Literary Modernism and Joyce

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Literary Modernism and Joyce
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Literary Modernism

• Most critical studies on literary modernism begin
  by discussing the predominant world view held by
  intellectuals during the period just before the
  first world war.
• The generation of artists who had been born in
  the 1880s and early 1890s came of age during the
  first decade of the 20th century, and they were
  coming to terms with a world that had changed
  dramatically in terms of religious, economic, and
  political realities.

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Literary Modernism

• Darwins ideas had called into question the place
  of human beings within the cosmos. Concepts such
  as survival of the fittest and chance
  interfered with the ability of writers and
  thinkers to assume an orderly universe or a
  morality based upon the divine origin of the
  species.

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Literary Modernism

• Marx and Engels economic theories called into
  question the moral legitimacy of the middle class
  and laid out in the open the proposition that
  social structures were the result of ideologies
  ideologies that could be questioned and changed.

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• The work of women in the United States and the
  Commonwealth to gain suffrage and to find a voice
  in the public realm called into question gender
  roles which were also increasingly viewed as
  the result of economic and social ideologies.

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Literary Modernism

• In addition to destabilizing the social and
  cultural practices of most western nations, these
  changes impacted the work of creative artists,
  many of whom viewed the break from the past at
  least initially as a welcome respite from art
  and literature that had become characterized by a
  reliance on form, sentimentality, and what
  Virginia Woolf termed a false realism, in which
  authors rendered detailed descriptions of the
  material world, but did little to advance
  readers understanding of characters inner lives.

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Literary Modernism
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Literary Modernism

• Early in the movement, literary modernists
  focused on these shifts
• FORM In poetry, the focus moved away from
  formal verse to free verse, and in fiction, the
  focus moved away from plot to an evocation of the
  internal lives of characters what we would now
  call interiority.
• AUDIENCE The reader was increasingly expected
  to perform interpretative functions, as writers
  abandoned authorial intrusions and predictably
  structured plot lines. Instead, writers
  developed what became known as fragmentary
  units that were often held together in subtle
  ways that required the reader to intuit meaning.

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Literary Modernism

• With the Irish context, the turn of the last
  century was a time of great political and
  artistic debate. During the 19th century, Irish
  Catholics, who made up the majority of the
  population in the country, developed political
  organizations designed to repeal the land laws
  that had left most Irish workers dependent upon
  English-based landlords and factory owners. As
  part of this new wave of nationalism, many
  intellectuals learned Gaelic and encouraged the
  development of a literature that reclaimed and
  reshaped Irish myths and legends.

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Literary Modernism
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Literary Modernism

• Over the last three decades, literary scholars
  have looked at Ireland during the beginning of
  the 20th century as a nation struggling to shake
  off the impact of colonial rule. What
  complicated the situation in Ireland was the fact
  that the Catholic Church had often been complicit
  in the political machinations that kept reform
  from succeeding.
• When Joyce came of age in the early years of the
  20th century, he certainly could have joined what
  became known as the Irish Literary Revival, but
  he chose not to do so.

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Literary Modernism

• Joyce was just as eager as most Irish Catholics
  to have an independent Irish state, but by the
  time he reached adulthood, he viewed most social
  institutions with grave distrust. He felt that
  the church, the government (regardless of who was
  in charge), and the educational system were all
  allied against the work of a true creative
  intellect. He refused to join or to support any
  endeavor that asked his allegiance, because Joyce
  felt that his first and only allegiance was to
  art. In this view, he was joined by many of the
  leading literary modernists.

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James Joyce Artist and Citizen
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Joyces Overarching Vision

• The 2 important tropes in Joyces work are the
  artist the city. While Joyce was editing
  Dubliners (the city), he was also writing Stephen
  Hero (the artist), the prototype for Portrait
  later, Ulysses would represent a linking of these
  tropes.
• The artist was to practice a type of isolation
  that freed him from convention, but he had to
  serve the community.
• The paralysing force of the city, diagnosed in
  Dubliners, had to be matched with an
  uncompromising spirit who would not serve, who
  would sever his roots rather than submit, because
  only by such refusal and such severance would it
  be possible, subsequently, for him to respond
  fruitfully to contact with a more tolerant and
  less embittered spirit (Peake 62).

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The 20th-Century Bildungsroman
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Portrait

• Structure of Portrait
• Five chapters, each depicting the artists
  struggle, first to master his environment and
  then to free himself from it.
• At the end of each chapter, he attains the
  completion of one state in his growth he finds a
  new world and a point of rest, though in every
  case a temporary one which collapses under the
  strain of some internal pressure (Peake 70).

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Stephen at Clongowes
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Chapter One

• Chapter One chief problem social adjustment.
  A crisis is provoked when SD is unjustly
  punished However, he goes to the rector out of
  crushed pride Father Dolan has forgotten his
  name It was his own name that he should have
  made fun of it he wanted to make fun. Dolan it
  was like the name of a woman that washed
  clothes. When the rector sides with SD, it is a
  social victory SD is temporarily at peace.
  Asserting his identity individuality is the
  first act of an artist this represents his
  epiphany of self and of the freeing aspects of
  assertiveness.

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Stephen at Belvedere College
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Chapter Two

• Chapter Two SDs social adjustment crumples
  under pressure of new external and internal
  forces there are a series of collapses and
  recoveries. His familys financial difficulties
  encourage him to withdraw into himself. Rather
  than return Emmas advances, he writes a poem
  about her signaling his ability to distance
  himself from and to romanticize reality. At
  Belvedere, his social position is retrieved he
  is the model youth of the school. However, he
  is plagued by sexual fantasies fantasies that
  merge with reality in the brothel scene where,
  again, SD find temporary peace. The challenge
  for the artist is to be able to embrace himself,
  even when he feels that he has sinned. Stephens
  epiphany in this chapter is the reawakening of
  his sense of wonder and ecstasy.

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Stephen at the Brothels
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Chapter Three

• Chapter Three SDs reliance upon precise church
  doctrine to relieve him of guilt is turned upside
  down during Father Arnells addresses the
  images of his soul being evaporated into hell
  represent the next crisis at first, when he
  experiences the afterglow of confession, SD is a
  peace however, it is a temporary peace. Peake
  argues that SDs experience is, in fact, useful
  this is the refining fire through which his soul
  must pass in order that its sensual desires
  should be given a new direction that the
  impulse of his lust should be transformed into
  the spiritual impulse of the artist.

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Stephen at Ringsend (Todays Version)
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Chapter Four

• Chapter Four SD enters into a period of
  fanatical religious isolation, the crisis of
  which is the directors offer to SD of the life
  of a priest. SD realizes that the allure of
  secret knowledge and power will only serve his
  vanity His destiny was to be elusive of social
  or religious orders. He was destined to learn
  his own wisdom apart from others or to learn the
  wisdom of others himself wandering among the
  snares of the world. His HUGE Epiphany includes
  the images of death rebirth that are found
  throughout the text His soul had arisen from
  the grave of boyhood, spurning her graveclothes.
  His soul was swooning into some new world,
  fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed
  by cloudy shapes and beings SDs Dante moment.

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Stephen at University College, Dublin
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Chapter Five

• Chapter Five all the features of the artist as
  a young man, shaped and formed by the interaction
  of his nature and his environment, are assembled
  and molded into a portrait Peake.
• SD steers his way through opposites in this
  chapter, the sordid family life vs. the beautiful
  morning, for example. He become noncommital
  the static artist. However, does he cut the
  ties in the way we think he might?

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Stephens Philosophical Arguments

• Aesthetic discussion of how an image is recreated
  in art
• The image must be set between the mind of the
  artist himself and the mind of others
• Lyrical artist presents the image in relation
  to himself (Purely Personal)
• Epical artist presents the image in relation to
  himself and others (The Personality of the Artist
  Flows Around the Person and the Action)
• Dramatic artist presents his image in immediate
  relation to others (The Personality of the Artist
  Refines Itself Out of Existence Impersonalizes
  Itself.)

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Stephens Philosophical Arguments

• Three things are needed for beauty wholeness,
  harmony, and radiance
• Wholeness the mind separates the image from all
  which it is not
• Harmony the mind apprehends the balance of all
  its parts

• Radiance the mind apprehends its uniqueness
  its beauty
• SD then relates this to the artists epiphany
  and his/her ability to communicate a beauty that
  is both individual and universal