Transcript Modernism and Post

Modernism and
Post-Modernism
Reading Contemporary Fiction
Lecture Week Seven
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Realism, a brief recap.
Modernism
Modernist Fiction
Post-Structuralism and Post-Modernism
A Post-Modern text: 500 Days of Summer
Structure of the lecture
• In week three we looked at the features of a realist text.
• Realist fiction became ‘the dominant literary form in Europe in
the first half of the nineteenth century’ (Walder, 1996, p.4).
• Realism flourished during the Enlightenment; the period of
time in which scientific rationality became the dominant way
in which humans made sense of the world around them.
• Morris suggests that traditionally realism has been viewed as a
“representational form” which was concerned with the “close
artistic imitation of social reality” (Realism 4-5). Thus, Morris
argues, the term has been linked with notions such as mimesis
and verisimilitude (p. 5).
Realism
• Mimesis: a concept linked to mime and imitation. Also
linked to verisimilitude.
• Verisimilitude: ‘likeness to truth, and therefore, the
appearance of being true or real, even when fantastic . . .
an acceptable presentation of reality’ (Dictionary of
Literary Terms and Literary Theory)
• As Morris suggests, ‘the realist plot is typically structured
upon the epistemological progress of readers and
principal characters from ignorance to knowledge, and
characterisation normally focuses upon the highly
individualised inner subjective, self-development of
rational understanding and moral discrimination’
(Realism 28).
• ‘Classic realism, still the dominant popular mode in
literature, film and television drama, roughly coincides
with the epoch of industrial capitalism. It performs . . .
the work of ideology, not only in its representation of a
world of consistent subjects who are the origin of
meaning, knowledge and action, but also in offering the
reader, as the position from which the text is most readily
intelligible, the position of subject as the origin both of
understanding and of action in accordance with that
understanding’ (Critical Practice 67) .
Critiques of Realism
• Morris:
‘There is one distinction between realist writing and actual
everyday reality beyond the text that must be quite
categorically insisted upon: realist novels never give us
life or a slice of life, nor do they reflect reality . . . realism
is a representational form and a representation can never
be identical with that which it represents’ ([emphasis in
original] 4).
Critiques of Realism
• ‘Modernism, in the infrastructural productive sense,
begins in the 1890s and 1900s, a time which experienced
mass technological innovations, the second tidal wave of
the Industrial Revolution begun nearly a century before.’
• New Technology (automobile, tractor, bus, aeroplane,
telephone, typewriter)
• Mass Media and Entertainment (advertising and mass
circulation newspapers, gramophone, wireless telegraph,
gramophone, movie theatres)
• Science (genetics, psychoanalysis, theories of the atom,
and of relativity) (Appignanesi and Garratt, 1998, p.11)
Modernism
• What we see here is nothing less than a new way of
looking at the world. The world itself becomes interconnected due to advances in science and technology.
• Freud’s theory of consciousness also has radical
implications for how the human subject sees itself. For
the first time in history, humans have the sense of
themselves as having a psyche with different levels of
consciousness: the conscious, the subconscious and the
unconscious minds.
• What effect do you think this might have had on writers
and/or artists?
Modernism
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Marx and Engels The Communist Manifesto 1848
Darwin The Origin of the Species 1872
Freud The Interpretation of dreams 1899
Einstein Relativity 1916
World War 1 1914-1918
The modernist context
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Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves
James Joyce Ulysses
T.S. Eliot ‘The Wasteland’
Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot
• For writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, the problem with the
realist form is that it does not accurately represent reality as it is
experienced. Woolf writes:
• 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. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this
varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or
complexity it might display, with as little mixture of the alien and external
as possible? (Collected Essays: Volume Two 106)
• She suggests that reality cannot be “contained any longer by such ill-fitting
vestments as [novelists] provide” (Collected Essays: Volume Two 105).
What does she mean by this?
Modernist Fiction
• Morris uses the example of Mrs Dalloway to show how Woolf
breaks with the conventions of realism prevalent in her time:
• ‘plot’ is encompassed in a single day and resolves no
mysteries, leaves the future of the lives presented in the story
as uncertain as at the beginning, and refuses the reader any
objective knowledge of the main protagonists that could form
the basis of moral or epistemological evaluation. Put in
technical terms, the novel refutes closure: nothing and no one
is summed up in the writing as a coherent truth that can be
known. ([emphasis in original] 15)
• What we see here is that Woolf applied her critical ideas about
fiction and pioneered a new style of writing. Her critique of
realist fiction was that it didn’t actually reflect reality.
Virginia Woolf
• Much of the fiction that comes after Woolf and Joyce is
influenced by their ideas. Many writers take their ideas
forward and produce different kinds of texts.
• The two short stories for this week ‘The Balloon’ and
‘How I contemplated my life . . .’ are clearly not realist
texts.
• Both these stories are also influenced by the poststructural critique of language.
• This theoretical critique changes the way that texts are
written, read and studied. Cultural Studies (and current
Literary Studies) owes a great debt to the work of writers
such as Joyce and Woolf and thinkers such as Jacques
Derrida and Roland Barthes (amongst others).
Post-Modern Fiction
 Post-structuralism is a critique of
structuralism and has its hey-day
in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
 Ferdinand de Saussure, a
linguist, posited that language is
organised like a system. For
Saussure signifiers and signified
make up the SIGN (the meaning
of the word)
• So, cat (the word) + cat (the
concept: the idea we get when
we see or hear the word) = sign.
Structuralism
• Structuralists would argue is
that there is nothing about the
word ‘cat’ or the idea of a cat
which means cat.
• Put another way, they believe
the SIGN is relational and
dependent on the relationship
between the signifier and the
signified.
• There is nothing about the
word or the concept that
universally implies the
characteristics of a cat. ‘Cat’ is
an English word; in Italian it is
‘gatto’, in French it is ‘chat’.
 Jacques Derrida uses structuralism to point out that a text’s
meaning is relational. For Derrida, meaning is endlessly
deferred. Or, to put it more simply, what happens if we look
up the word ‘table’ in the dictionary?
 Another way of thinking about it is through binaries. It is
almost impossible to define the word ‘cold’ without invoking
the concept of ‘hot’.
Post-Structuralism: Derrida
Derrida’s formulation of deconstruction has been one of the most
important ideas in post-structural literary theory. Derrida posits
that if we deconstruct a text – which for the purposes of this unit
means seeing who is represented in the text and who is absent we can understand more about the text and the culture it was
created in. We can reveal meanings in the text that the author
may not have intended.
Deconstruction is an important tool for Cultural Studies and
Literary Criticism. When applied to the Literary Canon it allows
us to see whose work is valued and whose has been ignored.
Post-Structuralism: Derrida
• Another central idea of post-structuralism is Roland Barthes’
assertion in 1967 that the author is dead’. What might this mean?
• For Barthes, ‘the death of the author’ means that all readers bring
their own meaning to a text. He makes a distinction between the
readerly text (a text whose interpretation is straightforward and
determined by the author) and the writerly text (an open text,
which invites the reader to make up their own meaning).
• The work of Derrida and Barthes has been critical in literature.
The period immediately after this post-structuralist critiques is rife
with experimental writing, which has often been labelled postmodern.
Post-Structuralism: Barthes
• Post-modernist writers include Donald Barthelme, Carol
Shields, Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt,
Samuel Beckett, Yann Martel, Arundhati Roy and Dave
Eggers amongst many, many others.
• ‘If postmodernism has proved a synthetic discourse,
unanimated by personal concerns, at least it has given
writers a breath of that precious oxygen of permission, and
more important, time to see in what ways the old realism—
the mirror of the world—has failed us. It was perhaps, not
real enough.’ (Carol Shields: Narrative Hunger and the
Possibilities of Fiction 34)
Post-Modern Fiction
Is this a postmodern
text?
Why is it a postmodern
text?
What does it have in
common with other
postmodern fiction?
500 Days of Summer
• Appegnanesi, Richard and Chris Garrat, 1998.
Introducing Postmodernism, Icon Books: Cambridge
• Glendinning, Simon, 2011. Derrida: A Very Short
Introduction. Oxford University Press: Oxford
Recommended Reading