bicc2的部落格

The colonial novel: Most popular since the 1870s till the 1930s, during the peak of the British empire. It usually records a journey by a white person, often male, to the colonies. It presents the West in masculine terms as civilized, advanced, standing for reason, knowledge, light, and presents the colonies in feminine terms as backward, barbaric, chaotic, standing for darkness, ignorance and lack of reason/control. Often it justifies the colonial conquest as a generous act to save or civilize the colonized people.

e.g. Conrad: More cosmopolitan; bold experiments in form and language; themes of honor, guilt, moral alienation, different from traditional themes. Not interested in characters succeeding in life, but in man’s responsibility to himself. Use locales and conflicts alien to everyday society in order to lead men to ultimate judgment of their nature and moral duties. Lord Jim (1900), an early work, is the first important English experimental novel of the modern era, with unusual chronology, imagistic detail and symbol. Nostromo (1904), Heart of Darkness.

I. Literary Modernism:

A. Space: moving from object, outside world which is chaosàsubject, inner consciousness

1. Stream of consciousness (the “subjective method”): against external realism, outer objects became symbols

2. Symbolism: against the omniscient intruding authorial narrator

3. Characterization: against the “stable old ego for a fragmented and dissolute(消融的) self.”

B. Time: against plot which has chronological, linear development culminating in climax=>episodic, fragmented

C. Art:

1. Background: by end of 19th C, religious decline gave way to faith in science for some, and some turned to art as substitute system of value, such as Henry James’s theories about novel, Wilde’s aestheticism (art for art’s sake), dandyism and decadence

2. Treat novel as art, almost as religion. Art has a central priority in modernist fiction. Most concerned with artists=>no longer Bildungsroman(成長小說) but Künstleroman(藝術家成長小說)

D. Language focus:

II. Modernist fiction:
        A. Stream-of-consciousness: first coined by William James to describe the flow of inner experience

1. Def.: depiction of the thoughts and feelings which flow, with no obvious logic (~lack of plot, unusual chronology), through the mind of a character (note there’s absence of hero, ~multiple perspectives). Set to mimic the flow of the mind, it uses fragmentary sentences, fractured syntax, unusual punctuation like frequent dashes and ellipses (showing inner contradictions). The past, present, and future are merged together, constantly jumps in between.

2. Purpose: language experiments, quest for meaning and permanence inside the mind and in art, not in the outside world or society.

a. James Joyce A Portrait : Artist as the outsider, in rebellion, breaking from his matrix and becoming himself. Mythological motif of Stephen Daedalus, epiphanies in most commonplace experiences. Wave-like structure, with each problem temporarily solved at the end of chapter, yet new problems arise.

b. Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway: Two time schemes: Big Ben’s clock time, outer reality, not the ultimate reality; inner time is truthful, felt at any given moment by which we may be living in the past, present or future or combination.

B. The psychological novel: it mostly arises in the late 19th century when novelists shift their emphasis from external action and broad social concernàinner emotion and close examination of individual character’s psychology and mental life. It displays less interest in what happened than in why it happened and what its effects are on the human psyche. Techniques like interior monologues and stream of consciousness are often used. The theories of Freud are a great influence. D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers.

III. Modernism(M) and Postmodernism(P): transition of novel in 20^th century writing, both a final extension of M concern about art, representation and language, and an antecedent(先行者) for a self-referential, self-conscious writing, “a language-focused postmodernism” in Fredric Jameson’s words(US Marxist) that followed. E.g. Samuel Beckett, Lawrence Durrell, Doris Lessing, John Fowles, etc, fictions about the creation of fiction, demonstrating the potential and limitation of language and narrative (self-questioning) as consolations for the black emptiness of life; the self reflective foregrounding of language and fiction-making, a central feature of at least one phase of P.

IV. Postmodernism: for the last 20 years, critics’ debate. Some see it as simply the continuation and development of modernism, others a radical break with classical modernism (Eliot), while still others think past literature (Pound of The Cantos) as already postmodern. The term was first used in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a mood of radical indeterminacy, a tone of self-conscious, parodic skepticism toward past certainties; the ironic and playful and parodic creation of multiple and fantastic worlds. A vast and confusing term. Two key arguments:

A. The “grand narratives” of historical progress initiated by the Enlightenment are discredited (Lyotard)

B. Image has ousted the real, there is no longer “reality” or “history,” but replaced by signs, and simulations that characterize the age of mass consumption and technology (Baudrillard).
V. Postmodernism and post-structuralism: overlap to a great extent, questioning of “depth models,” de-centering of the world and the self, rejection of elitism and experimental formalism, disruption of all boundaries between discursive genres or boundaries between high and low culture, between art and commodity, resistance to meaning and interpretation=> result of all these developments in literary theory since the 1960s —the problem of the subject or self.

As the ideal of the individual has been so influential in the development and interpretation of the novel, new ways are needed. The traditional notion is increasingly challenged that a novel is read as expressions of one individual author’ s vision, including mimetic representations of fictional individuals (characters), communicated via the text to another individual (reader) and interpreted by him/her in terms of universal traits of human nature. With the spread of theories against novels, and the increasing dominance of electronic media in society in general, we might see:

A. Movement from the novel in its traditional and pure definitionàa wider category of narrative, pervasive(滲透,普及) in film, TV and electric media.

B. The category of narrative can not only apply to fiction, but also to history, science, and other disciplines.
VI. Post-colonialism: A further movement drawing on the more radical implications of post-structuralism. Become the concerns of intellectuals and academics since the awakening of a new consciousness after Indian independence (1947), and a general leftist turn in the Third-World struggles (esp. Algeria) from 1950s onwards. Replaced Commonwealth literature to emerge in the 1980s as a set of concerns marked by the indeterminacies and de-centeredness associated with deconstruction, Commonwealth thus overlaps with Post-colonialism, but brings an added awareness of power relations between Western and Third-World cultures hitherto(迄今) neglected by Post-colonialism. Western values are guilty of a repressive ethnocentrism (Indo-European) which dominates the world. Derrida – white man lacks his own mythology as the universal Reason. Commonwealth uses deconstructionist methods, also Bakhtin’ s dialogism, Gramsci’ s concept of hegemony, Foucault’s power and knowledge, Lyotard's critique of Western universalizing historical narratives.
VII. 20^th Century Poetry:

 A. William Butler Yeats (1865-1939, Nobel 1923): made recreating Ireland's largely forgotten intellectual heritage a purpose. In the eighteen-nineties, life changed. Poetry new style, stripped of decoration, more directly into “truth.” He established the Irish Theatre at Abbey Theatre from 1904-1910,worked as secretary to Pound during 1913-15, with the effect being that his style changed from a tired rhetoric to more colloquial expression. He becomes more political with the Uprising, Civil War.

1. Early poems (political out): “The Stolen Child” (1886), “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (1890), “No Second Troy” (1908) (Maud Gonne married in 1903, hence compared to Helen of Troy. Early love poems defeatist, mournful. Later a note of weariness gets in poem, then despair after 1903, though goes on writing love poems for Maud)=> Style: both a 19th c and 20th c poet, the last Romanticist who lived to be a modernist, early poems vague, obscure(曖昧), mysterious, delicate, beautiful and dreamy (an oft-repeated word), using Irish tales. His book The Celtic Twilight (1893) gave its name to the kind of literature by him and imitators, romantic, affirmative, wistful, using lengthy notes as explanations. The Wind Among the Reeds (collection 1899) is the culmination of this “Cleric poetry.”

2. Poems 1910-20(political in): “The Magi” (1913), eight-line stanzas with ottava rima. “The Wild Swans at Coole”(1916), “Easter 1916” (1916), “The Second Coming” (1919-20)

3. Poems 1920s: change of style and maturity reflected in the 198 publication of The Tower, a
collection of Yeats' best poems until then, more apprehension of the Civil War, of crises in Ireland and the world, and of approaching age, of ruin and decay, a 60-year-old man, but with ironic memories of lost youth and love, an idealized Byzantium to set against reality, “Sailing to Byzantium” (1926), “Meditations in Time of Civil War VII”(1922-3)

4. Last Poems in the 1930s: “The Gyres” (1936)

Yeats altered many of his early poems, to make them more tough and energetic rather than gentle and soft. The Victorian Edition of Yeats is the unaltered ones, and from a purely aesthetic point of view, critics prefer this. The alterations show the difference between 19th c and 20th c sensibilities. Even his most modern poems hark back to Shelley and Keats.

B. T.S. Eliot (1888 - 1965)

1. Objective correlative: a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events that shall be the formula of that particular emotion, such as when the general facts are given, the emotion is immediately evokedàConceit: different unrelated ideas are united to create a new, contrasting and shocking impression, usually brief words to create sudden contrasts.

2. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) Published with Pound's help, Eliot's best early poetry in its stylistic innovation, thematic and linguistic complexity, enactment of psychic conflicts.

l   Surface: Satire on modern life (Boston society at the turn of the century), modern city like Dante's medieval Inferno. Modern man as indecisive, timid, fastidious, afraid of action; self-mockery, but the modern world is not worthy of action after all.

n   Split between poet and persona: Prufrock, like the society, is over-learned, self-conscious, timid and afraid of action, “part Eliot himself, part a man of 40.” =>Self, split and changing, no longer a unified entity, interplay of different voices and roles.

n   Split in Prufrock’s personality: outer self (respectable, middle-class, conservative) v.s.deep-down emotion. Sometimes Guido, John the Baptist, Lazarus, Hamlet=>self-deception through rhetoric masking, yearning for romance (inner self), but afraid of ridicule in a material world (social self), thus has to express inner feelings only through irony, parody and negation.

n   Split between poet, persona, and reader--Dramatic interior monologue revises Browning’s dramatic monologue which is more objective and external. Eliot’s concerns with what goes on within the mind, reacting against Romantic confessional style, so that distance/split between poet and persona is created to achieve irony and criticism from reader who can both sympathize and judge.

=>Explores self and reveals it as fragmented; multiple voices and masks denote both fragmentariness, and also leads to impersonality and distance between poet, persona and reader.

=>The deliberate play of thought and feeling is not stream of consciousness, for Eliot uses vers libres(free verse), rhythms of colloquial speech.

l   Title: “Love Song” romantic expectations of a Elizabethan or Romantic lyric; yet Prufrock - prude and frock, mock and contradict this expectation, frock being upper-middle class, suggest dandyism, another contradiction.

l   Epigraph: Guido of Dante's Inferno speaks only when he mistook Dante for one of the damned who could not escape from Hell; likewise Prufrock speaks only because he believes his love song will only be heard by the author.

3.The Waste Land (1922): Written under personal strain and tension; Vivien's breakdown, his mother's visit, his own breakdown. Pound’s substantial editoring, deleted elements of misogyny, other rambling parts, into a coherent whole, brought out the essence; though also changed a lot.

l   Form: Is it a unified whole or separate poems?

l   Points of view: a multiplicity of fragmentary monologues by different voices, yet with blurred boundaries, no fixed identity to be distinguished, has a number of personae, not a unified self, but shifting and fluid.

l   Use of allusions: related to his theory of tradition and the relationship between past and present, allusions evoke a literary or historical past, so that the past and present is simultaneous, and the present is unfavorably compared with the grandeur of the past; tradition also has to be inherited though labor and efforts, the poet in selecting allusions, the reader in interpreting them.

l   Use of myth: admitted debt to two works of anthology: Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890) and Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance (1920), evolutionary view of religion, as evolved from primitive rituals though questions the two works’ findings, and criticizing them for demystifying religion and taking off the supernatural, divine side, they provide a framework of myth to structure, order the poem, giving it shape and significance, just as the Odyssey had done for Joyce's Ulysses, but less significance, only towards the end of composition, learned from Joyce, thus only later half of poem, could even be extraneous.

l   Purpose: savagery and violence of primitive times still underlay modern civilization the myth of the dying and resurrected god, the vegetation god in primitive religions who dies and returns once a year with the change of seasons, the land is laid waste and rejuvenates together with him, celebrates life and fertility in Easter from ancient times, sacrifice the son of the king to keep land fertile.
the myth of the Grail, cup used by Christ in the last supper, used by Joseph to catch Christ's blood during crucifixion, the Grail was lost, the search for it is the search for spiritual truth; comes across as waste land because the king (Fisher King) is impotent and ailing, asks the right question 'What ails thee, King?', life comes back, not just a literary or Christian myth, but based on primitive rituals which Christianity took over and adapted.

C. English poetry after modernists: split into two influences: the explosive energy of the New Romanticism of Dylan Thomas, and cool discipline and aloofness of the New Classicism of Eliot.

W. H. Auden: follows Eliot yet with Marxist propaganda. Slangy idiom with references to everyday life to achieve a new virility and contact with the public.

The Movement (1950s): colloquial ease, allusion to the apparently trivial in daily life, disillusioned and ironic self scrutiny, calm acceptance of life as mad. No heroic or tragic view of life, spinning poetry out of the very inadequacy and pointlessness of modern existence. Eliot and Auden chief influences. Philip Larkin “Church Going.”

VIII. 20^th Century Drama: focused on social realism, without the psychological depth and innovation of the continental playwrights. Until Beckett and Pinter in the 1950s and 1960s.

Beckett: a leading proponent of the Theater of the Absurd. Waiting for Godot (1952) with no plot, focusing on portraying the hopeless situation of mankind by means of bizarre happenings and elliptical dialogues. Dramatizes the solitude and grim humor of modern life.

Harold Pinter: life is a comic absurdity, continental influence. The Caretaker (1960). His mastery of everyday idiom and verbal inventiveness; focusing on the nonessential in plots, leaving many threads unexplained, keeps the audience amused, showing life's absurdity without trying to make sense of everything.