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DKopic - Modernist Fiction. V. Woolf and J. Joyce. Main Features of Modernist Fiction.
by DKopic - (2012-01-23)
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What are the main characteristic of modernist fiction?

The main characteristics of modernist fiction are:

-subjectivity, there is attention to characters' subjectivity, their feelings, emotions while in the traditional novel prevail events, situations...

-the narrator is 3rd person omniscient narrator non intrusive because it does not make comments and give his opinions so also the reader is asked to make ideas itself, it is freer than the reader in the traditional novel when everything was filtered by the intrusive narrator...

-the eclipse of narrator, narrative technique used by modernist writers where the narrator does not appear while in the traditional novel the narrator enters the text and speaks to the reader...

-other narrative techniques: free indirect style, stream of consciousness, shift of point of view...

-concept of time, the time in the modernist fiction is not chronological and linear as it is in the traditional novel; the narrator is concerned to the inner side of character so there is the simultaneous concept of time made by our consciousness where the past, the present and the future coexist together...

-the plot is reduced to the minimum, while in the traditional novel the writers use descriptions,summaries, digressions and the characterization is mainly made with "the technique of telling" in the modernist novel it is made with the "technique of showing"...