Modernism Context Flashcards
How did Joyce describe Ireland?
As a British colony of the ‘gratefully oppressed, wearing the mask of a capital’
What is a gnomon?
Refers to absences, gaps, missing pieces.
Used to describe a broken culture which cannot attain wholeness, stability or coherence.
‘The artistic movement that leads most directly into modernism’
Who said this?
What movement was he referring to?
Daniel Albright
Symbolism
Who described Yeats as the chief architect of Irish symbolism?
Arthur Symons
How did Arthur Symons describe symbolism?
A revolt against exteriority, against materialistic tradition
How did Yeats describe symbolism?
As a reaction against the influence of scientific rationalism and didactic morality in poetry
What idea did T.S Eliot perpetuate in ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’ ?
‘Myth is a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’
Eliot believed mythology could be employed as a means to order and structure the seemingly chaotic flow of contemporary history
‘The use of combinations of words and sounds for immediate emotional impact rather than for their referential capacity’
Who said this?
Kate Flint
- idea of the text resembling musical counterpart
Considers Woolf use of repetition and other impressionist devices
Jeri Johnson on Dubliners?
‘The book is a succession of pictures, or the trace of a moving, metamorphosing subject’
Recite some of Virginia Woolf’s essay on modern fiction
‘The mind receives a myriad of impressions… from all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, and as they fall they shape themselves into the lives of Mondays and Tuesdays’
…let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance’
In the work of a writer of genius we rediscover our neglected thoughts
Who said this?
Emmerson Cone
- one of Virginia Woolf’s favourite writes
Who described Virginia Woolf’s writing as ‘depersonalised prose’
Kate Flint
What did Virginia Woolf’s write in a letter to a friend concerning ‘The Waves’?
It’s possible to see read the characters as 6 different versions of a single self
Julie Briggs
- Woolf was trying to find new ways to convey the condition of the modern individual and depict real life. In order to do this, Woolf believe she must evolve a new style and form.
‘Prose and poetry, a novel and a play’
What is the overarching structure to Joyce’s Dubliners
The stories can be divided into subsections of childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life.
To this respect, Dubliner’s follows an ABBA pattern of expansion and contraction
The dead sits out this schema
*Bouville on the uncanny?
It seems to have an allusive quality, something that escapes as soon as it is felt. It vanishes from the blink of the psychological as reality quickly resurfaces
