Talking with Jon the other day, I realised how long it's been since I did anything truly academic and how little I recalled clearly from my years of study. Since, despite my distaste for the academic community (their arrogance, their blindness and the fact that, in the end, it's a job and they have to offer what's popular more than what's actually right and true, however they may, for the most part, delight in stomping down those who aren't bound by the need to gain tenure and actually still love what they do), I do love to study written art (or any art) almost as much as I love the writing itself. So, finding myself incapable of aptly describing what Modernism is in the course of conversation, I present here a short extract from the presentation I gave as part of my six month review of my PhD progress.
Consider this fair warning: most of you will be bored to tears. (Enjoy, my Dragon? Despite its dryness. ;p)
In ‘Marxism and Modernism’, Eugene Lunn writes of four major unifying aspects of the various modernist movements. The first of these is “aesthetic self-consciousness or self-reflexiveness”. This particularly appears in two forms: the tendency of modernist writers to draw attention to the reality of the text as a ‘construction or artifice’ and in a heightened awareness of the nature of poetic language and a tendency towards viewing words as objects in their own right, as well as towards experimentation with form. The former is indicated either through direct treatment of the role of the artist (for example, in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) or through the author referring to himself within the text (for example, Woolf’s Orlando). The latter is especially shown in Pound’s “A retrospect”, in which he states that an aspiring poet should “fill his mind with the finest cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign language, so that the meaning of the words may be less likely to divert his attention from the movement” and exhorts such an individual to “use no superfluous word.”
The second aspect of modernism, as defined by Lunn, is “simultaneity”. Lunn talks of a weakening of narrative structure, stating that, “Instead of narrating outer sequential or additive time, modern novelists explore the simultaneity of experience in a moment of psychological time, in which are concentrated past, present and future.” This applies to a sense of historical discontinuity, or a lack of linear narrative, in modernist texts. Again, the work of Joyce and Woolf especially exhibit these tendencies within modernism, as both Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Waves reject linear narrative in favour of an aesthetic ordering of events.
Lunn’s third and fourth aspects of modernism are what he terms “paradox, ambiguity, and uncertainty,” and “the demise of the integrated individual subject or personality.” The first of these deals with modernist reactions to the decline of religious, scientific and philosophical certainties, with the advent of a fragmented world. Lunn argues that modernists explore the ‘paradoxically many-sidedness of the world’, depicting a fragmented and unnatural world that is both liberating and estranging, something that can be especially seen in the poetry of Eliot and Yeats. Lunn states that this exploration is frequently done through the use of a limited and fallible narrator, thus exploring also the latter point: the subjective nature of individual experience that arises with the advent of psychoanalytic theory. Both Woolf’s The Waves and Eliot’s 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', for example, focus on the subjective experience and view point of the individual, in the case of Woolf, focusing on the multiple consciousnesses that intersect within the novel. In modernist texts, however, art is frequently viewed as ordering, as a remedy for the uncertainty and the fragmented nature of the modern world. Modernist writers frequently attempt to inject order into their texts through the use of referentiality and symbol, thus using art as a potentially restorative force. Thus while the work itself depicts disorder, their writing possesses an underlying order created through patterns of symbols and allusions. This is most clear in the poetry of Eliot and Pound, especially 'The Wasteland' and Pound’s 'Cantos'.
Central to the imagist movement is a belief in the necessity of the knowledge and use of literary tradition and canonised texts, of entering into a dialogue with past texts. In his essay ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’, Pound writes of ‘…the power of tradition, of centuries of race consciousness, of agreement, of association…,’ an idea that is reiterated by Eliot in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent'. Eliot writes of the dissolution of the writer’s ego into canonised authors, stating ‘…if we approach a poet without…prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most interesting parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors assert their immortality most vigorously.’ Similarly, Yeats writes, in 'A General Introduction to My Work', that ‘all that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in salt… I must choose a traditional stanza, even what I alter must see traditional…. Talk to me of originality and I shall turn on you with rage. I am a crowd, I am a lonely man, I am nothing. Ancient salt is the best packing.’ Thus, intensive knowledge of, reliance upon and constant reference to canonised texts is important to the imagist movement. This is similarly clear in their work, especially that of Eliot (for example, 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' and 'The Wasteland').
Because I have an unusual urge to toot my own horn (*grins*), after giving my presentation Paul (then acting head of research) told me it was the best presentation he'd heard all day and Anne, my supervisor, kissed me on the cheek. It gave me happy glows.
Tomorrow: defining postmodernism. Or rather... not.
Consider this fair warning: most of you will be bored to tears. (Enjoy, my Dragon? Despite its dryness. ;p)
~
In ‘Marxism and Modernism’, Eugene Lunn writes of four major unifying aspects of the various modernist movements. The first of these is “aesthetic self-consciousness or self-reflexiveness”. This particularly appears in two forms: the tendency of modernist writers to draw attention to the reality of the text as a ‘construction or artifice’ and in a heightened awareness of the nature of poetic language and a tendency towards viewing words as objects in their own right, as well as towards experimentation with form. The former is indicated either through direct treatment of the role of the artist (for example, in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) or through the author referring to himself within the text (for example, Woolf’s Orlando). The latter is especially shown in Pound’s “A retrospect”, in which he states that an aspiring poet should “fill his mind with the finest cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign language, so that the meaning of the words may be less likely to divert his attention from the movement” and exhorts such an individual to “use no superfluous word.”
The second aspect of modernism, as defined by Lunn, is “simultaneity”. Lunn talks of a weakening of narrative structure, stating that, “Instead of narrating outer sequential or additive time, modern novelists explore the simultaneity of experience in a moment of psychological time, in which are concentrated past, present and future.” This applies to a sense of historical discontinuity, or a lack of linear narrative, in modernist texts. Again, the work of Joyce and Woolf especially exhibit these tendencies within modernism, as both Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Waves reject linear narrative in favour of an aesthetic ordering of events.
Lunn’s third and fourth aspects of modernism are what he terms “paradox, ambiguity, and uncertainty,” and “the demise of the integrated individual subject or personality.” The first of these deals with modernist reactions to the decline of religious, scientific and philosophical certainties, with the advent of a fragmented world. Lunn argues that modernists explore the ‘paradoxically many-sidedness of the world’, depicting a fragmented and unnatural world that is both liberating and estranging, something that can be especially seen in the poetry of Eliot and Yeats. Lunn states that this exploration is frequently done through the use of a limited and fallible narrator, thus exploring also the latter point: the subjective nature of individual experience that arises with the advent of psychoanalytic theory. Both Woolf’s The Waves and Eliot’s 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', for example, focus on the subjective experience and view point of the individual, in the case of Woolf, focusing on the multiple consciousnesses that intersect within the novel. In modernist texts, however, art is frequently viewed as ordering, as a remedy for the uncertainty and the fragmented nature of the modern world. Modernist writers frequently attempt to inject order into their texts through the use of referentiality and symbol, thus using art as a potentially restorative force. Thus while the work itself depicts disorder, their writing possesses an underlying order created through patterns of symbols and allusions. This is most clear in the poetry of Eliot and Pound, especially 'The Wasteland' and Pound’s 'Cantos'.
Central to the imagist movement is a belief in the necessity of the knowledge and use of literary tradition and canonised texts, of entering into a dialogue with past texts. In his essay ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’, Pound writes of ‘…the power of tradition, of centuries of race consciousness, of agreement, of association…,’ an idea that is reiterated by Eliot in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent'. Eliot writes of the dissolution of the writer’s ego into canonised authors, stating ‘…if we approach a poet without…prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most interesting parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors assert their immortality most vigorously.’ Similarly, Yeats writes, in 'A General Introduction to My Work', that ‘all that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in salt… I must choose a traditional stanza, even what I alter must see traditional…. Talk to me of originality and I shall turn on you with rage. I am a crowd, I am a lonely man, I am nothing. Ancient salt is the best packing.’ Thus, intensive knowledge of, reliance upon and constant reference to canonised texts is important to the imagist movement. This is similarly clear in their work, especially that of Eliot (for example, 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' and 'The Wasteland').
~
Because I have an unusual urge to toot my own horn (*grins*), after giving my presentation Paul (then acting head of research) told me it was the best presentation he'd heard all day and Anne, my supervisor, kissed me on the cheek. It gave me happy glows.
Tomorrow: defining postmodernism. Or rather... not.
1 comment:
Gee you couldn't have posted that say about 5 weeks ago..... LOL
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