Learning Paths » 5B Interacting
Modernism is a cultural movement of the first decades of the 20th century. Virginia Woolf and James Joyce are taken as paradigms of this movement. In Modernism the narrative was developed through novel and short story. The most important exponents are Virgina Woolf and James Joyce. The aim of these writers is to create a new way to express life's experience in opposition to traditional novel which wasn't able to express reality. In Modernism the attention was about characters' subjectivity expressed by them stream of consciousness which included feelings, emotion, fears. For Modernists inner reality is everything passes in human mind and it is defined as flux of consciousness.
The most important novelists of Modernism are Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and the also experiment with new narrative techniques.
The attention was focused on the individual and on his subjectivity, with the aim of rendering the inner side of the human being that is often an anti-hero. To render the individual consciousness Virginia Woolf and James Joyce appealed to different techniques.
Mrs Woolf used the interior monologue to express her characters stream of consciousness; she reached this aim using narrative techniques such as the free indirect style , the shift of the point of view and an eclipsed third person narrator in order to make her readers able to feel closed to the characters minds. She did not abolish language connectors and she used a simultaneous concept of time, which allows distinguishing the subjectivity time from the external one.
James Joyce may be considered the innovator par excellence. He wants to write in a realistic way and he goes beyond: in order to render flux of consciousness he uses stream of consciousness technique to convey thoughts, feelings... Someone has defined it as a total stream of consciousness technique, where the total disintegration of syntax is adopted: there are no connectors, no logical links (there is no cause and effect) because the reader is asked to understand and interpretate all semantic links. Like Virginia Woolf he uses a language of senses impressions in order to create the rythm of the prose that links everything. Mr Joyce wants to render what happens; there is a new conception of time, man is anymore a hero because of God's loss and he is one of a thousand.
Moreover there are Jung theories about man's behaviour: what a man does is not only influenced by the place where he lives and his unconscious, but also by his culture. In order to give a sense of it, man needs language.
During Modernism fiction is characterized by two forms: novels and short stories. Modernists are interested into make an artistic research and find new ways to render real life in novels, that is what traditional novels were not able to do. It follows that Modernists make a narrative technique research in order to present life as it really is. They focuse their attention on subjectivity and anti-heroes to render the imperfection of man.
In Dubliners Joyce via the paralysis' metaphor express the inability to change. The metaphor is expression of symbolical realism adopted by Joyce to reveal the deep reality behind the appearances.
Joyce take inspiration by French symbolism and classical epic tradition. Myth function is to show how man isn't change in the time, how the human component is unchanged.