Contents:

African Civilisation American Civilisation British Civilisation American Literature British Literature Psycholinguistics PsychoPedagogy Sociolinguistics TEFL

The program

About modernism

·         Nature and major characteristic

·         Dominant genres and most prominent figures

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway

·         The use of the stream of consciousness technique

·         A critical review

James Joyce as a modernist founding father

·         The flashback technique

·         A study of the short story the Dead as an illustration

·         A critical review

D.H Lawrence as An outspoken and largely disturbing artist

·         A study of the short story Odour of Chrysanthemums

·         The mind/body dilemma in the Lawrencian art

·         A critical review

The post-war avant-garde movement

·         Modern Drama: study of the anti-play

·         Endgame a play by Samuel Pinter: The theatre of the Absurd

·         The Caretaker: a play by Harold Pinter: The theatre of the vacuum.

 

·         The Novel no longer novel: A study of an excerpt from The Unnameable by S.Beckett

·         Evoke the issue of identity and the limits of enunciation (central themes to the post modern mind.)

·         Two critical reviews.

Some Reference Books:

·      Modernism, Eds. M. Bradbury and J. McFarlane, London, Penguin, 1976

·      J-M. Domenach, Le Retour du Traguique, Paris, Seuil, 1969

·      The Twentieth Century, Martin Dodsworth (ed), Penguin History of Literature, V7, 1994

·      R-M Alberes; l’Avanture Intellecturelle du XXe Siecle, Paris Albin Michel, (1959-1969)

·      M. Bradbury, The Penguin Short History of English Literature, Penguin, 1993

·      The New Pelican Guide to English Literature: The present, Ed. Boris Ford, Penguin, 1983

·      Warren/Wellek, Theory of Literature, Great Britain, Peregrine, 1985

·      J.A. Cuddon, Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, Penguin, 1991

·     D.H. Lawrence, Selected Critical Writings, Oxford University Press, 1998

·      Gerard Genette, Figures III, Seuil, 1972

 

About Modernism

“… Modernism is our inevitable art, the only composition appropriate to the new composition in which we live” Gertrude Stein.[1]

Unlike the tremors of fashion that are often likely to appear and disappear right with every changing generation, larger displacements; characterized by extended periods of style, sensibility and prevailing mood do occur necessarily. The latter’s impact is deeper and last longer. They trigger indeed cultural upheavals, questioning the past canons of aesthetics, rejecting forcefully old norms and vales which through time are no more valid to fit a new age and a new spirit. “That the twentieth century brought us a new art is undeniable” argue M. Bradbury and J. McFarlane, a shatteringly new art which marks a break with all earlier tradition. “The aim of five centuries of European effort is openly abandoned” suggest Herbert Read[2].

The term “Modernism”; though vague, and often abused; is usually used to denote a powerful European and transcontinental movement which flourished by the closing years of the 19^th century and was to influence much of the first half of the 20^th century’s artistic and literary scene. Within the general movement, one might distinguish subsidiary tendencies and schools such as expressionism, cubism, surrealism, futurism to name only these[3].

Modernism was extremely affected by Freud’s works in psychology and psychoanalysis as well as Frazer’s famous book The Golden Bough in anthropology. The perspective of the human conception was ultimately reshaped by those two avant-garde thinkers.

The prevailing characteristic of Modernism, as far as literature is concerned, is certainly focused on an obsessive and unparalleled interest the human being’s position and function in the universe together with a firm “negation of history”, as would argue Lukacs. “This negation of history takes two different forms… Firstly, the hero is strictly confined within the limits of his own experience. There is not for him any pre-existent reality beyond his own self… Secondly, the hero is without personal history. He is thrown into the world, meaninglessly, unfathomably. He does not develop through contact with the world; he neither forms, nor is formed by it. The only development in this literature is the gradual revelation of the human condition.”

Modernism manifests better than any other movement its disengagement from social and historical processes, emphasizing the importance of form and style. In a defence of Finnegan’s Wake, the last work published by James Joyce, a work determined as modern, par excellence, the young Beckett states firmly “Here is direct expression, pages and pages of it. And if you are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content, that you can comprehend the one almost without bothering to read the other… Here form is content and content is form.”

The early 20^th century mind was extremely determined to break free from the past, as handed out by the Victorian age, as well as five centuries an ancestral tradition, that even the notion of “hero” is challenged, considering that it was unfit to determine the modern man, who was merely an ordinary fellow, leading a banal and even insignificant existence.

The delicate nature of the modern mind’s preoccupations would culminate in one of the most disturbing “crisis of language” ever in the history of literature. The latter induced most prominent experiments both in form and content. Ulysses by Joyce and Mrs. Dalloway by Woolf are remarkable illustrations of the implementation of the “stream of consciousness” technique[4] in novel writing. The stream of consciousness is, concisely, a modern mode of writing, seeking to capture throughout ‘myriad impressions’ and ‘moments of being’, the infinite flows of a mind at work.

Traditional novel writing was again challenged by modernists. Two central features characterizing the traditional novel are: the story and the moral. The modern novel was obviously de-plotted. No fixed structure was maintained merely because modernists highlighted the fragmentariness of human experience, which definitely could be represented by a sort of life where a series of events were mechanically arranged. Chronology was also challenged, mostly through the stream of consciousness use, a writings technique which tends to focus on slices of life rather than life as a whole. Modern writings revolutionized not only form but even time conception, to quote Virginia Woolf: “an hour may be accurately represented on the time-piece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation”.

As to the moral, it merely faded away. The refusal to convey a moral was symptomatic of the modern man, The latter felt so miserable and disillusioned that he could not pretend to translate though writing a ‘model of morality’ to abide by, as was the case during the Victorian  age with Fielding and Thackeray, to name only these. Unlike traditional heroes, it is typical of modern fiction protagonists to be withdrawn, intellectual, eccentric, and mostly solitary. The figure of the “artist” pervades modern literature, be it an unpopular writer or a second-rate painter.

Modernism explores remarkably the sense of loss and anguish pervading the early decades of the 20^th century in Western Europe and the United States. This eclectic movement was to trigger a form of shuttered writing that is so unique and difficult to grasp sometimes to such and extent that it is viewed by some as an anti-literature.

It is the aim of all literature to take off social disguises, and transcend all forms of jail, be it linguistic or cultural, portraying life as naked and disturbing as it often is, modifying nothing, neither its ugliness nor its beauty, freeing as much as possible both mind and body from norms, towards a mere creative impulse. James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, DH Lawrance, and Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter are among the most remarkable literary figures of the twentieth century as far as Britain is concerned. They could be hailed as masters in terms of artistic liberation and self-excavation. The shift from one to the other as well illustrates the different steps Modernism went through during two major phases the pre-war and post-war time.

The Modernism movement

The 20^th century is concerned with ordinary people. Modernism was marked by novel writers, and dramas..

Modernism came as a reaction against the Victorian age, it is a transcontinental movement, it focused on human being.

The Victorian age has its own traditions, preoccupations, but the modern age brought other dilemmas, traditions …etc and they had to change their way of thinking and writhing, so people feel that there are a lot of changes. This new world is more interest in arms, weapons …etc; they focus on individualism, and became materialism.

In the time of Modernism, there were ward and a lot of suffering. At that particular time, the church in Europe was losing its place in the peoples’ hearts, “loss of faith” of Friedrich Nietzsche, the gay science.

Friedrich Nietzsche said that “God is dead” (in hearts of peoples). No other movement before modernism focused about how we think and how we feel. Most Modernism writers are atheist. Human being had no more value in the 19^th century, people lost faith in everything, in love, in God, in religion, and they were in troubles, in dilemmas.

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Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

The stream of consciousness

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning –fresh as if issued to children on a beach.

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now. She had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how clam, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?” –was that it? –“I prefer men to cauliflowers” –was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace –Peter Walsh. He would be back form India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished –how strange it was!– a few sayings like this about cabbages.

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