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Mburino - Modernist Fiction. V. Woolf and J. Joyce - School notes
by - (2012-03-11)
Up to 5B - Modernist Fiction. V. Woolf and J. Joyce
Modernism is an inclusive cultural movement, meant to represent the subjectivity of human being. Also, it focuses on the artistic research, known as the Quest, which tries to represent life as what it seems to be. This Quest is imposed by the fact that now the world doesn't embody anymore reality.
Modernism movement is based on an anthropological conception where the human is imperfect, at the inside of a context that influences him.
The stream of consciousness represents the non-chronologically arranged flux of thoughts inside someone's mind. To show this, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce use different narrative techniques. Virginia Woolf uses the interior monologue, a third person omniscient narrator adopting the thoughts of a character with a free indirect style in order make the reader feel intimate with her characters. The narrator seems to be eclipsed and the mental chaos of someone's mind comes out. In Virginia Woolf's interior monologue there are still connectors and there also a juxtaposition between the conscience's time and the external time, beat by Big Ben. Therefore, another technique is the shift of the point of view. Like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce wants to achieve a way of writing as more realistic as possible. Yet he goes further on adopting the stream of consciousness technique in order to represent the stream of consciousness. This technique is called total stream of consciousness, as the connectors and the traditional logical syntax break up. The disintegration is due to the juxtaposition technique that asks the reader to cooperate in giving sense to the text. Also, James Joyce adopts the language of sense impressions to create a particular rhythm able to take together the narration. Joyce creates a new language in comparison with the traditional one. He experiments new styles to represent reality. For example, James Joyce changes his style in Dubliners to represent both physically and metaphorically Dublin's paralysis, due to the inability to change. The symbolical realism in Dubliners has the function to reveal reality behind things. In fact, there's a lot more behind the appearances. James Joyce got inspired by the French Symbolists and by the classic epic as Ulysses myth. The myth is the structural principle of his stylistic research and of his book Ulysses, where he represents both the cognitive and the physical world. Furthermore, the myth allows to a chaotic being like the conscience to make roots.
In the magazine "The Dial" T.S.Eliot said that "Ulysses" was just a new narrative technique, the mythic method, used by James Joyce to reorganize his novel to give order to the immense futility of contemporary life. The myth has the function to make believe that no the man, but the situations have changed.
Modernism movement is based on an anthropological conception where the human is imperfect, at the inside of a context that influences him.
The stream of consciousness represents the non-chronologically arranged flux of thoughts inside someone's mind. To show this, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce use different narrative techniques. Virginia Woolf uses the interior monologue, a third person omniscient narrator adopting the thoughts of a character with a free indirect style in order make the reader feel intimate with her characters. The narrator seems to be eclipsed and the mental chaos of someone's mind comes out. In Virginia Woolf's interior monologue there are still connectors and there also a juxtaposition between the conscience's time and the external time, beat by Big Ben. Therefore, another technique is the shift of the point of view. Like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce wants to achieve a way of writing as more realistic as possible. Yet he goes further on adopting the stream of consciousness technique in order to represent the stream of consciousness. This technique is called total stream of consciousness, as the connectors and the traditional logical syntax break up. The disintegration is due to the juxtaposition technique that asks the reader to cooperate in giving sense to the text. Also, James Joyce adopts the language of sense impressions to create a particular rhythm able to take together the narration. Joyce creates a new language in comparison with the traditional one. He experiments new styles to represent reality. For example, James Joyce changes his style in Dubliners to represent both physically and metaphorically Dublin's paralysis, due to the inability to change. The symbolical realism in Dubliners has the function to reveal reality behind things. In fact, there's a lot more behind the appearances. James Joyce got inspired by the French Symbolists and by the classic epic as Ulysses myth. The myth is the structural principle of his stylistic research and of his book Ulysses, where he represents both the cognitive and the physical world. Furthermore, the myth allows to a chaotic being like the conscience to make roots.
In the magazine "The Dial" T.S.Eliot said that "Ulysses" was just a new narrative technique, the mythic method, used by James Joyce to reorganize his novel to give order to the immense futility of contemporary life. The myth has the function to make believe that no the man, but the situations have changed.