The twentieth century

Question 1

What are the overarching themes of session 12?

Answer 1

1. Modernity and (vs.) Modernism
2. Progress and Materiality in Edwardian era
3. WWI and its impact on poetry
4. (Transatlantic) Modernism: Innovation in the world and in the arts.

Question 2

Which characteristics of Modern Times were kept in the lecture?

Answer 2

1. Modernization: technology, sciences and economy (1880s to 1920s were extremely innovative in terms of technolofy)
2. Experience of insecurity and fragmentation, loss of belief in progress and stability. (Insecurity due to excessive demands)
3. The cataclysm of the First World War (WWI showed people what technology can do…It changes society forever [Thus there is a pre and a post war period])
4. Radical innovation in the arts. (None were untouched by modernism and all was done in the ghost of innovation)

Question 3

What was characteristics of writers in Modern Times?

Answer 3

1. Some writers use traditional narrative techniques but modern themes.
2. Others experiment with both subject-matter and style.

Question 4

What is the distinction between modernity and modernism?

Answer 4

1. Modernity refers to the theme which is found everywhere.
2. Modernism refers to an aesthetic style.

Question 5

What is characteristic of Edwardian fiction?

Answer 5

1. The erosion of victorian value systems.
2. Secularization (If we don’t have the guidance of religion, how do we keep guidance, growth of capitalist consumer economy, fear of corruptibility of the individual.
3. Writers position themselves between:
   - Liberalism (the reliance on individual choice)
   - Humanism (belief in development of the psyche)
   - Romanticism (belief that, after all, there can be harmony between the classes, sexes and the human beings and nature).
4. It engages a lot with new technology as a topos (asking how far can technology go and what will it lead to?). It is a mixture of science fiction and social criticism.
5. People like Wolf and Joyce took the novel to what was aesthetically possible playing with form and structure.
6. Modernist writers were Avantgarde artists without a big audience.

Question 6

What are topoi of the Georgian poetry?

Answer 6

1. Uses of the pastoral (idealised landscapes)
2. The war experience
3. The war in the trenches and the change from enthusiasm on a glorious patriotic act (essentially war propaganda that beautifies the heroic death) to criticism of the impersonal war machine (Anti-war poems often written by people who experienced the horros themselves. It mourns the loss of heroism and bravery in battle due to technological advancements).

Question 7

Which two new art forms are developing in Modernism?

Answer 7

1. Impressionism (The first step to catching a fleeting impression instead of depicting the world as it is)
2. Expressionism (This was taken to the extremes in Expressionism. It is about expressing the own impressions without focussing on overall reality.

Modernist art developed a new stance toward realism placing reality in the individual.

Question 8

What is characteristic of Modernist Fiction?

Answer 8

1. The psychological novel - the turn “within”. (The modernist novel was interested in the personal psyche)
2. The subjective perception of the world (time, space and people).
3. Innovation in narrative technique:
   - neutralization of the heterodiegetic narrator.
   - dominance of mostly variable internal focalization (The inner thoughts were placed in the centre of the narration); use of interior monologue technique, stream-of-consciousness (Not every interior monologue is a stream of consciousness).
4. Typical genre of the period was the “Künstlerroman” in which the protagonist is an artist himself.

Question 9

What is characteristic of Modernist poetry?

Answer 9

1. Coping with modernity: The feelings of loss and insecurity in the face of (the renegotiation of) cultural traditions.
2. The search for new forms.
3. The fight with traditional/conventional thinking.
4. Imagism, simplicity, accuracy and reduction of expression.
5. The image presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.

Question 10

What are the main characteristics of modernism from a literary perspective?

Answer 10

From a literary perspective, the main characteristics of modernism include:
1. emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity in writing […]; an emphasis on HOW seeing (or reading or perception itself) takes place, rather than on WHAT is perceived. […]
2. a movement away from the apparent objectivity provided by omniscient third-person
narrators, fixed narrative points of view, and clear-cut moral positions. […]
3. a blurring of distinctions between genres […].
4. an emphasis on fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives, and random-seeming collages of different materials.
5. a tendency toward reflexivity, or self-consciousness, about the production of the work of art, so that each piece calls attention to its own status as a production, as something
constructed and consumed in particular ways.
6. a rejection of elaborate formal aesthetics in favor of minimalist designs […] and a rejection […]of formal aesthetic theories, in favor of spontaneity and discovery in creation.

Question 11

What were the “take-home” message on session 12?

Answer 11

• literature engaged with modernisation in the early decades of the 20th century in different ways:
• important differentiation between (thematic) modernity and (aesthetic) Modernism
• the First World War gave rise to much poetic production that was no
  longer traditional (without being Modernist in a strict aesthetic
  sense)
• aesthetic Modernism tried to express the experience of modernity by
  focusing on subjective impressions, fragmentation, multiplicity of
  viewpoints, blurred genre boundaries – epistemological scepticism
• formally, this was expressed in replacing ’omniscient’ narrators with
  covert heterodiegetic narrators and much variable internal
  focalisation

Question 12

What can be said about the period between Modernism and Postmodernism in British Literature?

Answer 12

• there is no good term for the period between the end of Modernism (late 1930s) and the beginning of Post
  Modernism (late 1960s)
• from the ‘swinging 20s’ to the ‘gloomy 30s’ (After the war, those who could afford it were living in the swinging 20s, but when we move further into the 30s it became a time of shortfollowed crises).
• time of crisis, social anxieties, political instabilities (1929:
  General Strike, crash of American stock markets, poverty; rise of socialism, 2nd Labour government)
• totalitarian regimes (Italy, Russia, Germany); fascist party in GB: Oswald Mosely
• new concepts of the ‘masses’: between observation and manipulation (mass media: cinema, radio [There was a lot of criticism on the manipulating potential of mass media)
• the caesura of the Second World War (“The end of all wars”…Split the century in two.

Question 13

What is characteristic of the poetry in the period between Modernism and Postmodernism?

Answer 13

1. Anti-modernist reactions - a move towards clear, sober and non-symbolistic language (“No wonder people don’t care about modernist poetry if modernist poetry doesn’t care about the people instead of form).
2. Everyday topics to regain the reader.
3. From pylon poets to (A fresh look at everyday topics).
4. the movement poets (From the mid 1950s consistent in topics but more philosophically demanding. The texts are also reflective of “the big philosophical questions”)

Question 14

What is characteristic of drama in the period between Modernism and Postmodernism?

Answer 14

1. The commercial theatre of the West End vs. Angry Young Men and Kitchen Sink drama. (There are different streams in drama at the time…e.g. the drawing room comedies [based on traditions of Wilde] and the well-made play [very limited space and realistic settings] vs. the rebelling young generation of writers [Often talking of toxic couples, the dead american dream and ideology critic)
2. Brechtian and political drama, social realism (Brechts episches Theater changes theatre forever…He established Verfremdungstechniken)
3. The working-class anti-hero (For the first time we have working class protagonists [whose heroism often draws on their ability to get as much out of the system as possible]).
4. British New Wave Cinema.
5. Female writers and feminist theatre (but the feminist movemnt wouldn’t take on until the 60s).

Question 15

What is Middle-brow fiction?

Answer 15

“The middlebrow novel is one that straddles the divide between the trashy romance or thriller on the one hand, and the philosophically or formally challenging novel on the other: offering narrative excitement without guilt, and intellectual
stimulation without undue effort.”

It reached a broad readership and negotiated central social, philosophical and political discourses of the time.

Although once a derogatory term today 99% of novels published in britain are middle-brow novels. They are a “Mischform” of the “high cultural” topoi and “low cultural” writing and themes.

It is also an indicator of the erosion of the upper- and middle class cultural chokehold.

Question 16

What is characteristic of Postmodernism?

Answer 16

• international philosophical and aesthetic movement
• from epistemological doubt to questioning ontology (How can i know that my perception is other people’s perception of the world aswell?)
• reality as a construct (‘natural’ vs. ‘cultural’ realities)
• questioning the relationship between language and reality (cf. Post-Structuralism, Deconstruction [if the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary who then gets to decide which ones belong together…according to post-structuralist they do not carry a tied relationship at all…basically there is no such thing as meaning only a random play of signifiers…There is no access to truth except through language but language cant express truth anymore So what even is truth)
• textual and media realities
• politics: questioning authority of signification (Now the people unhappy with the establishment realised that they can’t be right either)
• literature: questioning plot, structure, omniscience, reliability (If it is true that no one can really reach the truth how can you work with an omniscient narrator?)
• crisis of representation
• what is the status of fiction?

Question 17

What is typical of Postmodernist fiction?

Answer 17

• highlighting textual and media realities: intertextuality (referring to other texts), intermediality
• meta-fictional, self-reflexive devices (The text pushes you away from the emersion and onto the awareness of the story)
• metalepsis (There are internal and external communication systems…Some authors of the post-modernist movement crossed this divide)
• historiographic metafiction: questioning the differences
  between writing history and fiction
• anti-mimeticism (avoidance of any real life expressions in order to show that meaning is arbitrary, total avoidance of storytelling) (montage, cut-ups and a lack of plot) vs. fabulation (embracement of storytelling).
• formal and structural experiments (It can also be about challenging and playing about with the reader)
• fragmentation (little stories that seem to be unconnected), eclecticism (you select certain things out of a historic narrative), pastiche (mode of imitating previous writing styles) and parody
• focus on textuality: meta-fictionality
• According to Jacques Derrida, there is nothing outside text. We live in a world of signifiers that can never fully signify because it can carry other meaning.

Question 18

What is metalepsis?

Answer 18

Metalepsis in postmodernist fiction is a narrative device or rhetorical technique that involves the deliberate transgression of boundaries between different levels of reality or discourse. It often creates a playful, self-aware effect that challenges traditional notions of narrative coherence and questions the relationship between fiction and reality.

Question 19

What were the take home messages on session 13?

Answer 19

• British literature after WWII did not pursue the aesthetic experiments
  of the Modernist period
• Postmodernism took the epistemological scepticism of Modernism one step further and doubted ontologies
• two ways of dealing with ontological scepticism in postmodern
  literature: ‘fabulation’ vs. anti-mimeticism
• playfulness, fragmentation, relf-reference as major postmodernist
  aesthetic strategies.

Question 20

How is WWI perceived in British cultural memory?

Answer 20

1. It is the historical event that produced the most artistic reception in British history.
2. The “Great War” is dominant in British cultural memory in comparison to the second.

Question 21

What are the changes in British society from 1939 - 2015?

Answer 21

1. The second world war
2. The decline of the British empire
3. The rise and fall of the welfare state
4. The liberalisation of sexuality and gender roles
5. The influence of migration, devolution and globalisation on contemporary meanings of English and British national identity.

Question 22

What are the most notable ways in which the changes in British society influenced British literature?

Answer 22

1. The turn against modernism after the war.
2. The waxing and waning of post-modernism.
3. The renewed emphasis on the condition of England.

Question 23

What is characteristic of the post war period?

Answer 23

1. The crisis of representation
2. Metafiction and fabulation

A different understanding on how truth works.

Question 24

What are the three stages from post war scepticism to postmodernism?

Answer 24

1. Continuation of modernism in the 30s.
2. The varied literary production from the 50s to 60s
3. Postmodernism from the late 60s onwards.

Question 25

What was kept on Writers in the Postmodernist era?

Answer 25

1. Particular interests: Politics, morality and the thriller – the individual in the context of political power struggles, fictions of loss and moral decay. A lot of social criticism.
2. George Orwell (Frustration about the relationship between individual and society)
3. William Golding (pessimistic world view [human as animal metaphor])
4. Middle-brow fiction (Fiction that never stopped [non-modernist novel])
5. Late-modernist continuations of experimentation. The underlying idea is always that in a world like this it is no longer possible to use literary genres to express meaning. Experimentation with language.
6. Many writers of the postmodernist theory were academically trained in writing styles and literary criticism. Story-telling is to paused to show the reader the textuality and fictionality of the work.
7. They were asking themselves: If cinema can tell stories so much better than us, what can we do to adjust to that?

Question 26

What does Epistomology stand for?

Answer 26

How do we get to know the meaning of things? According to epistemological scepticism I can only perceive the world from my point of view. How can I know anything or how can knowledge be proven?

Question 27

What is ontology?

Answer 27

Ontology is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of being, existence, and reality. It explores fundamental questions about what exists, how entities and their properties can be categorized, and how these entities relate to one another. Ontology is concerned with defining and classifying the basic building blocks of reality, often addressing questions like:

What does it mean for something to exist?
What kinds of things exist (e.g., physical objects, abstract concepts, events, or processes)?
How do entities relate to each other within a given framework of existence?

Question 28

Who is Hayden White?

Answer 28

Hayden White was a scholar who found out that historiography falls the same musters as writing fiction. The same ways of writing fiction apply to history books. We can only gain access to history through artifacts everything else is fiction. Therefore authors of fiction have the power to rewrite history. (Everybody has that power) Facts are being highlighted as fabrications. Look reader we all know that we are just telling a story here. Including metanarrative comments. Any history book could have come to a different ending.

Question 29

What is a Moebius loop?

Answer 29

An endless loop of stories that begin. A material performance of the eco-chamber of postmodernism.

Question 30

What can be said about gender identity as perceived in postmodernism?

Answer 30

Gender identity is as constructed as all the other realities are constructed.