NOVEL II LECTURE 2

Novel: The Genera

SYNOPSIS

MODERNISM AND REALISM` A DETAILD TALK 1. Elements of Novel

2. How the novel has evolved…  How Novel is defined…

3. Unique form of Novel

 Novel Compared to the Story 4. History of the Novel

5. Birth of the Novel 6. Focus of Modern Novel

SYNOPSIS

7. Types of Modern Novel

          THE EPIC NARRATIVE VS. FICTION IRONY ALLUSION Picaresque Novel REALISM MODERNISM POSTMODERNISM NATURALISM NONPARTICIPANT NARRATORS

SYNOPSIS

8. James Joyce (1882-1941)

 Modernism and James Joyce - A bit in detail…  Modernism  The Rise  Characteristics

9. A Review of James’ famous works

CONCEPT OF MODERNISM

Modernism and Modern Novel 5

modernism

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 The term modernism refers to the radical shift in aesthetic and cultural sensibilities evident in the art and literature of the post-World War One period.  The ordered, stable and inherently meaningful world view of the nineteenth century could not, wrote T.S. Eliot, accord with "the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history."

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 Modernism thus marks a distinctive break with Victorian bourgeois morality; rejecting nineteenth century optimism, they presented a profoundly pessimistic picture of a culture in disarray.  This despair often results in an apparent apathy and moral relativism.

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 In literature, the movement is associated with the works of (among others) Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Franz Kafka and Knut Hamsun.  In their attempt to throw off the aesthetic burden of the realist novel, these writers introduced a variety of literary tactics and devices:

9 The radical disruption of linear flow of narrative; the frustration of conventional expectations concerning unity and coherence of plot and character and the cause and effect development thereof; the deployment of ironic and ambiguous juxtapositions to call into question the moral and philosophical meaning of literary action; the adoption of a tone of epistemological self-mockery aimed at naive pretensions of bourgeois rationality; the opposition of inward consciousness to rational, public, objective discourse; and an inclination to subjective distortion to point up the evanescence of the social world of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. (Barth, "The Literature of Replenishment" 68)

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 Modernism is often derided for abandoning the social world in favour of its narcissistic interest in language and its processes.  Recognizing the failure of language to ever fully communicate meaning ("That's not it at all, that's not what I meant at all" laments Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock), the modernists generally downplayed content in favour of an investigation of form.  The fragmented, non-chronological, poetic forms utilized by Eliot and Pound revolutionized poetic language.

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   Modernist formalism, however, was not without its political cost. Many of the chief Modernists either flirted with fascism or openly espoused it (Eliot, Yeats, Hamsun and Pound). This should not be surprising: modernism is markedly non egalitarian; its disregard for the shared conventions of meaning make many of its supreme accomplishments (eg. Eliot's "The Wasteland," Pound's "Cantos," Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Woolf's The Waves) largely inaccessible to the common reader. For Eliot, such obscurantism was necessary to halt the erosion of art in the age of commodity circulation and a literature adjusted to the lowest common denominator.

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 In looking to carry on many of the aesthetic goals of the Modernist project, hypertext fiction must confront again the politics of its achievements in order to position itself anew with regard to reader.  With its reliance on expensive technology and its interest in re-thinking the linear nature of The Book , hypertext fiction may find itself accused of the same elitism as its modernist predecessors.

REALITY NOVEL

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Realism

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 Realism is an aesthetic mode which broke with the classical demands of art to show life as it should be in order to show life "as it is."  The work of realist art tends to eschew the elevated subject matter of tragedy in favour of the quotidian; the average, the commonplace, the middle classes and their daily struggles with the mean verities of everyday existence--these are the typical subject matters of realism.

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 The attempt, however, to render life as it is, to use language as a kind of undistorting mirror of, or perfectly transparent window to, the "real" is fraught with contradictions. Realism in this simplified sense must assume a one-to-one relationship between the signifier (the word, "tree" for example) and the thing it represents (the actual arboreal object typically found in forests).

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 Realism must, in effect, disguise its own status as artifice, must try and force language into transparency through an appeal to our ideologically constructed sense of the real.  The reader must be addressed in such a way that he or she is always, in some way, saying, "Yes. That's it, that's how it really is."

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  Realism can never fully offer up the world in all its complexity, its irreducible plenitude. Its verisimilitude is an effect achieved through the deployment of certain literary and ideological conventions which have been invested with a kind of truth value. The use of an omniscient narrator who gives us access to a character's thoughts, feelings and motivations, for example, is a highly formalized convention that produces a sense of psychological depth; the characters seem to have "lives" independent of the text itself.

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 They, of course, do not; the sense that they do is achieved entirely by the fact that both the author and the reader share these codes of the real.  The consensual nature of such codes is so deep that we forget that we are in the presence of fiction. As Terry Eagleton notes,

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The sign as "reflection," "expression" or "representation" denies the productive character of language: it suppresses the fact that what we only have a "world" at all because we have language to signify it. (136)

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 The realist novel first developed in the nineteenth century and is the form we associate with the work of writers such as Austen, Balzac, George Eliot and Tolstoy.  According to Barthes, the narrative or plot of a realist novel is structured around an opening enigma which throws the conventional cultural and signifying practices into disarray. In a detective novel, for example, the opening enigma is usually a murder, or a theft.

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 The event throws the world into a paranoid state of suspicion; the reader and the protagonist can no longer trust anyone because signs--people, objects, words--no longer have the obvious meaning they had before the event.  But the story must move inevitably towards closure, which in the realist novel involves some dissolution or resolution of the enigma: the murderer is caught, the case is solved, the hero marries the girl.

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 The realist novel drives toward the final re establishment of harmony and thus re-assures the reader that the value system of signs and cultural practices which he or she shares with the author is not in danger.  The political affiliation of the realist novel is thus evident; in trying to show us the world as it is, it often reaffirms, in the last instance, the way things are.

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    As Catherine Belsey notes, classic realism is "still the dominant popular mode in literature, film, and television drama" (67). It has been denounced as the crudest from of the readerlly text, and its conventions subverted and parodied by the modern novel, the new novel and postmodern novel. However, the form, like the capitalist mode of production with which it is historically coincident, has shown remarkable resiliency. It will no doubt continue to function, if only anti-thetically, as one of the chief influences on the development of hypertext fiction.

ELEMENTS OF NOVEL

Novel: The Genera

How the novel has evolved…

 Since its first appearance in the mid-1700s-novel started as a way to preserve oral stories of various cultures and grew to include epics and romances.  In the 1700s, novels were actually used to spread gossip and other allegations of scandalous behavior.  The authors changed names and claimed the writing was fiction in order to betray secrets while escaping legal consequences.

DEFINITIONS…

“A book length story in prose, whose author tries to create a sense that, while we read, we experience actual life.”

By X. J. Kennedy

“An extended fictional narrative, usually written in prose.” Anonymous “ An imaginary work in prose of a considerable length, which presents as real certain characters living in a given environment and describes their attitudes, fate, and adventures.” By Percy Lubbock “ The novel is like a symphony In that the closing movement Echoes and resounds with all that has gone before…”’ By John Gardner

THE NOVEL IS A UNIQUE FORM OF PROSE

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The novel has four unique qualities that set it apart from other types of prose.

Length Emphasis is on the character Multiple themes characters in conflict / Realism

1. Length is generally 100 pages or more

  The first quality of a novel is its length. Although there are no definite rules on the subject of length, it is generally agreed among writers and publishers that the length of the narrative must be 100 pages or more. If it is less than that, it is usually referred to as a novella, such as Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Harper Lee’s classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird, for example, contains more than 250 pages.

2. Emphasis is on the character

   The second quality of a novel is its emphasis on the character or characters in the story. Unlike the short story, the length of a novel allows the author to give the reader a much fuller description of the characters and to introduce more than one conflict. Therefore, the reader can better understand the character’s motives for action or inaction, relationships with others, and their own personal feelings, dreams and fears.

3. Allows for more than one theme, conflict, point of view or plot

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The third quality of a novel is its ability to include more than one theme, conflict, point of view and plot.

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The novel’s length allows the author to explore various themes

4. Plot explores characters in conflict to understand our own humanity

 The fourth quality of a novel is the complexity of plot.  Unlike the short story, a novel will often have more than one major conflict within the plot.  Often the author is interested in developing a plot in which the main goal is for the character to better understand his or her own humanity or place in society.

NOVEL COMPARED TO THE SHORT STORY

NOVEL COMPARED TO THE SHORT STORY

NOVEL

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50,000 words or more

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Many characters

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Complex story

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Deeper understanding of life or individuals SHORT STORY

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5,000 words or less

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Few or one character

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Focuses on one event

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Better understanding of an event or character

HISTORY OF THE NOVEL

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Oral telling of myths, history, and stories

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Written storytelling in the form of the epic

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Written prose fiction concerned with adventure known as the romance. (The French word for the novel is roman)

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Written prose fiction concerned with reality or actual life. (The English word for new is novel) 1700s

The Industrial Revolution

Mid 18th Century England New “middle class” is created from industry Growth of cities due to industry Ideas and goods are exchanged

The Industrial Revolution

• These social and economic changes occurred as a result of the Industrial Revolution.

• The colonization of the Americas gave England an abundance of raw materials, which led to the creation of a merchant class, members of which sought their success in the profit made from trading goods.

• Further, a series of technological changes, such as new machinery, defined what we now call the Industrial Revolution.

The Industrial Revolution

• With it came the growth of cities and a change in the entire social, political and economic structure in England.

• From the creation of industry, a new social and economic class of people emerged—the middle class.

• They gained their wealth through the ownership of factories and the institutions that supported them.

Birth of the Novel

Increase in the number of people able to read New market for the novel by 1700s!

Spending money available for entertainment Creation Of The Middle Class More leisure time available

FOCUS OF MODERN NOVEL

THE MIDDLE CLASS

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Concerned with real problems and real situations!

Early Beginnings–1700s

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“The proper study of mankind is man.”

—Alexander Pope

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Samuel Richardson

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Henry Fielding Richardson Pope

The Founder of the Modern English Novel

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Daniel Defoe

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Wrote Robinson Crusoe (1719)

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Moll Flanders (1722)

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Born 1660

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Died 1731

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Established a “middle class” perspective

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Basic elements: Plot, Character , Setting, Point of View, Theme Defoe

Shaping Modern Literature Modern English Novel The plot is what happens in the story.

• climax • exposition

Conflict in the early novel

• Person versus society • Person versus self

Shaping Modern Literature Modern English Novel

Person vs. society • Character trapped by circumstances of birth • Character falsely accused by society • Character feels apart from society and discovers

own values

Person vs. society • Great Expectations • English Society during the Industrial Age • Trapped between two worlds • Middle class audience

TYPES OF NOVELS

Novel: The Genera

THE EPIC

Stories and songs emerged as an oral means of communication and preserving the past: tales of heroic battles or struggles, myths, or religious beliefs.

In a time before mass communication, the oral tradition enabled people to pass down stories, most often in the form of rhyming poems.

 Thus, the earliest forms of fiction were in fact poetry.  Eventually written down, these extended narratives developed into

epics

, which were long narrative poems about heroic figures whose actions determine the fate of a nation or entire race. What other stories or films do you know of that follow this common theme?

NARRATIVE VS. FICTION

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NARRATIVE

tells a story by presenting events in some logical or orderly way.

A work of FICTION is a narrative that, for the most part, originates in the imagination of the author rather than in history or fact. The word “fiction” comes from the Latin “fictio”, which means “a shaping, a counterfeiting”

IRONY

Dramatic Irony: when the reader or audience knows something that the character has yet to realize. Examples?

Verbal Irony: when the character says the opposite of what is really meant.

Examples?

Situational Irony: when something is about to happen to a character or characters who expect the opposite.

ALLUSION

An Allusion is a reference in a text to a person, place, or thing—fictitious or real. These references are often to literature, history, mythology, or the Bible.

PROTAGONIST & ANTAGONIST

The Protagonist is the central character in a literary work. This character usually initiates and is in conflict in the narrative. The Antagonist is the character or force that opposes the protagonist in the narrative. Remember, the antagonist may be another character, society itself, a force of nature, or even—in modern literature—conflicting impulses within the protagonist.

Picaresque Novel

• This type of novel emerged from Spain in the 17 th century.

• This type of narrative is often told in episodes, or adventures, and it is very often a satirical work.

• This form of narrative, usually a novel, presents the life of a likable scoundrel or rogue who is at odds with respectable society.

• The narrator of a picaresque was originally a “picaro”, which is Spanish means “rascal” or “rogue”.

Epistolary Novel

A novel in which the story is told by way of letters written by one or more of the characters.

REALISM

Realism denotes a period or literary movement of writing wherein writers strove to portray everyday events and people in a realistic fashion. Realism refers to a movement in 19 th century European literature that focused on the middle class rather than aristocracy. It rejected idealism, romanticism, and elitism.

MAGICAL REALISM

The style, genre, or movement of writing called Magical Realism is marked by it imaginative content, vivid effects, and lingering mystery. It is a type of contemporary narrative that combines the fantastic, magical elements with realistic details. A writer like Garcia Marquez can create a fictional world where the miraculous and the everyday live side by side.

Example: “ The world had been sad since Tuesday”

MODERNISM

World War I Recruiting Poster

During the early 20 th century, the literary movement known as Modernism was established by writers, such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, who: 1) Reacted to the increasing complexity of a changing world 2) M0urned the passing of old ways under the pressures of modernity World War I, Urbanization, and The Rise of Industrialism contributed to this literary reaction.

POSTMODERNISM

• After Modernism, hence “post”, a movement called Postmodernism emerged.

• Postmodern artists reacted to the confines and limitations placed upon form and meaning by opening ideas of interpretation. • Many postmodernists confronted, with their writing, the changing society, the future, and the impact of technology.

NATURALISM

• Naturalism, sometimes considered an extreme form of realism, rejected unrealistic plots and sentimentality of • melodrama.

Unlike realism, naturalism sought to explore the depths of the human condition.

• Influenced by Freud, Darwin, & Marx, naturalism portrays human beings as higher-order animals who are driven by basic instincs—especially hunger, fear, greed, and sexuality.

LOCAL COLOR

When a writer is considered a local colorist, this writer has used a specific regional material—unique social customs, dress, habits, and speech patterns.

POINTS OF VIEW: NARRATORS

PARTICIPANT NARRATOR

The participant narrator in a work of literature is written in the first person.

Such a character may be a protagonist (Huck Finn) or may be an observer, or minor character standing a little to one side, watching a story unfold that mainly involves someone else.

A good example of this is Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. He is a narrator and minor character who focuses the story on Jay Gatsby.

NONPARTICIPANT NARRATORS

Written in THIRD PERSON and can possess different levels of knowledge about characters

 Omniscient or All-knowing: sees into any or all of the characters’ minds, souls, feelings, and motivations  Limited Omniscience: sees into one character  Objective: does not see into any characters, but merely reports events from outside

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th

Century Novel…

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Novels serve many purposes: Document an event for better understanding Help us understand our own heritage Can be a catalyst for social and political change Illuminate the human experience

A QUICK HISTORICAL REVIEW OF MODERN LITERATURE

Reasons-Impacts (Social and Cultural)

 The twentieth century introduces a cultural period in which individuals not only reject the past but also question the very basis of knowledge and consider the possibility that knowledge and concepts once thought to be fixed and objective are instead constantly shifting and subjective.

Suitability of early Philosophies

 Philosophers and thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzche, Henri Bergson, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud challenged nineteenth-century science and the positivist confidence in its ability to explain both the physical and social worlds in completely rational terms.

World War I

 World War I had a powerful impact in its aftermath, causing Europeans to reconsider their very belief systems and leading to widespread dissatisfaction with the authorities who, many believed, were motivated by greed, class exploitation, and hunger for power.

Interest in Psychology

 A growing interest in psychology influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud contributed to a new emphasis on the internal reality of individuals, the importance of the self, and the alienation of the self in modern society.

Relationship between Reality and Appearance

 New studies in the relationship between reality and appearance led to the philosophies of phenomenology and existentialism as represented in the philosophical writings of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre.

World War II

 After the Second World War, the rise of Communism, the gradual disintegration of colonialism, and the exponential development of technology, existentialism flourished in the 1940s and 1950s as individuals struggled to find meaning in an increasingly fragmented and confusing world.

Cultural Parochialism

 A growing awareness of a variety of other cultures that have differing worldviews than traditional European or American ones undercut the assumptions of “cultural parochialism” and led to pluralistic and postcolonial perspectives

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TH

CENTURY LITERATURE

Language Game

 Adapting the theories of linguists and philosophers such as Ferdinand Saussure and Ludwig Wittgenstein, twentieth-century writers began to treat language as a “game,” creating fragmented word combinations, ambiguous meanings, and experimental forms.

Literary Movements

 Dadaism and Surrealism were among the most influential early-twentieth-century literary movements. The goal of the Dadaists was to abolish the restraints of authority by breaking the conventions of literature and art; the goal of the Surrealists was to express the unconscious mind through dream writing, automatic writing, and fantasy.

Use of Imagery

 Although the term “modernism” generally refers to the collective literary trend in the early twentieth century, it more precisely applies to a group of British and American writers—such as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot—who crafted carefully worded images in colloquial language.

Modernism

 In the broader sense of “modernism,” early twentieth-century writers broke up the traditional plot structure of narratives, experimented with language, fragmented ideas, played with shifting perspectives, and drew self-conscious attention to the very nature of language itself.

Rediscovery of the Meaning

 Despite the experiments with style and content, early modernists continued to hope that through art they could rediscover the meaning and unity lost in modern society.  By mid-century, a growing number of writers, often referred to as postmodernists, abandoned that hope and began instead to create literature that celebrates rather than laments the inability of language and literature to bring conclusion and meaning to the modern experience.

A Challenge to Fixed Notions

 Postmodern writers playfully create allusions, contradictions, meta-narratives, and linguistic games in order to disrupt reader expectations of fixed, objective references.

Cultural Diversity

 At the end of the twentieth century, as geopolitical boundaries blurred and shifted, an increased recognition of the diversity of cultural identities in ethnic, gender, and sexual issues led to a correspondent pluralism in writing that depicts the full range of human diversity.  Included in these new perspectives is attention to the efforts of postcolonial cultures to develop a consciousness apart from that of their colonizers.

REVIEW LECTURE 2

MODERNISM AND REALISM` A DETAILD TALK 1. Elements of Novel

2. How the novel has evolved…  How Novel is defined…

3. Unique form of Novel

 Novel Compared to the Story 4. History of the Novel

5. Birth of the Novel 6. Focus of Modern Novel

REVIEW LECTURE 2

7. Types of Modern Novel

          THE EPIC NARRATIVE VS. FICTION IRONY ALLUSION Picaresque Novel REALISM MODERNISM POSTMODERNISM NATURALISM NONPARTICIPANT NARRATORS