His uncompromisingly bleak, difficult plays (and novels) depict the lonely, alienated human condition with compassion and humor.

(3) Doris Lessing (1919-) is an English writer who possesses an intense sense of

social responsibility and a warm sympathy for the oppressed. Widely regarded as

a major writer of the mid-20th cent and an influential feminist writer, Lessing

writes on a wide variety of themes and her work is distinguished for its energy, intelligence and concern with the lives of women --- their psychology, sexuality, politics, work, relationship to men and to their children, their change of vision as they age, and their efforts to resist society's pressures toward marginalization and acculturation. Either of realism and fantasy dominates in some novels and both mingle in others. Her fiction includes a series of five novels collectively entitled The Children of Violence. Her most influential work, The Golden Notebook (1962), is now considered a classic of feminist fiction.

(4) Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) is a writer who is interested not so much in political or

social issues as in moral and philosophical problems and especially in the problem of man's identity in today's world. The problem of identity is closely linked with existentialism which is skeptical about understanding the essential nature of any person or thing. Based on it, the writer's task is to deal with concrete facts of experience rather than theorize about the real nature of things.

2. Postmodernism: Any of several artistic movements since about the 1960s that have challenged the philosophy and practices of modern arts or literature. In literature this has amounted to a reaction against an ordered view of the world and therefore against fixed ideas about the form and meaning of texts. Postmodern writing and art emphasize devices such as pastiche and parody and the stylized technique of the antinovel and magic realism. Postmodernism has also led to a proliferation of critical theories, most notably deconstruction and its offshoots, and the breaking down of the distinction between "high" and "low" culture.

Postmodern literature is used to describe certain characteristics of post–World War II literature (relying heavily, for example, on fragmentation, paradox, questionable narrators, etc.) and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature.