Modernism Flashcards
Virginia Woolf 1910
‘On or about December 1910, human character changed’
Define it
‘Essentially rebellious in character and far too amorphous to ever be pinned down with precision’
Eliot’s task
‘The painful task of unifying’
- exploring murkier and less predictable operations of human perception and consciousness
To reconnect / integrate all Victorian moral dichotomy gore asunder - the human and animal, civilised and savage
William James
‘The stream of consciousness’ - raw sensory flux is the closest humans can get to knowing:
‘When we conceptualise we cut and fix… whereas in the real concrete flux of life experiences compenetrate each other’
McFarlane’s 3 stages of modernism
- Early rebellion - breaking up systems
- Restructuring fragments
- A dissolving, a blending, a merging
McFarlane’s conclusion
‘The defining thing in the modernist mode is not so much that things fall apart but that they fall together’
Alan Wilde
‘Articulation of disconnection’ is essence of modernism
Cultural reference
- cubism; all planes on canvas simultaneously, so you experience it as a fused whole
- cinematic montage, jazz music blends primitivism of African origins with modern sophistication
- attempt to breakdown boundaries between stage and audience in 20th c theatre
Stream of consciousness according to DH Lawrence
Captures the ‘real, vital, potential self” as opposed to the ‘old stable ego” of 19th c. Characters
The self - Judith Ryan
Just a ‘bundle of sensory impressions precariously grouped together and constantly threatened with possible dissolution’
What replaced the ‘substantial, consistent self’
‘Fluid, unbounded self’
Ronald Bush’s 20th Century Self
The self is ‘a state of continuous becoming’
Freud on the self
Ego has the task of organising the assorted fragments of identity into a consolidated persona, but process will never reach closure
the Love song of j Alfred Prufrock published
1915
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo
Prufrock impossibility of language
‘It is impossible to say just what I mean!’
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent / to lead you to an overwhelming question… oh, do not ask what is it? Let us go and make our visit
Do I dare
Disturb the universe
I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all” - if one, settling a pillow by her head, / should say: “That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.”
Prufrock sea-girls
‘We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / by sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and we drown’
What does Eliot call Pound in dedication of Waste Land
‘Il miglior fabbro’ - the better craftsman in Italian
Wasteland Broken Images
‘You know only / A heap of broken images’
Most effective parenthesis in The Waste Land
‘There is shadow under this red rock
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust’
I can connect
Nothing with nothing
