Learning Paths » 5B Interacting
Talk about differences between traditional and Modernist novel
Traditional novel is logical and fact-based and writes try to represent life as they believed it really was (concept of verisimilitude) focusing the portrait of external objects and events. Authors are detached and unemotional in their works.
On the contrary in Modernist culture, that recognizes the impossibility to return the reality in a correct way because of its complexity, conscience and subjectivity occupy the central position. The inner vision and emotion or the inner spiritual reality are seen more important than the external realities of objects and events.
The writer can’t communicate everything because reality is very complex, thus he can show just small piece of life of his character and not the whole biography as traditional writers did.
What is the different position of the reader in traditional fiction and in Modernist fiction? How the reader position has changed in Modernist novel?
Traditional and Modernist cultures has two different approach to the novel’s reader. The second one gives him a more active role: he’s not more the passive addressee of traditional literature who had to accept judgments of the narrator. Basically the reader is freer in modernist novel than in traditional one.
Is he free of what?
He’s free of making a personal idea of what he reads. In the traditional novel the reader position is limited by the narrator. As Modernist novel gives central position to character’s subjectivity, Modernist narrator doesn’t want to teach something, but he leaves the reader free building a personal opinion about the novel.
What was the main element of narration in traditional novel?
In traditional novel the characters are told by the reader who is a third omniscient intrusive narrator, while in modernist literature the characters are showed.
How emotions, feelings are conveyed in traditional novel?
Emotions and feeling are always filtered by narrator’s point of view, through the description.
What narrative techniques are used in Modernist novels? What is typical?
In modernist culture there’s the use of third person omniscient narrator, of free indirect style and free direct style. Typical of Modernism is the use of interior monologue to convey the viewpoint of the characters.
The narrator in modernist novel is omniscient in a different way, in which way?
In the traditional novel we have a third person intrusive omniscient narrator, while in modernist novel we have an eclipsed narrator who, on the contrary, gets inside character’s mind. He knows everything about the novel but he doesn’t give moral judgments on his characters. He shows events from a particular perspective as opposed to an “objective” one, using the shift of point of view. For this reason the reader sees the story from multiple perspectives
What is the eclipse of the narrator?
The narrator doesn’t filter what he’s speaking about, thus the reader almost doesn’t feel his presence neither the author’s presence (the writer is not more the “spokesperson” for the author).
What is the indirect style?
Free indirect style means reporting speech (the words of one character are reported with narrator’s word).
Free direct thought is quotation of the direct speech without quotation marks.
Explain the concept of simultaneous time in modernist novel.
Modernist novel doesn’t follow a chronological order, because time becomes psychological time (rather than historical reality) moving from the inner side of characters. Time is represented through movements backwards and forwards and juxtaposition of events referring to different times.
How did the traditional writers convey the concept of simultaneous time?
Basically they used chronological arrangements, their narration consisted in the description of what one character does (the plot) filtering everything (narrator omniscient intrusive).